Plato and his Reception

This paper interprets Socrates’ defense speech in Plato’s Apology of Socrates within the unstable context of late 5^th century Athenian political ideology concerning self-sacrifice, and thereby challenges the dominant approach to interpreting the speech. Going back at least to Hegel, scholars have taken Socrates’ speech to his jurors to be a performance of a conflict between philosophy and the city, between the individual and the collective, between rationalistic morality and conventional ethical values (Most 2007).

While Zeno seems to have defined the ideal aim (telos) of life as living in accordance to nature (apud Cic. Fin. III.22, DL VII.87), Plato formulates it at several points as ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν, becoming like to god, to the extent that it is possible for a human (e.g. Rep. X.613a-b, Tht. 176b, Ti. 90c-d). Likeness to god became a defining feature of Platonism in the Roman empire, as many scholars have noted (e.g. Dillon [1977:9-10], Annas [1999:6], Tarrant [2007]).

In Plato’s Laws 7, the Athenian stranger argues that humans ought to live out their whole lives “playing the finest games” (παίζοντα ὅτι καλλίστας παιδιὰς), which he identifies as “sacrificing and singing and dancing” (θύοντα καὶ ᾄδοντα καὶ ὀρχούμενον, 7.803C7-E2). Sacrifice’s inclusion in this list is peculiar, since sacrifice is not an activity that was associated with play or children, as singing and dancing both are.

The Platonic dialogue Axiochus is not by Plato. Though included in the Platonic corpus, already in antiquity it was bastardized—that is, athetized (DL 3.62). In the dialogue, Socrates tries to console Axiochus who is overcome by the fear of death. Socrates offers a two main lines of argument: the soul is mortal and so does not experience death, and the soul is immortal and experiences a blessed afterlife. Axiochus is persuaded and is released from his fear of death.

This paper argues that the conceptual world of divination plays a central and productive role in Plato’s construction of dialogical philosophy in his Apology. The study of ancient divination has emerged in recent decades as one of the most exciting comparative enterprises in Classical and ancient Near Eastern studies, uncovering the sophistication and ubiquity of this widespread cultural phenomenon (e.g. Bowden 2005, Huffmon 2007, Maurizio 1997, and Nissinen 2017). This has prompted new attention to the surprising prevalence of divination throughout the Platonic corpus.