This collective volume is devoted to the reception of Plato from the Old Academy to the last of the pagan Diadochoi of the sixth century. Covering ten centuries of Plato's reception is not an easy task, not only in terms of the length of the period, but also due to the polymorphous character of the impact that the writings and thought of Plato had throughout Antiquity. The book deals not only with exegetes who have interpreted the Dialogues, whether philosophically or literarily (be they men or, as C. Addey shows, women), but also, and above all, with those who have drawn on elements in order to elaborate their own thinking, in fields as diverse as metaphysics, religion, sophistic or politics. It is this multi-directional fruitfulness offered by this volume, which invites in its conclusion (pp. 580–2) to a kind of hermeneutic of infinite dialogue between Plato and his readers. The book is composed of 31 contributions divided into three sections of unequal length, each preceded by a detailed introduction. These introductions not only provide a synthetic panorama of the period covered, but also mention significant figures for whom the volume had not space enough to allow them an entry (e.g. Aristotle in Part 1 and, to a lesser degree, Atticus in Part 2). Besides a general introduction and conclusion, there is a general index (names and subjects) and an index of places. The first section comprises four entries and covers the period from the Old Academy to Cicero. The second, devoted to Middle-Platonism, includes nine papers. The last, and most important, since it contains more than half of the contributions, has papers focused on the reception of Plato by the Neoplatonists and early Christian thinkers.

This format does not mean, however, that the three sections are completely independent from each other. Lines of continuity appear particularly through the study of pivotal figures such as Numenius or Cicero. At the crossroads of politics, rhetoric and philosophy, the latter occupies a special place in Section 1. As Renaud points out, he is not only an essential source for the Academic debates, but also a key player for the reception of Plato, notably in translating Plato into Latin. Furthermore, what marks Cicero's place is that, following Philo of Larissa (and in opposition to Antiochus), he pleaded for a unity of the Academy, understood as a school, where the practice of debates and dialectic would lead to a sort of Platonic identity. P.S. Horky defends the hypothesis of a unity of method that one finds in Speusippus and Xenocrates, which goes beyond their differences, and relates to the importance given to an educational programme that privileges the zetetic method and interpersonal dialogue. F. Alesse studies the impact of the Platonic influence on the constitution of the ethics in early Stoicism up to Panaetius, linked to the polemical interpretation of the cosmology of the Timaeus. C.E. Snyder analyses how the different scholarchs of the New Academy have viewed the tradition of free discussion that is the quintessence of the Socratic (and Platonic) heritage.

Section 2, while staying attentive to these underlying themes, draws attention to the emergence of novelties, such as the establishment of a curriculum for reading the Dialogues, as studied by Tarrant; the rise of inter-textual readings of Platonist and biblical texts, as shown in Philo of Alexandria by S. Yli-Karjanmaa; or the development of the imperative of homoiôsis theô. This section's aim is to reveal the capillary spread of Platonism at the start of the imperial era. The paper by R.C. Fowler, devoted to the Second Sophistic, shows the huge impact that reading Plato had in the cultural life of that period, through the study of Greek and Latin sophists and rhetors. M. Bonazzi starts with a comparative study on the use of scepticism in the Anonymous Commentary on the Theaetetus and in the works of Plutarch of Chaeronea, as a tool to counter the dogmatism of the empiricist epistemologies of the Epicureans and the Stoics; he concludes by indicating that according to Plutarch, Plato's philosophy, which defines politics as an art of caring for the soul and an auxiliary step towards the contemplation of the divine, is of crucial importance in a world in crisis. In another register, the paper of F.M. Petrucci is devoted to the role of mathematics. He distinguishes two approaches: one, represented by Nicomachus of Gerasa, seeks to establish a mathematical system from a Platonic perspective; the other, that of Theo of Smyrna, starts with the Dialogues, in order to draw out a system of scientific exposition. G. Roskam's contribution proposes an interesting hypothesis concerning the writing of De Platone of Apuleius (translator of Plato into Latin and writer at the crossroads of literary, rhetorical and philosophical preoccupations). According to Roskam, this book is partly the fruit of a later re-writing of lessons that Apuleius had attended in his youth in Athens. This would explain both the innovations peculiar to Apuleius and the parallels with the Didaskalikos of Alcinous. C.S. O'Brien's paper focuses on this handbook. According to him, Alcinous is an interpreter whose reading of Plato is often imprecise and who offers barely any new insights. To nuance this conclusion, one could, on the plus side, point out Alcinous’ stimulating definition of the Platonic Forms, which is based in part on a precise knowledge of Metaphysics Lambda, which at the time was quite rare amongst Middle-Platonists.

