Watching a tragedy can make us weep against our will, whereas a good comedy can send us into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Causing these intense emotional experiences seems to be what is distinctive about the two genres. From its earliest incarnation, tragedy has also been seen as communicating deep and important truths about human nature, and many figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Hegel and Kierkegaard, have constructed theories of tragedy that attempt to articulate the nature of this tragic wisdom. In common parlance, a ‘tragedy’ is a sad or heartbreaking event, like the accidental death of a youth or a natural disaster, but the genre of tragedy – which often depicts sad or heartbreaking events – is thought to communicate something to its audience about human life – its fragility, for example, or its meaninglessness. Comedy, by contrast, is often seen as mere amusement, and we are not inclined to think that we are learning anything significant while laughing at the foolishness of a stage figure, at the pretensions of a politician or at the punch line of a joke. Comedy has received some philosophical attention from, for example, Hobbes, Kant and Bergson, but significantly less than tragedy. Treatments have generally focused on the question of humor, that is, of explaining what makes something funny and why we laugh. The aim of this book is to reconstruct, on Plato’s behalf, an original philosophical account of tragedy and comedy. Plato’s view of these genres is distinctive in at least three related ways: first, he defines them in terms of their best, or ideal, instantiations; second, he understands the ideal instantiations of both tragedy and comedy in terms of their ethical content, with emotional reactions in the background; and third, he conceives of the ethical contents of tragedy and comedy to be equally important and importantly related to one another.

Turning to Plato for insight into the nature of comedy and tragedy might strike some as a puzzling thing to do. Plato’s apparently sweeping rejection of poetry as morally harmful would seem to prevent him from having anything interesting to say about particular genres of poetry. Indeed, Plato seems to disdain tragedy and partly blame comedy for the execution of Socrates. However, scattered throughout the corpus, we also find exciting and provocative claims that suggest a positive educational role for tragedy and comedy in promoting the life devoted to wisdom and virtue. For example, the philosophical protagonist in the Laws declares there to be a “true tragedy” which is “an imitation of the finest and noblest life” (817b4–5). In the Republic, Socrates claims that only what is “bad” is really laughable (452d–e), and, in the Philebus, he defines “the laughable” as the vice of “self-ignorance,” especially concerning virtue and wisdom (48c–49a). Plato’s Symposium famously ends with Socrates trying to persuade Agathon, the tragedian, and Aristophanes, the comedian, that “the same man … knows how to compose comedy and tragedy” (223d3–5). How, if at all, do these suggestive claims hang together? Can they be squared with Plato’s undeniably hostile attitude towards comedy and tragedy? This book is an attempt to show, first, that these disparate claims should be understood as part of a larger philosophical account of the nature of tragedy and comedy; second, that Plato’s criticisms of comedy and tragedy should be understood as picking out failures to live up to their respective ideals; and that Plato’s own dialogues can be, in a certain sense, understood as ideal versions of comedy and tragedy. To my knowledge, no other scholar has attempted to reconstruct Plato’s ideals of comedy and tragedy in the systematic way that I do in this book: I formulate definitions of each genre, specify the particular norms that instances of tragedy and comedy must conform to, and show how the two genres are related to one another. My book is also novel in providing detailed readings of individual dialogues as instances of ideal comedy and tragedy: I show how each dialogue satisfies the conditions of ideal comedy or tragedy, and how reading them as comedies or tragedies provides important insights into the dialogue’s structure and philosophical content.

