Appetitive: Birthday Books

Birthday Books

My birthday was recently. As I am starting up classes as the local large university in classics. So the theme of my recent birthday was books that will prepare me for school (or various other classically-related things). I am very excited by all of this. Propertius II, with whom I shared a thesis desk had a copy of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), and I used it a little. I really enjoyed it and I especially needed it for my current art history class where mythological background is crucial and my art history professor takes very unkindly to websites as resources. I am also really excited about having the OCT of the Laws so that I may reference the Greek easily and a copy of The Greek Particles, to which my Greek History professor sang paeans in my Herodotus class.

Covered books

I took the opportunity today between my German midterm and my doctor's appointment to cover some of the books. My mom volunteered at the library of both my elementary school and high school and she got me into those library covers over dust jackets to protect the books. Covering books is a very relaxing activity.

Appetitive: Plato and Egypt

In the Laws, Plato presents Egyptian art and music as a static set of arts rigidly regulated by custom. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger presents Egypt as a potential model for proper regulation of the arts. This lead me to believe there was strict regulation of the arts. However, an Egyptology News article lead me to a New York Times article that explained that this impression of Egyptian art is false: there was a move toward the greater characterization of humans as humans rather than rigid forms following an specified pattern.

Reasoning/Spirited: Dates in the Platonic Corpus #5

Now the penultimate installment of "Dates in the Platonic Corpus" (at least for now) on the Laws. I thought I would divide this into three sections: the "old" view(s) of the Laws, Zuckert's dramatic date hypothesis, and problems (and solutions) for Zuckert's dramatic date (which will be saved for the final blogpost).


The "Old" View(s) of the Laws: There is a lot of evidence from ancient (although not classical) sources that Plato wrote the Laws in the later part of his career [1]. Diogenes Laertius claims that the Laws was Plato's last dialogue and that Philip of Opus transcribed it (see my recent blogpost). Similarly Plutarch,who may have been Diogenes Laertius' source, says that Plato wrote the Laws as an old man (De Iside et Osiride 370ff). The 19th century view took this to be sufficient evidence to place this not only as his last work but as the great culmination of his thought. The evolutionary hypothesis posits that the Laws rethought the Republic in a more practical manner.

Richard Kraut (whom I spoke about length in previous my previous blogpost) defends the hypothesis that the Laws was written last among Plato's works [2] and the stylometric analysis which places the dialogue based upon the Laws being the last and the latest of Plato's works. This seems to be the typical modern interpretation of the dating of the dialogue. Glenn Morrow cites a slightly more radical version in his book Plato's Cretan City, suggest that certain contradictions in the Laws imply that the Laws was an unfinished text at the time of Plato's death (Zuckert 96 footnote 95). Neither of these authors, so far as I know (I have not read Morrow's book, only what Zuckert quotes of it), employs the common wisdom that the Laws is more practical than the Republic, but this is still a commonly held view.

Zuckert's Dramatic Date for the Laws (460-450 BCE): A perhaps not-easily-noticeable, but quite unexpected, aspect of the Laws is that in a conference of three old men, a Creten, a Spartan, and an Athenian, is that there is no mention whatsoever of the Peloponnesian War (Zuckert 53-54). How is it possible that these three would talk so civilly, and the Spartan listens so earnestly to the advice of the Athenian (which seems unlikely with the tensions of the Peloponnesian War and certainly seems problematic if the dialogue is supposedly set in 408 BCE (as the comment hypothesized) or late in Plato's lifetime [3].

There are also any number of other things that Place the dialogue before the Peloponnesian War [4]. The mathematics (Zuckert 54-55) are distinctly Pythagorean in nature and are not the type of calculations that Socrates and his fellow interlocutors employ. This extreme use of numbers is one of the reasons that scholars generally speak of the Laws as a more practical city-in-speech than the Republic. However, the numbers themselves have a fanciful quality to them, e.g. keeping the population at 5040 people because it is evenly divisible by all of the numbers between 1 and 10, as well as being divisible by 12 [5].

All of the quotations and references are pre-Socratic. None of the references come from sophists or poets who were a contemporary of Socrates (Zuckert) [6]. The ideas that the Athenian Stranger espouses are distinctly pre-Socratic (Zuckert 54-57). For example, the god that the Αthenian Stranger proposes is not one of the traditional Olympians, but rather is a sort of amorphous, anonymous god in the style of the pre-Socratics, much more like the sun or the heavens than the personified Greek pantheon (Laws 715-716) [7]. There are many more examples which Zuckert elaborates. I may, perhaps, go over them in more detail in a future blogpost.

