ABSTRACT
PLATO is the one voluminous author of classical antiquity whose works seem to have come down to us whole and entire. Nowhere in later antiquity do we come on any reference to a Platonic work which we do not still possess. It is true that we know nothing of the contents of Plato's lectures except from a few scanty notices in Aristotle or quotations preserved from contemporaries of Aristotle by the Aristotelian commentators. But the explanation of this seems to be that Plato habitually lectured without any kind of manuscript. This explains why Aristotle speaks of certain doctrines as taught in the “unwritten teaching” (ἄγραφα δόγματα) of his master, and why at least five of the auditors of a particularly famous lecture (that on “The Good”), including both Aristotle and Xenocrates, published their own recollections of it. We must suppose that Plato's written dialogues were meant to appeal to the “educated” at large and interest them in philosophy; the teaching given to Plato's personal associates depended for its due appreciation on the actual contact of mind with mind within the school and was therefore not committed to writing at all. As we shall see later on, this has had the (for us) unfortunate result that we are left to learn Plato's inmost ultimate convictions on the most important questions, the very thing we most want to know, from references in Aristotle, polemical in object, always brief, and often puzzling in the highest degree.
