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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
That Plato was in some sense a poet is a fact which most of us are prepared to recognize without much hesitation. What is not always clear is how far any of his Dialogues, in whole or in part, may be justly described as poetry, and to what extent his “poeticalness” must affect our critical approach to, and hence our evaluation of, his philosophy as a whole. And this, in effect, is the problem to which I propose to address myself in this paper. Before, however, I attempt to discuss what is an exceptionally complicated issue, a few remarks of a more general nature will not perhaps be out of place-for the need of caution in any approach to Plato is obvious from the start.
1 Ep. ii, 314C.
page 5 note 1 Professor Harold Cherniss is a notable exception.
page 5 note 2 Jowett's translation. This passage from the Phaedrus appears to receive confirmation from Ep. ii, 314C and Ep. vii, 341C–342A, 343E–344D. But the whole question is bound up with Plato's conception of philosophy as a “way of life.”
page 5 note 3 Allan, D. J.: Introduction (p. viii) to his translation of some of Julius Stenzel's essays under the title of Plato's Method of Dialectic, Oxford 1940.Google Scholar
page 5 note 4 John Burnet: Greek Philosophy, Pt. 1, Thales to Plato, p. 214.
page 5 note 5 A. E.Taylor, whose views are similar to Burnet's, comes nearest, I suppose to making his exegesis square with his theories-but he frequently “forgets himself.” A good example of this is his exposition (Plato: the Man and his Work, 4th edn., pp. 489 sqq.) of Plato's natural theology in Laws X; surely he is here giving us Plato's “real teaching”?
page 5 note 6 Plato, through Socrates, implicitly modifies this statement a little further on (278), when he declares that if the compositions of poets, orators and legis-lators are “based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments,” then these poets, orators and legislators may be rightly called philosophers.
page 6 note 1 Dionysius II, who apparently wrote a handbook to “Platonism,” was the first offender. Cf. Ep. vii, 341B.
page 6 note 2 op. cit., pp. viii–ix.
page 7 note 1 Cf. his Plato and Platonism, London 1893.Google Scholar
page 7 note 2 Cf. Les Mythes de Platon, Paris 1930, pp. 4–5, 178.Google Scholar
page 8 note 1 The Vitality of Platonism, Cambridge 1911, p. 9. It seems likely that Adam was thinking mainly of the Timaeus here.Google Scholar
page 8 note 2 Poetics, i, 1447b 7–10.
page 8 note 3 Diog. Laert., III, 37.
page 8 note 4 Biog. Lit., chap. XIV. By “contradistinguishing objects of a poem,” Coleridge presumably meant “pleasure” as opposed to “truth” - orsothe next few lines imply. But he also adds that “a poem of any lengthneithercan be, nor ought to be, all poetry”!
page 8 note 5 A Defence of Poetry.
page 9 note 1 Plato and Platonism, p. 127.
page 9 note 2 op. cit., p. 271.
page 9 note 3 In his Consolation of Philosophy.
page 10 note 1 This is especially noticeable in the earlier Dialogues (up to and including the Phaedrus), and also, of course, in the Timaeus.
page 10 note 2 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Cambridge 1920, Introduction, pp. xxix–xxx.Google Scholar
page 11 note 1 The Principles of Art, p. 46.
page 11 note 2 Cf. Laws, vii, 801–2, where virtually the same views are expressed by the anonymous Athenian.
page 11 note 3 Cf. Meno 81B, Rep. 331B.
page 11 note 4 Rep., x, 608B.
page 12 note 1 It may be noted that Socrates (Phaedo 61A) declared philosophy to be “the noblest and best of music.”
page 12 note 2 Phaedrus 271E–272A. Cf. 277.
page 12 note 3 It has been pointed out by scholars that, quite apart from actual quota-tions from the poets, there are one or two passages in the Dialogues where a definite metrical arrangement can be detected. The passages in question how-ever-notably Symp. 195A–197E and Phaedr. 237A–241D-are in the nature of deliberate parodies on the styles of other writers. When Plato is seriously propounding his own (or Socrates’) doctrines, however “poetic” he may be-come he does not use verse.
page 14 note 1 Phaedr. 259B–D (Jowett's translation).
page 14 note 2 Rep., ii, 359C–360D. The story of Gyges’ Ring is far more directly illus-trative of a point in the main argument than is the Fable of the Grasshoppers; hence it is more philosophically significant. But its language is “prosaic” enough to exclude its consideration as poetry.
page 15 note 1 Successively: 32C–33A; 34A–B; 37C–D. The translation is by J. A. Stewart (The Myths of Plato, London 1905, pp. 263–71), and though perhaps a little florid (compared with that of Jowett), well succeeds in bringing out the spirit of the original.Google Scholar
page 16 note 1 It is, however, by no means uniformly present. Later in the Dialogue some of the long descriptive passages are quite prosaic and even clumsily constructed.
page 16 note 2 Cf. Tim. 29C: “As Being is to Becoming, so is truth to belief.”
page 16 note 3 According to Frutiger's classification.
page 17 note 1 A. E. Taylor, op. cit., p. 440. Frutiger, however, gives it a totally different interpretation-namely, to exhibit the ideal State in being.
page 17 note 2 Jowett's translation.
page 17 note 3 Plato's eschatological Myths (e.g. the Myth of Er) are borrowed from the Orphic-Pythagorean tradition.
page 18 note 1 Symp. 211D–212A (Stewart's translation).
page 18 note 2 Burnet defines Plato's conception of philosophy at this period as “In the first place the conversion of a soul, and in the second place the service of mankind” (op. cit., p. 218).