There are three central ideas animating the argument of this book. The first is that Plato operates with a distinction between actual drama, that is, the comedy and tragedy of the fifth and fourth centuries, and ideal drama, that is, the norms for what comedy and tragedy ought to be like. While some scholars have regarded Plato as staunchly anti-tragic, leaving no room for ideal tragedy,Footnote ¹ others have acknowledged that Plato’s relationship to tragedy is more complicated, though this latter group is quite diverse both in their conceptions of what tragedy is for Plato and to what extent he has a notion of ideal tragedy.Footnote ² Only Helmut Kuhn’s article, “The True Tragedy: On the Relationship between Greek Tragedy and Plato” (1941–1942), attempts to articulate a systematic account of ideal tragedy on Plato’s behalf. In the case of comedy, while some scholars have noticed that Plato’s notion of the laughable resonates with the Socratic practice of exposing interlocutors with pretensions to wisdomFootnote ³ and that Plato employs comedic techniques,Footnote ⁴ and others have explored the role of laughter in the dialogues,Footnote ⁵ only Andrea Capra’s “Platon et la comédie. Une apologie fantastique pour la poésie?” (Reference Capra, Jouet-Pastré and Saetta Cottone2018) makes progress in formulating an ideal of comedy on Plato’s behalf. Formulating and defending the distinction between the ideal and the actual versions of comedy and tragedy is a central aim of the book, but it will be useful to clarify it briefly here. The notions of ‘actual drama’ and ‘ideal drama’ should be understood as interpretive tools that I am employing in order to clarify what, from Plato’s perspective, distinguishes the dramas available to his audience from the standards against which those dramas are to be measured and judged. The category of ‘actual drama’ is essentially a shorthand way of referring to the drama of fifth- and fourth-century Athens. However, this does not entail that all comedies and tragedies fail equally, and, as we will see, Plato found some actual instances of comedy and tragedy to be closer to the norm than others.Footnote ⁶ One way to get an intuitive sense of what motivates the distinction between actual and ideal is to consider how the composing poet negotiates the two traditional aims of poetry – pleasure and moral education. For Plato, ideal drama demands that one subordinate pleasure to the goal of moral education, whereas he is constantly criticizing actual drama for elevating pleasure above moral education. This distinction can thus throw fresh light on Plato’s criticisms of actual tragedy and comedy, allowing us to see them as picking out specific failures to live up to their respective ideals. Since Plato’s conceptions of tragedy and comedy are robustly normative, they are not concerned with descriptive adequacy, and it may even turn out that the majority of actual comedies and tragedies fail Plato’s test so thoroughly that they are not really tragedies and comedies at all. Consider, by way of comparison, the normative analysis of a constitution, or politeia, in the Statesman, which renders all actual constitutions – democracies, oligarchies, etc. – into either non-constitutions or at best highly deficient ones.

The second core idea is that, for Plato, tragedy and comedy are meaningful generic forms with proto-philosophical content concerning the moral character of their protagonists and the goodness and desirability of the lives they lead. In short, tragedy imitates high, noble figures that audiences are to admire and seek to emulate, whereas comedy imitates low, ignoble figures that audience are to laugh at and disdain.Footnote ⁷ Halliwell has explicitly defended the idea that tragedy endorses a proto-philosophical conception of the human condition and others have followed suit,Footnote ⁸ but attempts to fill in that content have generally taken their starting point from actual tragedy and have not focused on the protagonist’s moral character. While some scholars have noticed Plato’s association of vice and the laughable,Footnote ⁹ none have seen that connection as having broader philosophical significance for Platonic ethics. On my view, tragedy and comedy have ethical content in that they tell audiences what good and bad lives look like by showing them what to be serious about and what to laugh at. It is then primarily through the presentation of character that comedy and tragedy perform the task of moral education. When we learn something from tragedy and comedy, according to Plato, we learn something about how to live good lives and how to avoid leading bad lives. Ideal tragedy and ideal comedy will provide portrayals of character that track the truth about moral value, providing accurate depictions of human virtue and vice that guide its audience in the right direction, that is, towards the pursuit of wisdom and away from self-ignorance. This will contribute positively to audience happiness or well-being. By contrast, actual tragedy and actual comedy provide false and misleading portrayals of good and bad lives, providing its audience with incorrect models of virtue and vice, by, for example, making the life of power and wealth seem desirable, or by making the life of study and inquiry seem ridiculous. This sets audiences on a path away from happiness. While Plato’s ideal versions of comedy and tragedy may seem somewhat remote from their actual counterparts, I will argue that they are, for Plato, what comedy and tragedy really are about.Footnote ¹⁰

