ABSTRACT
WE are now to consider the group of four great dialogues which exhibit Plato's dramatic art at its ripest perfection. It may fairly be presumed that they all belong to one and the same period of his development as a writer, a view borne out by a cautious and sane use of the available “stylometric” evidence. Outwardly they have all the same form, that of a conversation supposed to have taken place before a numerous audience and subsequently described either by Socrates himself (Protagoras, Republic), or by one of the original auditors (Phaedo, Symposium). We have already found Plato using this difficult literary form for comparatively short dialogues (e.g. Charmides, Euthydemus), but it is a more arduous task to keep it up successfully throughout a work of considerable compass; as we have seen, in the dialogues which there is other reason for thinking later than the Republic, it is only adopted once (in the Parmenides), and there is a formal explanation of its abandonment in the Theaetetus. This is good reason for thinking that Plato's great achievements in this kind belong neither to his more youthful nor to his later period of literary activity, but to his prime of maturity as a writer (which need not, of course, coincide with his ripest maturity as a thinker). I do not think there is any satisfactory method of dating the four dialogues themselves in the order of their composition. We may reasonably presume that the Republic, as the work of greatest range and compass among them, must have taken longest to write, and was the last to be completed. It also contains what looks like a concealed reference to the Phaedo (Rep. 611b 10), though the fact is by no means certain. 1 Now there is one consideration which perhaps allows us to fix an approximate date in Plato's life for the writing of the Republic. In Ep. vii. 326b, where Plato is describing the state of mind in which he paid his first visit to Italy and Sicily, he says that he had been driven to state, in a eulogy of genuine philosophy ἐπαινῶν τὴν ὀρθὴν φιλοσοφίαν), that humanity will never escape its sufferings until either true philosophers occupy political office or political “rulers,” by some happy providence, turn to philosophy. It seems impossible not to take this as a direct allusion to Republic vi. 499b, where the same thing is said, almost in the same words, as part of a “eulogy” of true philosophy. Since Plato also says (Ep. vii. 324a) that he was about forty years old at the time of his voyage, this seems to give us 387 B.c. as an approximate date for the writing of the Republic, or, at least, of its central and most difficult section, and we are led to think of his dramatic activity, culminating in the four great “reported dialogues,” as marking the late thirties of his life. Beyond this, so far as I can see, we have no means of going. We cannot tell, for example, whether the Phaedo is earlier or later than the Symposium, or either earlier or later than the Protagoras. My own reason for taking the Phaedo before the other two is simply that it connects outwardly with the events of Socrates’ last day, and consequently illustrates the same side of his thought and character as the three dialogues we have just examined.
