Topics Philosophers

Question What's the relationship between Greek Drama and the sorts of dialogues that Plato wrote? What are the origins of the genre of philosophical dialogue?

Accepted:
August 22, 2013

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This question is harder to answer than it might look, partly because of our incomplete information about Greek drama. Another problem is that many people who address the issue elide from laying out the factual information we have available to us, to interpreting that information into a theory of the Platonic dialogue. Your question does not ask for a theory of Platonic writing as such, and I won’t attempt to give one.

In a literal sense, Platonic dialogues began as other dialogues about Socrates did, with efforts by his friends to write down things Socrates had said. Socrates was not the type of philosopher to lecture, or to introduce a topic and develop a thesis about it. All the reliable evidence instead indicates that he would get involved with friends and strangers, query them about their beliefs, and perhaps defend positions of his own, but all in the context of ongoing conversation. It seems to have been clear to his friends that the written account of Socratic philosophy should respect this conversational form. According to later ancient traditions, then, friends of Socrates began writing down quotes from conversations with him while he was still alive. The earliest among them, according to the tradition, was Simon the Shoemaker, who had a shop at the edge of the Athenian agora that Socrates allegedly spent time in. Simon wrote up a number of (apparently very short) dialogues that reported the Socratic conversations from his shop.

Simon probably died while Plato was still a child, and before the death of Socrates. Phaedo, a character familiar from Plato’s dialogue of that name, also may have written his dialogues around this time. After Socrates died, dialogues were written by Antisthenes the Cynic and Aeschines of Sphettus, among others. Later authors quote from some of these works but they are almost entirely lost, so we can’t say to what degree they report the words of Socrates. What we do know is that all these dialogues appear during or soon after the time of Socrates, were written by people who knew him, and typically feature conversations that included Socrates. So the philosophical dialogue has its origins in reports about Socrates.

Plato was in his late twenties when Socrates died; so was Xenophon. They both wrote numerous dialogues about Socrates that survived. And by the time we get to these works we have a clear genre in existence that we may call the philosophical dialogue. Such dialogues can vary, some purporting to give brief factual transcriptions of actual and often pedestrian conversations, others – much too long to have been real conversations – expanding into philosophical theorizing.

If Plato found the genre of dialogue already starting to form when he began to write, what could the relationship be between that genre and Greek drama? Given that we can explain the genre in terms of notes on conversations that Socrates got himself into, why talk about tragedy? The answer is that Plato was an ambitious author, and specifically an author who tried to master the forms of literary writing he encountered around him. An old tradition, though not a reliable one, says that he originally aspired to write tragedies, until Socrates asked him probing questions about some of his verse, and Plato went home to burn everything he’d written. But even if this story is not true, we can see for ourselves Plato’s interest in how tragedy and comedy work, and funeral rhetoric, and courtroom rhetoric. He read and thought about the great prose works of history by Herodotus and Thucydides. In a word, he absorbed and responded to all the prose of his time and much of the poetry.

The dominant dramatic form was tragedy, of course. In a tragedy the Athenians could see people addressing an issue from different points of view, sometimes going back and forth in the pointed brief exchanges called stichomythia. But tragedy used all the blandishments of verse, presented traumatic or frightening situations, and often showed heroic people suffering unjustly or slipping into vice. Plato’s dissatisfaction with tragedy is well documented (see Books 3 and 10 of the Republic). Comedy fared slightly better. It seemed to induce less passionate identification between spectator and character; and the comedies that Plato knew, above all those by Aristophanes, could address political issues quite abstractly.

Plato drew from both genres, offering his dialogues as literary alternatives to them. Imagine these dialogues, he seems to be saying, as the dramatic art that children first read, rather than tragedy with its dubious moral implications or comedy that invites thoughtless laughter.

Finally we have mimes. The mimes were shorter plays, performed in private homes or other non-theatrical settings. They evidently featured domestic situations and had something of a light-comic tone. Aristotle’s Poetics clearly groups the mimes of Sophron with the dialogues of Plato as members of a single dramatic genre; so the dialogues’ relationship to this dramatic form had been noticed from an early time.

To say much more is to begin a theory of the dialogue. And these few paragraphs have already moved in that direction. So let me close by repeating points I already made. The philosophical dialogue probably began inartistically, with reports on Socratic exchanges. Some people who remembered Socrates would have stuck to this form, trying to record what their old friend said as accurately as possible. (In the Symposium, Apollodorus tells the story of that dinner party, saying he confirmed details of it with Socrates on the basis of an earlier report. In the Theaetetus, Euclides of Megara checked on details with Socrates before writing down the conversation in that dialogue.) Others however tried to make the dialogue something more than biography. Plato is our best example of this ambition, though one can say much about Xenophon’s ambitions as well. And in Plato’s case, the attempt to make the dialogue a literary form of its own involved drawing on elements of Greek historical chronicles but especially on elements of Greek drama, where that includes tragedy, comedy, and mime.

Question What's the relationship between Greek Drama and the sorts of dialogues that Plato wrote? What are the origins of the genre of philosophical dialogue? Accepted:August 22, 2013

Question What's the relationship between Greek Drama and the sorts of dialogues that Plato wrote? What are the origins of the genre of philosophical dialogue?

Accepted:
August 22, 2013