Phaedrus by Plato;

Author:Plato;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2006-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

EXPLANATORY NOTES

See also the Index of Names (pp. 107–11) for information on characters appearing or mentioned in the dialogue.

the city walls: the dramatic date of this dialogue cannot be fixed, largely because there are too many uncertainties in the lives of the people involved. Lysias was (probably) not resident in Athens until after 412, and his brother Polemarchus, who died in 404, is presumed still to be alive (257b). During this period, however, Phaedrus was in exile. We might be tempted to suppose that Lysias paid a visit to Athens from his home in southern Italy some time earlier, perhaps during the lull in the Peloponnesian War around 420, but by this time, although he had undoubtedly studied rhetoric, he had not embarked on a career as a speech-writer. K. J. Dover (Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 32–4), supposing that Lysias was already resident in Athens, argues for a date early in 415, before Phaedrus went into exile, but it seems unlikely that Lysias was well known as a speech-writer by then either. It seems that, as elsewhere, Plato is being anachronistic or careless about the dramatic date of the dialogue. At any rate, throughout this period, Athens had impressive defensive walls, which not only surrounded the city, but also connected it to the port of Piraeus (these connecting walls were demolished after Athens’ defeat in 404). It is outside the main city walls, to the south-east of the city (see the first note on 229a), that we may picture Socrates and Phaedrus taking their walk, having left through the Itonia Gate. For more precise details, see R. E. Wycherley, ‘The Scene of Plato’s Phaidros’, Phoenix, 17 (1963), 88–98.

The date of composition of the dialogue is just as difficult to fix. Most scholars regard it as one of Plato’s later, or late-middle-period works, composed around 370 BCE. On the shaky grounds that Lysias was still alive until about 366, and that Plato would not have been so rude to a living person, Panagiotou argues for a later date, during or just after 365 (S. Panagiotou, ‘Lysias and the Date of Plato’s Phaedrus’, Mnemosyne, 28 (1975), 388–98). For various views, see the essays in the section ‘Relative Chronology’ in Rossetti [19].

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