Malcolm Schofield

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Re-editing the RepublicMalcolm SchofieldS. R. Slings, ed. Platonis Respublica. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. xxiv + 428 pp. Cloth, $45.S. R. Slings' Republic is the second volume to appear in the new OCT edition of Plato. Reviewing the first—the new volume I, containing the first two tetralogies—Slings rounded off with some general remarks for the "average user of OCTs," who "will want to know to what degree all this work has improved the text" (Mnemosyne 51 [1998] 101). If we apply the question to the fruits of his own tireless labours (the last of his seven general editorial principles is: editori non est fatiscendum), the answer is the same verdict as Slings passed on volume I: "The text is not all that different from Burnet's, and rightly so," for "he was a superb editor with a feeling for Platonic Greek that is unlikely to be ever surpassed" (ibid. 93). But did you know something Slings reports elsewhere (Mnem. 42 [1989] 192): that "when the volumes of Burnet's Platonis Opera first appeared, they were generally considered a provisional editio minor, soon to be superseded by more impressive tomes?" What is hugely improved is the apparatus criticus. There are two main reasons for this.First, Slings' text is based on a much more secure assessment of the textual tradition than was Burnet's, thanks not least to the comprehensive work of his former pupil Gerard Boter in The Textual Tradition of Plato's Republic (Leiden: Brill, 1989). Burnet gave pride of place to three primary witnesses: Parisinus 1807, ninth century (A); Marcianus 185, twelfth century (D); and Vindobonensis suppl. gr., dated by Slings to the period 1250-1325 (F). But he reported them selectively and sometimes inaccurately and never collated any of them himself. Moreover, while he was the first editor to recognise the true importance of the Vindobonensis, in Slings' opinion he accorded it more authority, particularly relative to the Parisinus, than it really carries. Finally, Burnet attached some weight to M, a manuscript in the library of the Malatestas at Cesena variously attributed to the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth centuries (but considered fifteenth century by Slings and Boter) and collated for the Republic by Lewis Campbell. Boter's investigations have established that M carries no independent authority. Slings and Boter have reexamined all three of the primary medieval manuscripts both in photocopies and in situ, with what was evidently extreme care, and Slings says he has no doubt that the readings reported in the new OCT are a lot more reliable than in any previous edition. His general view of the [End Page 607] merits and demerits of A, D, and F—repeated here—was already set out in Appendix 2 to his major edition of the Clitophon (which precedes the Republic in the seventh tetralogy and shares its textual tradition); see Plato: Clitophon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 340-44. Roughly speaking, A is the weightiest, D is of relatively minor importance, and F is "a typical representative of the cheap Plato omnibus as found in later antiquity," with "many uniquely true readings" but lots of errors and "untrustworthy variants in word order and particles" (ibid. 341).Second, as well as exploiting Plato papyri and translations into Coptic, Arabic, and Hebrew, Slings makes more generous use of the indirect tradition than do earlier editions by using quotations and allusions in subsequent ancient authors and scholia. He thanks a number of other Dutch scholars for their help in compiling this material and cites in particular Gerard Boter's index of testimonia in The Textual Tradition. Slings includes a list of those cited in his apparatus criticus as an appendix (it runs to seventeen pages). Moreover, interpretation of the information provided in the apparatus is aided by the clear explanation in the editor's pithy Latin preface of the rules and the orthographic practices he proposes to follow. In general, while Slings' apparatus is not consistently bulkier than Burnet's, it is often richer. Mostly this is thanks to better information about the textual tradition. But in line with the usual modern practice, Slings also gives the source of any Platonic quotation...

The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. This paper draws attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. It has three sections. In the first, it will be shown that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia, alternative to that advanced by Cleinias and Megillus, and accepted by Aristotle, which Plato could expect or at any rate hope to be taken seriously as such. In the second, the argument will focus on the contents of the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear Cleinias ascribe to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. The case will be made that Plato can expect recognition by the reader that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. Finally, the third section will argue that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon’s Lycurgus.

This article traces the circumstances, which led to Plato becoming a great philosopher. Gradual unraveling of the article brings out more of young Plato and how he became a part of Socrates' circle. Doing philosophy meant trying to understand how to live the life of a just person: getting rid of illusions about what we know or what we think we want, and coming to see what living well really consists of. That is the manifesto Socrates enunciates in his speech to the jurors in the Apology. That is the theme Plato makes him elaborate and defends on a massive scale in the Republic, the longest and most complex of all his works. Fundamental in what he took from Socrates is the idea that philosophy is an inquiry, and inquiry best pursued in conversation with someone else.

Burnet's text should be emended or repunctuated at three points. At d I we should follow Moreschini and with BT omit Proclus' γε: the unanimous voice of our best manuscripts must be allowed to drown the unreliable Neoplatonist. At e 2, as I shall argue, should be excised. And at e 2–3 the clause is to be attributed to Aristoteles, as Brumbaugh advocates. This attribution gives a better and more typical question and answer sequence, although I can find no other example where Aristoteles ventures sua sponte.

This paper takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book I of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue(644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion I comment on what light we may suppose to be thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we are promised it will.

The Pythagoreans are presented by Aristotle in Chapter 5 as a sort of bridge between the physicists and the Platonists. They resemble the physicists in treating their principles as material, although with the striking innovation that these are conceived in mathematical terms; and they talk less obscurely than their predecessors about principles as such. The ontology presupposed by their thesis that ‘numbers are primary in nature’ and ‘constitute the whole heaven’ can be reconstructed from elsewhere in Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias. No less importantly, however, they anticipate the direction in which Socrates and Plato will take philosophy. Their principles — limit and unlimited — are not natures like fire or earth, but substances in their own right of the things of which they are predicated; and they made attempts, albeit superficial and confused, at definitions.

Of all Plato's memorable images, the Cave is the most compelling, and it is possibly ‘the most famous metaphor in the history of philosophy’. However, it remains a challenge for philosophical scholarship, given that a determinate interpretation has eluded commentators. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the Cave's place in the developing argument of the _Republic_, and the interpretation of the image Socrates supplies in order to explain the way it contributes to that argument. This is followed by a longer section on the Cave as actually narrated. The chapter then offers some brief concluding reflections: on why Plato may have decided to combine two such very different projects, and on how his instructions for rereading nonetheless leave them different. The goal is to liberate readers of Plato from the tyranny of thinking they have to find significance simultaneously ethical and mathematical in every detail of the Cave narrative, harnessed to just one overarching interpretation.