Greek Dialogue in Antiquity

Abstract

AbstractThe book re-examines evidence for Greek dialogue between the mid-fourth century BCE and the mid-first century CE—that is, roughly from Plato’s death to the death of Philo of Alexandria. Although the genre of dialogue in antiquity has attracted a growing interest in the past two decades, the time covered in the book has remained overlooked and unresearched, with scholars believing that for much of this period the dialogue went through a period of decline and was revived only in Roman times. The book carefully reassesses post-Platonic and Hellenistic evidence and studies the employment of the dialogue in the Academy and by authors of the pseudo-Platonica, by Aristotle and his followers, as well as in other intellectual environments, from the Minor Socratic schools of the Megarians and Cyrenaics, to the major Hellenistic traditions—the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans—and from Timon of Phlius and Eratosthenes of Cyrene to Philo of Alexandria and Tablet of Cebes. It also collects and examines papyri fragments of dialogues, which have never been discussed in this context. The book argues that dialogues and texts creatively interacting with dialogic conventions were composed throughout Hellenistic times, and proposes to reconceptualize the imperial period dialogue as evidence not of a resurgence, but of continuity in this literary tradition; it therefore challenges the narrative of the dialogue’s decline and subsequent revival, postulating, instead, the genre’s unbroken continuity from the Classical period to the Roman Empire.