The last core idea is that we may usefully understand Plato as attempting to incorporate ideal tragedy and comedy into his own dialogues. Other scholars have in various ways recognized that Plato’s dialogues borrow from comedy and tragedy,Footnote ¹¹ and some have seen Plato’s dialogues as living up to the standards for literature that he articulates,Footnote ¹² but no scholar has attempted to show Plato’s incorporation of these genres on the scale that this book attempts and in a way that systematically connects his use of tragedy and comedy to his ideals for them. For Plato, drama has the power both to harm and to benefit the souls of its audience, and his appropriation of drama constitutes an attempt to harness the beneficial potential of drama, while avoiding its potentially harmful effects. In particular, I argue that Plato employs the techniques of comedic characterization to portray the enemies of philosophy–and other pretenders to wisdom – as laughable charlatans, who, despite their wealth, fame and power, genuinely deserve audience disdain; and that he portrays his philosophical protagonist, Socrates, as an admirable and reimagined tragic hero who, despite lacking noble birth, wealth, power and physical beauty, lives the best life because of his single-minded devotion to philosophy and the pursuit of virtue and wisdom.Footnote ¹³ The interpretive benefit of reading the dialogues in this way is that I can provide a framework for understanding how Plato’s literary portrayals support and supplement his philosophical arguments about virtue and goodness. This allows us to see how highly comedic dialogues, like the Hippias Major, and more sober and serious ones, like the Phaedo, can be complementary parts of the same philosophical project. My distinction between actual and ideal drama allows me to do this without having to weaken or undermine Plato’s seriously meant criticisms of the tragedy and comedy of his time. The fullest expression of Plato’s ideal poetry may be found under ideal political conditions in the Republic and Laws, where there are no rival cultural perspectives on the good life. The Platonic dialogues, by contrast, are explicitly engaged in a competition with other genres and ethical views about virtue and the good life under non-ideal conditions. This difference might explain why certain dialogues might be appropriate for publication in fourth-century Athens, but not appropriate in an ideal state.

I.1 Plato and the Poets

This book can be seen as part of a larger project of understanding how Plato conceives of the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Rep. 607b5–6). Plato’s highly critical attitude towards poetry may mislead readers into thinking that he is simply dismissive of poetry and thinks that it should be ignored. In my view, Plato saw himself as deeply engaged with the poets as rival thinkers. He not only quotes poets extensively and engages directly with their claims, he portrays Socrates as knowledgeable about poetry and as someone who reflects on its content.Footnote ¹⁴ The traditional idea that the poets are wise and, in particular, possess ethical wisdom is still very much alive in Plato’s time, and it is something that Plato is contending with throughout his career. Plato’s competition with the poets involves engaging with them on the level of moral philosophy. They merit criticism to the extent that they do because Plato finds them presenting importantly mistaken views of human virtue and happiness.

Some scholars have seen Plato’s moralizing approach to poetry as subjecting poetry to alien ethical and educational ideals,Footnote ¹⁵ but there is good reason to think that Plato is merely holding poets to their own standards. The foremost writer of comedy, Aristophanes, captures this view of poetry as promoting ethical and political content in his play the Frogs, which features a contest in the underworld between two of the great tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides. In the play, the tragedians agree that the poets are to be judged on the basis of their “skill and admonition,” which the good poet employs in order to “make men better in their cities” (Frogs 1009–1010). In line with their status as ‘wise’ poets, tragedians plausibly saw themselves as playing an important political, ethical and educational role in the city. Aristophanes also sees his own comedies as importantly contributing to the benefit and improvement of the citizens. In several places, Aristophanes comments on the aspiration for his own comedies to educate his audience and to be taken seriously as a voice in the public sphere. For example, in the Frogs, the chorus claims that it will say “much that is funny and much that is serious” (389–393) and that it gives the city “good advice and teaching” (686–687). In the Acharnians, we hear of “comedy’s sense of duty” (497–500), and Aristophanes, in the parabasis (628–665) – whose remarkable parallels to the Gorgias I discuss in Chapter 1 – claims to have made the Athenians better through his advice and by daring to speak the truth to them.Footnote ¹⁶ One of the virtues of my approach is that keeping the poetic intellectual context in mind helps to explain both why Plato takes tragedy and comedy seriously and what particular roles these genres played in the larger cultural conversation. In short, tragedy was the high, serious genre that provided wisdom, insight into the human condition and ideals of human virtue, while comedy was the low, ridiculous genre that exposed human foibles and directly attacked prominent citizens and foreigners. The gnomic utterances of tragedy’s characters and choruses were not only memorable but memorized, and Athenian intellectuals were more likely to quote Aeschylus or Sophocles than Empedocles or Protagoras.Footnote ¹⁷ Aristophanic comedy provided, as is clear from the Clouds and other plays, attacks on intellectuals and the intellectual life, but it also provided positive political advice to the Athenian on issues of pressing importance in the parabasis, in which the chorus leader addresses the audience directly on behalf of the poet. If the poets saw themselves as engaging in the promotion of ethical and political content, then it is reasonable for Plato to subject their poetry to rational scrutiny and engage them in a critical debate.

