Hesiod's Proem and Plato's Ion (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
Friedrich Solmsen’s path-breaking study of Hesiod’s influence on Plato focused on ‘motifs’ common to the two authors. Concerned to bring out the ‘threads of continuity’ in their ethical thought, Solmsen explicitly set aside the evidence of quotation, explaining that ‘[b]y and large, Plato is moving on a level of thought on which direct contact with the Hesiodic legacy could serve little purpose’ (Solmsen 1962: 179). There is no doubt that Plato found Hesiod ‘good to think with’ in a general way, but the evidence of his quotations of the poet is surely worth looking at as well. The present study is one of several in this volume to take up this material, which heretofore has been studied principally for text-critical reasons (Howes 1895). My concern will be to understand a simple pattern in the evidence: of the fifteen occasions on which Plato quotes specific Hesiodic lines or phrases (as against 146 quotations from Homer), fourteen come from the Works and Days; the Theogony is quoted...
"Hesiod in Plato's Theaetetus", Classical World 111.2 (2018) 177-205.
In this paper I focus my attention on the two references to Hesiod—one explicit (207a), the other implicit (155d)—that we encounter in the Theaetetus. Whereas at first glance Socrates seems to evoke Hesiod with a view to lending authority to or illustrating his own ongoing argument, if we go back to the original Hesiodic text and examine the wider context of the lines that Plato has Socrates quote or allude to, it becomes clear that the meaning attached to them is arbitrary, even absurd. Although this distortion appears to be " sophistic " owing to its seemingly self-serving and mercenary purposes, upon closer investigation it proves to be philosophically significant, insofar as Plato's orchestration of the two references provokes the alert reader to reflect upon and enter into a more rigorous dialogue with the Hesiodic text and the issues in question.
Performance and Elenkhos in Platos´s Ion
In Plato´s Ion, the authority and the wisdom of poets and rhapsodes are confronted by indirect means. The oblique character of this strategy prevents direct access to the content of the dialogue and causes many misunderstandings. One contextual fact encourages further misreadings. The poetry treated in the Ion is very different from how we understand it in modern times. In ancient Greece, where culture was aurally oriented, poetry was the main mode of conservation of the inherited tradition, and it continued exercising this important function even when writing began to play an important role in composition and cultural transmission. In this context, the rhapsode represents an authority that covers almost every field of knowledgean encyclopedic authority, against which Plato fought a war, not without ambiguities. This article seeks to reveal the profound motivation that animates the Ion, the opposition between two modes of communication: that of poetry and that of philosophy. It further claims that Plato, by attacking poetic performance in addition to rejecting it, tries to replace it with elenkhos as the ideal mode of communication for instruction and guidance of human life.
Ion: Plato's defense of poetry
International Studies in Philosophy, 1997
To think that Ion is a light-hearted piece with no philosophical weight, or Plato the enemy of poetry is to hold to one of the most mistaken ideas in the history of ideas. In the interest of both historical accuracy and philosophic truth the use of the word 'Plato' as such a marker must be stopped. That is, we would here be friends to both Plato and the truth, to poetry and philosophy. And while we think that poetry is as defensible as philosophy, and that Plato thought so as well and throughout his life, I will here examine only that first small dialogue, Ion, reading it as a poem should be read, for what it does not say, but engenders, as much as for what it does say, or in other words noting what it does as much as what it says. If this reading succeeds it will a) explain several historical anomalies and factual inconsistencies of the dialogue, and it will show b) that the dilemma (techne/mania) of the dialogue is false, c) that the dilemma is intimately related to a view of language as names for a world which is everything that is the case, d) that the flaw which the dialogue exhibits in the rhapsode, Ion, is at least as much a moral flaw as an intellectual one, e) that those moral and intellectual flaws are not transferable simpliciter to the poem or poet of the rhapsode's performance, or even necessarily to a rhapsode and f) that these same moral and intellectual flaws can be found in philosophers. THIS IS THE TYPESCRIPT; FOR SCHOLARLY NOTATION PLEASE USE THE JOURNAL