Safety statistics for air travel and workplaces speak of the “near miss”: close call; a collision that might have occurred and only barely did not. Given our present topic – Plato’s dialogues taking poetry in – and our brief’s engaging breadth that covers both true and false quotation, or those… Read more
It is Shakespeare’s fault. Weaving a variety of alien discourses together may have become standard fare after Shakespeare, but the novelty with which Plato did this thousands of years earlier thus becomes obscured. I wish here to unearth that novelty and reexamine it for how it contributes to Plato’s Cratylus,… Read more
N.B.: This volume of essays originated as a conference hosted by the Greek and Roman Studies department at Vassar College and set to take place in April 2020. The event was canceled due to the pandemic, but some of the papers appear here in this special issue of Classics@. I… Read more
§1. “La danse, Madame, c’est une question morale.” After a pregnant pause, that was George Balanchine’s response to the mother of a shy, young pupil who asked him about her daughter, in English, “Will she dance?” So reports Lincoln Kirstein, the ballet patron/philanthropist who brought Balanchine to the US in… Read more
§0. This essay began with an invitation to participate in a conference at Vassar College in early April 2020. As the world knows, everything planned for that date was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. The conference, organized by Gwenda-lin Grewal, was set to consider quotations and misquotations of Homer in… Read more
2020.06.26 §0. The text of this essay, as posted here in Classical Inquiries 2020.06.26, is a pre-edited version of my contribution to an online colloquium, Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato, the collected essays for which will reside in a special issue of Classics@; the guest-editor of that issue is the organizer… Read more
The passage in Plato that I have selected for investigation is a mention of Homer that occurs in Book 3 of the Republic, but not in the notorious pages in which a variety of Homeric lines are proposed for excision from the body of poetry that the Guardians will get… Read more
Socrates: Have you really then failed to observe, Theodorus, that in accordance with Homer’s speech it’s no stranger you lead but a kind of god? He asserts that not only do different gods accompany all those human beings who share in a just shame, but that also, in… Read more
At Euthydemus 304b, Socrates seems to twist the famous first line of Pindar’s Olympian 1. Pindar’s line reads as follows: ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ Best, on the one hand, water, but gold as blazing fire Here is Plato’s version: τὸ δὲ ὕδωρ εὐωνότατον, ἄριστον ὄν,… Read more