According to this way of framing the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, the problem is not so much the form of poetry but its content. This may surprise some readers who take the argument of Book 10 of the Republic to entail that poetry is harmful because of a formal feature that it possesses, namely that it contains imitations. Socrates opens Book 10 by claiming to be pleased that “we didn’t admit any [poetry] that is imitative” (595a). Taking this claim to be a sweeping rejection of all poetry insofar as it contains imitations creates an interpretive conflict both with the educational program of Books 2 and 3 and with the claim later in Book 10 that “hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city” (607a3–5). It would also seem to eliminate the possibility that the Republic itself, or indeed any of Plato’s dialogues, could be morally beneficial. However, the fact that imitations – according to both the metaphysics of the divided line (Rep. 509d–510b) and the analysis of imitation in general (597a–e) – necessarily stand in an asymmetrical and normative relation with their originals, with the former always being deficient versions of the latter, does not entail that they are ethically harmful.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, there seems to be a growing consensus that, as Nehamas puts the point, “Plato forbids not imitation, which he considers essential to education, but imitativeness, the desire and ability to imitate anything independently of its moral quality and without the proper attitude of praise or blame toward it” (Reference Nehamas1988, 215).Footnote ¹⁹ In Book 3, Socrates banishes the poet who imitates everything indiscriminately (397a–398b), but he allows in the “more austere, less pleasure-giving poet” (398a8) who imitates restricted, ethically appropriate content.Footnote ²⁰ According to this reading, hymns, encomia and Platonic dialogues may consist of imitations that are educational, without necessarily being ‘imitative’ and thus harmful. In order to sharpen this point, we might distinguish between what I call productive imitation, in which an agent produces a work that imitates some original, and performative imitation, in which an agent directly imitates the original.Footnote ²¹ Artistic products, including poetry, are productive imitations (Laws 668a–b; Rep. 596e–597e),Footnote ²² while an actor’s impersonating some figure, as opposed to the poet’s narrative description, is a performative imitation (Rep. 392c–394c; Laws 655d–656b).Footnote ²³ The young citizens’ performative imitation of the virtuous actions of virtuous characters that a suitably austere poet has productively imitated is central to the educational programs in the Republic and the Laws and to what the Athenian Stranger calls the “absolutely unavoidable” assimilation of character (656b7).Footnote ²⁴

If it is the content and not the form of comedy and tragedy that is generally problematic, then it can both be meaningful and relevant to ask which structures, tropes or features of their form may be put to philosophical use. Since Plato understands himself as competing with tragedians and comedians on the level of moral philosophy, then approaching his dialogues through the lens of tragedy and comedy – and seeing Plato as in critical dialogue with them – might shed important light on several aspects of his dialogues. First, it can help us to think about the relationship between the dramatic characters that he portrays and the ethical character that he seeks to promote. Second, it enables us to consider how Plato thought his own imitations of character fit within the philosophical and ethical vision articulated and defended in the dialogues. Third, we can begin to make sense of how the use of certain borrowed techniques, for example parody, contribute to the philosophical argument and thus bring forward aspects of the dialogue that have been neglected or ignored as philosophically insignificant.

