ABSTRACT
James Notopoulos provides strong evidence that ‘Prince Athanase’ emerged out of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s reading of the Symposium and Thomas Love Peacock’s Platonic fable, Rhododaphne, at Marlow in late 1817, though it is possible that Shelley only began the work on arrival in Italy. Whatever the exact date of composition, the fragment is like Rosalind and Helen a work of transition, expressing concerns which Shelley carried over from England to Italy. A tenet of Shelley’s thinking, apparent even in his earliest compositions, is the disinterestedness of virtue. The parallel with the prose commentary ‘On Christianity’ is plain: Athanase embodies the Christian idea in its de-theologized Socratic form, as Shelley translates it. In his characterization of ‘Jesus Christ’, Shelley celebrates, the man of complete virtue – of disinterested love – whose divinity is an open question, not an indisputable fact.