From a general point of view, this aspect of confrontation with Aristotelianism during the imperial era is not explored much in the second section and only fully dealt with in the final section. At the end of the volume, there is another study devoted to a famous handbook, the Anonymous Prolegomena. Layne points out the Neoplatonic stamp of this work, notably in its conception of the dialogue as a microcosm, but also the specificity of its approach, which insists on the supremacy of Socrates, without, however, leaving out a Socratic leaning towards aporia. P. Athanassiadi's paper on Numenius shows the key role he had in the emergence of Neoplatonism and his displacement by the commentators after Iamblichus; the study of his damnatio memoriae is taken up in the third section by Baltzly, who very precisely analyses the critiques addressed by Proclus to Theodorus of Asine and Amelius, whom he sees as the heirs of Numenius. Finally, J. Rocca effectively highlights how Galen both follows the Platonic definition of the demiurge (concerning, for example, the promise of indestructibility made to the young gods) and makes the demiurge directly responsible for the somatic organisation, which, in the end, considerably weakens the role of the auxiliaries.

Section 3 focuses on the moment when the reception of Plato blossomed in very different contexts such as pagan Neoplatonism, Christianism (including Gnostic thinkers, who, according to J.D. Turner, probably had good knowledge of the Dialogues) and also Latin thinkers, as is shown in the contributions by C. Hoenig on Calcidius and G. Van Riel on Augustine. I. Ramelli, studying Christian exegetes such as Eusebius and Origen who considered Plato as the pagan author most in line with Christianity, envisages the possibility that Origen the Christian is one and the same person as Origen the pagan, the disciple of Ammonius Saccas – and one might regret here that she makes no mention of the very serious arguments invalidating this hypothesis. From Origen till the end of the sixth century, things develop considerably, and the gap widens more and more between Christianity and paganism, as is clearly set out in the last two studies on Olympiodorus (M. Griffin) and Simplicius (G. Gabor). L.P. Gerson starts from the old assertion by Hegel, according to which Plotinus is as much an Aristotelian as a Platonist, and shows that this opposition does not hold water, since Aristotle himself was, in the final count, a Platonist. From that point, he develops a reading strategy where he shows that the little attention paid by Plotinus to the commentary of the letter of the Dialogues, originates from his desire to construct an interpretation from what he understood to be the ‘Platonism of Plato’. The remainder of the volume is composed of excellent studies devoted to the different Neoplatonic scholars. M. Chase underlines the importance of Porphyry, who integrates commentaries of Aristotle in the Platonic cursus; D. Clark takes on the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides. Bypassing the thorny problem of its authorship, Clark, while having reservations about P. Hadot's hypothesis, attributing it to Porphyry, underlines the profound differences of this text from the Middle-Platonic commentaries and makes a case for its Neoplatonic identity. With Iamblichus, studied by J. Finamore, culminates the preoccupation concerning the assimilation to the divine, which takes the form of theurgic practices. D.J. O'Meara, focusing on the works of the emperor Julian, develops a very subtle analysis of the question of the philosopher-king, showing how Julian, as a Neoplatonist philosopher, considers his vocation as a task imposed on him by Providence. Building on the Laws, Julian underlines the importance of piety, which is not only a civic virtue, but also a means that allows the soul to rise to the contemplation of the divine principles, which is the final goal of human life. The erudite contributions of S. Klitenic Wear on the exegetical methods of Syranius, Tarrant and Baltzly on his disciple Hermias, J. Opsomer on the metaphysics and theology of Proclus, and S. Ahbel-Rappe devoted to Damascius offer an important panorama of epistemological questions.

As a conclusion, the volume reveals a recurrent element: after a long period of textual systematisation and interpretation, rigorously codified, there rises anew a reading of Plato that gives a central role to aporia. Hence Damascius the last Athenian diadoch, makes aporia the key element in the process of self-knowledge – as if the imperative of perpetual interrogation and critical scrutiny of established positions were always hatched in the reception of Plato. It is under the sign of the swan, which appeared in a dream to Socrates and which escapes just as one thinks that one has seized it, that this important volume concludes. Even though one could cite a few inevitable small inaccuracies (e.g. p. 95, the fragments are preserved by ‘Eusebius’ and not ‘Atticus’, or an error in the title of Bénatouïl 2009), this collective volume contains a great number of erudite, original and fruitful contributions, which together form an excellent tool to blaze a path in the labyrinth of the very long history of Plato’s reception in Antiquity.