Platonic Drama and its Ancient Reception [Paperback]

This book studies the reception of Plato's dialogues as performance texts by his original audience and his readers down to late antiquity.This book studies the reception of Plato's dialogues as performance texts both by his original audience and by his readers down to late antiquity. A combination of well-known and newly discovered pieces of literary and archaeological evidence tell the forgotten story of 'Plato the playwright'.This book studies the reception of Plato's dialogues as performance texts both by his original audience and by his readers down to late antiquity. A combination of well-known and newly discovered pieces of literary and archaeological evidence tell the forgotten story of 'Plato the playwright'.Reconstructing the way Plato presented himself to his original audience as the creator of an alternative drama, Nikos Charalabopoulos explains the paradox' of the dialogue form as an appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of the time. Reviewing artefacts ranging from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy from the fourth century BC to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene from the fourth century AD, Charalabopoulos discusses a range of evidence pointing to a centuries-old tradition of treatment of the dialogues as performance literature, and reveals the significance of Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences.1. Setting the stage; 2. The metatheatre of dialogue; 3. Performing Plato; 4. Plato's theatre: the fragments; Finale; Appendix: an Academy inscription.