ABSTRACT
Plato and Xenophon were by no means the only early-to-mid fourth-century pupils of Socrates to have written dialogues in which he featured as a central character. Ancient authorities credit works of this form to all or most of Aeschines of Sphettus, Antisthenes, Phaedo, Crito, Simmias, Cebes, Euclides, Stilpo, Aristippus, Glaucon, and Simon the Cobbler.2 How many
were genuine was already debated in antiquity. The Stoic philosopher Panaetius was of the opinion that only those attributed to the ‘big four’, Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines and Antisthenes, were certainly authentic; he was dubious about those attributed to Phaedo and Euclides, and rejected the remainder.3 His evidence though shows that the bulk of them was still in circulation – and presumably being accepted by some as genuine – in the second century BC; and later quotations establish that Aeschines’ dialogues at least were still being read in the second AD. None however survived complete beyond Late Antiquity: the only supposed work of a minor Socratic to escape was the Pinax (Tablet) of Cebes which, though a dialogue, does not involve Socrates and is in any case certainly the product of a later period.4 Such influence as the minor Socratica have exercised subsequently has worked through quotations, references and adaptations in other, more fully preserved, ancient sources – the same as can now be used in modern scholarly reconstructions. The largest certain traces are those of the Aspasia and the Alcibiades of Aeschines, the former quoted by Cicero, and the latter by Aelius Aristides. Both dialogues clearly made a noticeable contribution to the pool of material relating to Socratic erotics.5 One of the largest surviving extracts, fr. 11 of the Alcibiades, shows that the dialogue as a whole was narrated by Socrates himself, and how closely this Aeschinean Socrates was (on occasions, at least) to his Platonic cousin:
But it was not only a question of dialogues. Socrates’ trial too was revisited by others than Plato and Xenophon. There were more Apologies: one by Lysias, which was even supposed to have been offered to Socrates before his trial and rejected, one by the rhetor and tragedian Theodectes, and one by Crito.7 It is unclear how many of these circulated as full texts, as opposed to the subjects of anecdote and conjecture; that attributed to Crito, at least, is likely to have been pseudepigraphic. From the other side of the fence came the Prosecution (Kategoria) of the sophist Polycrates, which presented itself as the words of the prosecutor Anytus, though was actually composed at some time after the year 394.8 The writing of formal defences continued to appeal for long after as a way of presenting and debating about Socrates: besides the surviving example by Libanius, from the fourth century AD, further Apologies are also attested for Demetrius of Phalerum, Zeno of Sidon, Plutarch, and Theon of Antioch.9 By contrast, only one other possible prosecution is attested, an Against Socrates credited by the Suda to the second-century (AD) sophist, Pollux of Naucratis.10
