The goal of this work is to excavate a rich ‘description of philosophical discourse and its role in society’, as Plato understood it, from four intertextual/cultural allusions in the Phaedrus (pp. 16, 23, 123). The result, overall, is that Plato does not reject poetry in favour of a discourse distinct from it, but reintegrates and transforms it into philosophy.
The book presupposes familiarity with the Phaedrus. Its intended readers are primarily Platonists, but also anyone interested in lyric poetry and rhetoric (p. x). The introduction defends the tenability of the project by claiming that the protreptic function of Platonic dialogues resembles the charms of poetry (pp. 8–9); the study of allusions is justified by the intrinsic impossibility of the dialogues explicitly referring to themselves (pp. 9–10); and the Phaedrus is chosen for being the most self-referential of Plato's dialogues (pp. xiii; 17–20; also the appendix).
In the Phaedrus, after discoursing on the harmful effects of love (ἔρως), Socrates recants that speech and offers a praise of love instead (the famous palinode). An important question is whether Plato's view of love informs both speeches, or only the palinode. In Chapter 1, C. argues for the former reading (pp. 27–8). His main argument is that Plato, by alluding to Stesichorus' Helen poem, appropriates it performatively, and that poem was likely performed as an ode and a palinode together instead of separately (pp. 38–48). So ‘Stesichorus has a structural impact on the Phaedrus' (p. 43 n. 66); Socrates' two speeches are therefore also two parts of a larger whole conveying a single message (p. 28). C. suggests that Plato consciously adopts this structure to exemplify flexible, philosophical discourse, which is more akin to lyric poetry and removed from fixed epic/rhetorical discourse (pp. 50–2, 54). He fails to discuss, however, except for a brief remark on pp. 48–9, how our interpretation of love might change in light of this structural impact. And he should have discussed it, because the claim that Plato's view of love informs only the palinode is perfectly compatible with the palinode being part of a larger speech (consider in this respect the structure of the Symp., also Phdr. 264e–265d). The claim concerning Stesichorus' influence thus does not automatically rule out the alternative reading.
Chapter 2 argues that the reference(s) to Helen in the dialogue are meant both physically and symbolically to establish a link to Sappho (pp. 65–71) through Isocrates and Gorgias (pp. 61–5), both of whom wrote an Encomium of Helen. Why is that link important? First, Sappho's Helen poem shows how oblivion does not oppose but is constitutive of erotic recollection, and Plato borrows from that model: philosophical longing is likewise a mixture of recollection (of eternal, heavenly forms) and ‘oblivion’ (the demotion of earthly, sensible manifestations) (pp. 59; 72–9; 81–2 contains an insightful cinematographic contrast between Sappho and Plato's descriptive art). Second, recollection also happens on a literary level: Sappho herself borrows and ‘recalls' the epic treatment of Helen to (re-)create her poem (pp. 82–5); similarly, Plato recollects and preserves the truth in poetry. (Incidentally, this would imply that the view on epic poetry in the Phaedrus [if there really is one] is more complicated than C. suggests in Chapter 1.) However, I cannot help but wonder whether seeing the Phaedrus–Sappho connection is truly indispensable for understanding the role of oblivion in Platonic recollection.
Chapter 3 is excellent. Its thesis is that Plato transforms poetic initiation into philosophical initiation. First, C. records linguistic parallels between Ion's account of being moved by Homer's poems (in the Ion), and Alcibiades' recollection of listening to Socrates talk (in the Symposium): this establishes the quasi-poetic power of Socratic discourse (pp. 95–101). While in Plato, the unilateral model of poetic inspiration is transformed into a bilateral one of conversation, the chain-like transmission of truth and the affective dimension are preserved (p. 101). C. shows that this transformed model is at work in the conclusion of the palinode and the cicada myth (pp. 103–14). Thus the cicadas, usually understood by scholars as a warning against the negative effects of logoi, play a positive role, according to C. (p. 108 n. 46). Bluntly put, the cicadas, by initiating Socrates and Phaedrus into philosophy in the manner in which poets are initiated into sweet singing, inspire them by exhibiting behaviour worthy of imitating. This is an intriguing and plausible view. I find C.'s account of ‘mirroring’ (pp. 101–3), where the lover's speech inspires speeches in the soul of the beloved, a potentially compelling interpretation of ἀντέρως (‘counter-love’) at Phdr. 255d–e (cf. 277a). But C. himself does not make that connection and suggests that the term is meant to invoke Stesichorus' εἴδωλον of Helen instead (pp. 48–9).
Chapter 4 discusses the prayer with which Socrates ends the conversation, and C.'s contribution to the subject is not uninteresting. He contends that the prayer concerns less Plato's contest with Isocrates (a usual line of interpretation) than a foundational, aetiological myth of Plato's own Academy (pp. 123; 143–5): Socrates is thus praying for his consecration as a poet-hero of philosophy. His argument is twofold: the prayer exhibits structural parallels with the consecration of poets (pp. 129–34), and the dialogue's landscape coincides with what we know of the cult of Socrates that occurred in the Academy and ancient times (pp. 142–6). I would have liked C. to discuss, in this connection, the fact that the Academy was outside the city, i.e. where Socrates claimed he could not learn anything about himself and usually refrained from going (Phdr. 230d). Does the dialogue confirm this claim or falsify it? Are the Phaedrus and Plato's Academy meant to indicate Plato's distance from Socrates instead of kinship to him?
In the conclusion C. draws three implications from his study. First, there is an ‘anti-intellectualist’ strand in the Phaedrus. Second, as much as the prayer in the Phaedrus points to the cult of Socrates of the Academy, the Phaedo, which reports Socrates writing poetry shortly before his death, dramatises the birth of philosophical discourse transfigured from traditional poetry. Platonic writing and the institution of the Academy are therefore understood as continuous with both the Socratic enterprise and traditional poetry. Finally, C. cautiously suggests that Platonic dialogues might be poetry designed for political reform, and might also be propaedeutic to philosophising of a more substantive sort.
As a Platonist and one of the intended readers, I found C.'s volume useful overall but was also slightly disappointed concerning his ‘reconstruction’ of Platonic philosophical discourse. Poetry is given its due because love, the topic where poetry reigns supreme, is the sole motivator of genuine logos; philosophical discourse is interlocutor-sensitive, inspired dialogue designed to trigger the appropriate mixture of intellectual vigilance, recollection and forgetfulness; and Socrates is where poetry and philosophy separate and reunite – but do any of these claims radically change the usual view of the Phaedrus? Do allusions to Stesichorus, Sappho, Isocrates and others impart a new dimension or depth to what Plato thinks of poetry, love, rhetoric and philosophy? I do not mean to criticise C. for lack of novelty, since the new is not always worth considering, and he certainly offers what he calls ‘new facts', if not new interpretations of old facts. Nevertheless, given that C. intends to overcome the insularity between European and English-speaking scholarship, and philologists and philosophers (pp. x–xi, 39–40, 70, 79), and that he intends to do so precisely by demonstrating that literary allusions are integral to the arguments in the dialogue, his purpose would have been better served had the allusions he unearthed demanded that we significantly revise the accepted understanding of Plato's views. The intention to overcome academic insularity thus ends up paradoxically justifying it, since it seems that specialised approaches to Plato do not generate partial and contradictory views, but rather similar ones.
