Greek Dialogue in Antiquity: Post-Platonic Transformations

Katarzyna Jażdżewska, Greek Dialogue in Antiquity: Post-Platonic Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 9780192893352.

Reviewed by John Anderson, University of Texas at Austin, johnanderson@utexas.edu.

In Greek Dialogue in Antiquity (hereafter GDA), Jażdżewska reconsiders the history of dialogue from Plato’s immediate successors until the early Roman Imperial period. To convince us the genre of dialogue never completely disappeared during this time, GDA assembles complete and fragmentary evidence that might suggest the persistence of the genre alongside the proliferating new formats of Hellenistic literature. Insofar as Jażdżewska’s methodology functions by presenting the quantity of surviving evidence to suggest a much greater quantity of loss, GDA is organised in a format resembling a sourcebook or reference work. Jażdżewska splits the work into six chapters in addition to an Introduction, Epilogue, List of Abbreviations, References, Index Locorum, Index of Greek Terms, and a General Index. Under each of the main thematized chapters, salient individual sources or authors are presented one by one in subsections with brief introductions and commentary. Chapter 3.6, for example, focuses on “Crantor” under “Dialogue in the Academy.” By collecting and contextualising the often fragmentary and confusing evidence for the production and reception of dialogue in this time, Jażdżewska has put together a highly useful guidebook as well as an alternative reading of the genre’s fortunes from Plato’s death to Plutarch.

GDA is certainly overdue seeing as there has not been any sustained discussion on the genre of dialogue during the Hellenistic period since Hirzel’s monumental 1895 history, which Jażdżewska charges as initiating the now commonplace impression of the dialogue’s demise and eventual rebirth.¹ The edited volume The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, for example, does not at all take up the period from Aristotle to the Late Republic but instead considers why the social, cultural, and religious contexts of late antiquity would no longer sustain the genre.² The dialogue format’s role in Plato’s philosophy is a familiar topic and is notably covered in Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, and while Socrates and Socratic Dialogue examines later readers’ reception of Socratic dialogues such volumes do not survey post-Classical and non-Socratic dialogues.³ As a result, there is no modern collection of sources or scholarship that directly supplements or contends with GDA’s new reading. Thus, for the historian of Hellenistic literature, Jażdżewska’s thesis that dialogue remained a critical part in the multivocal literary landscape of the time cannot be ignored.

In the Introduction and the first chapter, “Dialogic Entanglements,” Jażdżewska outlines the project of her revisionist history before considering the frameworks by which we ought to consider dialogue as a genre in itself. Jażdżewska posits there was “no coherent sense of the dialogue as a genre in antiquity” (p. 7) and in turn finds modern classifications as potentially either too broad or too restrictive so as to risk losing definition or excluding Imperial-period works which we might intuitively recognise as part of the genre. Instead, Jażdżewska claims dialogue from its inception had “volatility” at its essence and no inherent tendencies to delineate itself from other existing prose formats (p. 9). The closest we get to a definition of the topic of the book is “works whose common denominator was that at their core there was a record of a conversation or discussion (or a series of them)” (p. 10). Although the vagueness of such a description might come as a disappointment, the difficulty in providing a sufficient alternative from comments like those of Diogenes Laertius and Albinus only serves to prove how slippery the genre is. Jażdżewska then outlines the many modes through which dialogue sustained itself throughout the Hellenistic Period by becoming a significant component in novel literary developments such as the expanded anecdote (1.2), epistolography (1.3), and biography (1.4). While this must be correct, GDA for the rest of the work does not analyse in any depth samples of dialogue influencing and intertwining with the above genres.

The second and longest chapter, “Dialogues in Papyri,” which presents a selection of papyri that document dialogues, is likely the most valuable contribution of the book. The papyrological evidence was not available for Hirzel’s study nor has a like collection been arranged since the 1929 survey of W. M. Edwards.⁴ Each papyrus finding is presented with a recent critical edition of the Greek text with translation; the author has translated some of the papyri into English for the first time. The papyri are organised under subheadings according to their likely subject matter: Philosophical Dialogues (2.2); Dialogues on Literature (2.3); Historical Dialogues (2.4); Dialogized Anecdotes (2.5); School Compositions (2.6); Other Fragments (2.7). Following the texts and translations there is brief commentary on what can be said with reasonable confidence about the contents and how these might signify a broader practice of dialogue composition and reception untold by the better surviving evidence. The longer analyses of individual papyri which include literary contextualisation are especially insightful (e.g., 2.2.4; POxy. 53.3699), but elsewhere, given the inherently fragmentary nature of the material, Jażdżewska appropriately expresses due caution with dating, content, and possible readings. Other Fragments (2.7)is an unnecessary inclusion wherein the author introduces five pre-Imperial papyri in two pages which cannot be said with confidence to record dialogues (pp. 86–7). Regardless, chapter two is of great value even on its own as an updated collection of the papyrological evidence relating to the genre of dialogue. Together with the material presented in chapter four, which also displays positive evidence without relying on hypothesis and probability, this papyrological material gives the greatest weight in convincing us of dialogue’s staying power during the Hellenistic period.