The type of questioning in the Laws is distinctly not Socratic. The questions the Athenian Stranger and his interlocutors ask concern the best laws or the greatest justice, rather than considering the nature of law or justice (Zuckert 59). Furthermore, this questioning of the best laws tends to come from comparison and emendation of previously-existing laws rather than from the stance of "first principles" (i.e. deducing or hypothesizing from basic definitions to more specific principles).

Endnotes

1. I mentioned some of the problems with using ancient sources in a recent blogpost. However, most of the sources are a few centuries later that Plato was writing so they should be taken with caution.
2. He does express some small problems with this hypothesis, insofar as he says that the Cratylus is unfinished (Kraut 15). However, he sort of eventually pushes this concern aside. 
3. Some believe that the Athenian Stranger represents Plato himself in his old age (Zuckert 51-52).
4. By "the Peloponnesian War," I mean the Second Peloponnesian War, which began approximately in 431. The First Peloponnesian War, which lasted intermittently from 460-445 and "was mostly fought by Athens against Sparta's allies" (timeline from my Greek history class).
5. There are many more instances of the impracticalities of the Laws. Zuckert speaks about many of them in her opening chapter (Zuckert 51-148). I do not have the time or the expertise to discuss them at length here.
6. I cannot actually vouch for any of this myself. I do not remember any quotations or concepts that were particular to the sophists or contemporary with Socrates, but my knowledge is not comprehensive enough to have been able to pinpoint every reference. Here, I am relying on Zuckert's assessment. However, the fact that he not only does not quote them, but does not mention the sophists, or even the word ἡ ῥητορική (Zuckert 85). Furthermore, according to Zuckert, claims that the power of speech alone cannot govern a society in terms of changing people's actions (Zuckert 90).
7. Writing this I made reference to Zuckert 85-86.

Spirited: Notes on My Thesis #1

I have been meaning to put up a summery of my thesis for a very long time. I have not put it up partially because the thesis took up such a part of my life and I just have not been able to look at it again [1]. I practically had to pry it from my hands before going crazy like Dow Mossman with  The Stones of Summer, as was reavealed in the lovely documentary, the Stone Reader.

I have just begun to reread it to see if it needs any editing before I send pieces of it out as a writing sample. I remember thinking, after I wrote it, that it made the ideas that I was elucidating so clear and easy to follow that anyone could read it. I even included a summery of the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Laws for those who had not read them. However, rereading my abstract, which was essentially a page-and-a-half version of my conclusion, I realized that it actually a lot denser than I remember. This may have been because by the time I wrote my abstract I was working 5-6 hours a day on my thesis and I could no longer think straight about anything else.

My introduction was a summery of the most important parts of the three texts I referenced for my work. My first chapter was a thorough textual analysis of Republic Books 2, 3, and 10 (each of which discusses Plato's critique of tragedy and poetry). I also formulate an understanding of the various jabs at tragedy and poetry in the Laws which are scattered throughout. My analysis focuses on two aspects of the critiques: 1) the way in which Plato's texts violate the critique espoused in them and 2) the differences between the critiques in the Laws and the Republic. For the second point, I relied upon Catherine Zuckert's insightful dating scheme (presented in her excellent 2009 tome Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues) to explain the differences in the critiques by the Athenian Stranger (Laws) and Socrates (Republic).

More to come on my thesis in the next installment...

Translations I recommend:

For the Republic I would recommend either Allan Bloom's translation or the translation in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, edited by GRF Ferrari. Bloom's Translation is very literal because he believes that Plato's meaning comes from reading in between the lines and that the only way to do that is to have as literal a translation as possible. In some ways, I like this theory of translation and his translation is very good. His essay in the back, however, is awful. Ferrari's edition provides a solid translation-- a little less literal than Bloom's-- but also provides a set of very helpful notes that are not tainted by Bloom's ideology.

For the Phaedrus, the Aris and Phillips Classical Texts edition is fabulous. Rowe, the translator and editor, provides helpful commentary (on the English) and the edition is equipped with facing Greek. Unfortunately, there is not a particularly good grammatical commentary for the Greek in this edition, but there aren't very many commentaries for the grammar of the Phaedrus in general. Both this edition of the Phaedrus and Ferrari's edition of the Republic were recommended to me by a fabulous professor of mine who served on my thesis orals board.

For the Laws, I have only read two translations. However, the one I preferred by a wide margin (and also the one recommended by the afore-mentioned fabulous professor) was the Penguin Edition:

Endnotes

1. My blog was originally titled Fragments from Thesis Hell, after the popular phrase from a number of different universities, Postcards from Thesis Hell. I renamed it Fragments of Sulpicia when I graduated.