The third chapter, “Dialogue in the Academy,” argues that there are no grounds to believe the format was ever abandoned among Plato’s followers despite its diminished prominence and emergence of new genres such as consolation, protreptic discourse, and the philosophical letter. In each subsection of the chapter, Jażdżewska treats individual followers of the Academy and what we might infer about the role the dialogue had in their output. The extremely limited amount of information is duly signalled here, given we know next to nothing of the compositions of writers like Polemo and Crates and even less of the Skeptical Academy. Although we are sure that the early successors of Plato continued to creatively compose dialogues, the scantiness of evidence that follows and the radically different face of the Academy makes it much more challenging to convince us of any uninterrupted and robust intra-Academy tradition. Chapters three, five, and six are alike in endorsing an attenuated thesis whereby we are to accept the probability of the dialogue’s survival rather than any positive evidence.

Chapter four, “Platonic Dubia and the Appendix Platonica,” is unlike the rest of the book in taking as its subject matter a corpus of surviving dialogues rather than fragmentary writings and testimonia. Jażdżewska leaves out some of the more popular candidates to (re-)include into Plato’s authentic corpus like Greater Hippias and Alcibiades I, and instead focuses on seven dialogues from the Dubia for which there is near unanimous consensus for their inauthenticity as well as seven more dialogues from the Appendix Platonica. As with the rest of the book, the chapter does not aspire to contribute exhaustive or even novel analyses but instead offers overviews supported by recent scholarship of texts which might favourably suggest the continuing presence and relevance of dialogue. Jażdżewska pays special attention to the way these dialogues by variatio and oppositio in imitando creatively re(-)present Classical models of dialogue through the philosophical and literary developments of the Hellenistic Period. Subsections 4.3.6 on Axiochus and 4.3.7 on Halcyon stand out with their illuminating outlines and commentaries that situate these works in dynamic conversation with the ideas and literature of contemporary and earlier writers. Chapter four, like chapter two, would on its own be a highly useful introduction and reference work to a body of understudied works providing summaries but also the scholarship for further study. 

In chapter five, “Aristotle and Peripatetics,” Jażdżewska refutes Hirzel’s thesis whereby Aristotle’s now more private and systematic methods of education and philosophical thought created the conditions for the Verfall of the dialogue. The longest subsection (pp. 165–78) on Aristotle gives a convincing synopsis through several fragments of his dialogues and testimonies of later ancient readers of how Aristotle attached different functions to his separate writing formats. According to GDA, Aristotle did not corrupt the dialogue but instead used the genre to appeal to a larger lay audience, as a core part of his exoteric works (in contrast to his esoteric lecture and research notes). While Jażdżewska in this way persuasively shows Aristotle might not have in fact been the main culprit for the dialogue’s demise, each of the following subsections illuminate most of all the exponential decline of positive evidence for the dialogue’s later survival. GDA’s insistence on including the successive figures of the Lyceum, as with the Academy, often unfortunately only provokes skepticism as to the perseverance of dialogue when we are shown just how little there is to presume as such.

The hazards of aiming to be comprehensive in including sources or authors which possibly, to any degree, might have engaged with the dialogue format is most apparent in chapter six, “Other Schools and Authors.” Whereas the subsections of previous chapters most often focused on individual authors, works, or materials, chapter six in less than fifty pages (pp. 193–240) looks at the Megarians, Cyrenaics, Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans, as well as Timon of Phlius, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, The Tablet of Cebes, and Philo of Alexandria. Subsections 6.9 and 6.10 on the Tablet of Cebes and the dialogues of Philo of Alexandria are intended to, in two pages, bear non-speculative evidence for the vivacity of the genre preceding them. This chapter was largely unconvincing. The broad overviews on these schools faithfully point out the dearth of evidence suggesting dialogue could have still been any part of the literary landscape. From this background, the chapter moves on to the rather plausible, but not conclusive, theory that several figures known to compose dialogues contemporaneously should tell of an inherited tradition and not some resurrection by a single hand.

GDA concludes with a short Epilogue that reminds us the work’s main purpose is assembling, surveying, and, with spatial constraints, analysing a trying “jigsaw puzzle of which only a few pieces, most of them damaged, survive” (p. 241). In this jigsaw puzzle of history the pieces unfortunately exponentially disappear and become harder to place as we come closer to its end in the Imperial period and its better-surviving puzzle set. Jażdżewska’s thesis that the dialogue was never completely abandoned nor suffered some terminal qualitative decline is likely more accurate compared to Hirzel’s century-old narrative. Chapters two and four do the most to sway the scale of probability in Jażdżewska’s favour insofar as they concretely document and study the positive evidence for the dialogue’s continued currency. Both of these chapters could, in addition, be treated as independent collections to orient and stimulate further study into the papyrological record of dialogues and Plato’s spurious corpus respectively. While these two chapters on their own make GDA highly desirable and indeed essential for many historians of Hellenistic literature, much of the rest of the book becomes a sad reminder of how much of our sources from this time period have been lost. In these cases the force of Jażdżewska’s argument is necessarily enervated as GDA argues, despite a lack of evidence, that there is reason to believe the dialogue remained an integral part of the literary environment. Nonetheless, as a whole, in the book’s compact size of only 296 pages including appendices, GDA manages to turn the scale for us to assume that after the Classical Period the dialogue did not reach oblivion until it was revived again by figures such as Cicero and Philo of Alexandria. While correcting the narrative of dialogue’s discontinuity, Greek Dialogue in Antiquity has also provided the desperately needed modern foundations for reviving the study into the pieces of the genre’s volatile history.

Typographical Errors

(p. 49) Missing “a” – “…as a Socratic dialogue of political nature.”

(p. 50) apostrophe (’) missing to indicate elision between λυπο[οῖ]τ and ἀν̣.  

(p. 51) missing “the” in the translation: “…yourself against death penalty”. 

(p. 53) soft breathing mark on ⟦α⟧λυσιτ̣[ελ]ὲ̣ς̣. ⟦ἀ⟧.  

(p. 57) hyphen (-) missing to connect ἀλ̣[λ] with ήλων continued on the line below. 

(p. 75) Missing “the” – “It preserves fragments of two different texts: in first three columns…” 

(p. 101) “is” for “in” in footnote 33 – “…Heraclides in necessarily skewed.”

(p. 103) missing “the” – “…following morning: one of characters…”

(p. 104) include “(” and remove “and” – “…Diogenes Laertius 8.51) and gave his age.”

(p. 107) “Clazomenae” for “Cladzomenae” in footnote 52. 

(p. 108) plural for “fragments” – “…that papyri fragment provide…” 

(p. 125) remove “the” – “…in the Middle Platonism…”

(p. 145) missing “the” – “… it is impossible to deliberate about future…” 

(p. 146) missing “the” – “… Eryxias and Erasitratus on other hand…” 

(p. 149) missing “of” – “…question is reminiscent of the one asked by Meno at the beginning the Platonic model.”

(p. 216) “suggests” for “suggest” – “… the only title that suggest…” 

Table of Contents

Introduction (1–12)
1. Dialogic Entanglements (13–42)
2. Dialogues in Papyri (43–88)
3. Dialogue in the Academy (89–125)
4. Platonic Dubia and the Appendix Platonica (126–63)
5. Aristotle and the Peripatetics (164–92)
6. Other Schools and Authors (193–240)
Epilogue (241–46)

Notes

1. R. Hirzel, Der Dialog: Ein literarhistorischer Versuch (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1895).

2. Simon Goldhill,  ed., The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

3. C. H. Kahn, ed., Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); C. Moore and A. Stavru, eds., Socrates and Socratic Dialogue (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

4. W. M. Edwards, “Διάλογος, Διατριβή, Μελέτη,” in New Chapters in the History of Greek Literature, second series, Some Recent Discoveries in Greek Poetry and Prose, Chiefly of the Fourth Century BC and Later Times, ed. J. U. Powell and E. A. Barber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 88–124.