I.2 The Argument and Structure of the Book

The book is divided into two main parts, providing accounts of Plato’s understanding and appropriation of comedy and tragedy, with a unifying chapter at the end, showing how Plato conceives of their relationship. In the comedy part (Chapters 1, 2 and 3), I provide an account of Plato’s ideal of comedy by formulating a series of constraints that the ideal must satisfy; I situate his criticisms of comedy in terms of these constraints; and I then show how Plato puts comedy to use in two dialogues: the Euthydemus, in which Plato makes extensive use of comedic characterization and borrows directly from Aristophanes’ Clouds; and the Cratylus, in which Plato makes extensive use of the comic technique of parody. The tragedy part (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) basically repeats this structure: I provide an account of Plato’s ideal of tragedy by formulating a series of constraints, situate his criticism in terms of the constraints and show how Plato puts tragedy to use in two dialogues: the Gorgias, in which Plato adapts and appropriates Euripides’ Antiope in order to frame the debate between Callicles and Socrates, and the Phaedo, in which Plato presents Socrates as a reimagined tragic hero, going to his death nobly by engaging in philosophical conversation. In the concluding chapter, I provide an analysis of the Symposium in order to articulate the senses in which ideal tragedy and comedy might be seen as unified.

The argument of the book begins in Chapter 1, “Plato’s Definition of Comedy,” where I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Philebus, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands comedy to be, in essence, an imitation of laughable people, where the notion of the laughable, or to geloion, is a normative one that picks out what genuinely merits laughter and not necessarily what people actually laugh at. According to Plato, the only thing that merits laughter is vice, in particular the vice of self-ignorance. I formulate four constraints on ideal comedy on Plato’s behalf: the veridical constraint, which holds that only what is genuinely laughable, that is, vice, should be imitated as laughable; the educative constraint, which holds that comedic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to reject vice in their own lives; the emotional constraint, which holds that the comedic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; and the political constraint, which holds that only moral and political enemies should be portrayed as laughable.

Plato’s conception of, and norms for, comedy then provide the framework for my readings of the Euthydemus and the Cratylus as ideal comedies, in which Plato puts comedy in the service of philosophy. The former makes use of comedic characterization, while the latter employs the comedic technique of parody. In both cases, understanding how Plato’s use of comedy functions reveals the ways in which the dramatic aspects both support and deepen the explicit arguments made within the dialogues. Chapter 2, “Comedic Characterization in the Euthydemus,” argues that Plato employs techniques of comedic characterization, in particular borrowing from Aristophanes’ Clouds, in order to portray the enemies of philosophy as ridiculous and self-ignorant. In particular, I argue that he portrays the sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as imposters, who wrongly believe that they possess deep and important wisdom because of their skill in eristic argumentation, that is, argument that uses any means necessary to win. Socrates inhabits the role of the ironist, who ironically praises his interlocutors and then ultimately exposes them as ridiculous and self-ignorant. My analysis of the dialogue in terms of the interplay of these comedic character types not only allows us to see the nature, scope and function of Socratic irony in a new light but also shows how the dialogue’s overt concern with fallacy and argument ultimately is a question of character and virtue. In Chapter 3, “Parody in the Cratylus,” I examine Plato’s use of the comedic technique of parody in order to expose rival methodologies as sources of ridiculous self-ignorance. Socrates’ extended parody of etymology is intended to show that words cannot be a guide to the nature of being, since we have no reason to think that their analysis can teach us anything about the real natures to which names refer. Etymology is, in short, a source of laughable self-ignorance because it provides its practitioners with the illusion of wisdom. Parody generally involves the use of an imitation that exaggerates or distorts some feature of the original. often in order to undermine its claim to authority. In the case of etymology, Plato’s parody not only exposes etymology as a false path to wisdom but also articulates specific criticisms of etymology regarding its methodology, its scope and its alleged systematicity. The function and purpose of the very long etymological section has proved highly puzzling to interpreters who are generally unsure what to make of it, and my account reveals the etymologies to be playing a central, and previously unnoticed, role in the overall argument of the dialogue.

I then turn to Plato’s understanding of tragedy in Chapter 4, “Plato’s Definition of Tragedy,” where I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the best, noblest and most beautiful life. This includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the best life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. Here too the idea of the noblest or most beautiful life is not necessarily the one that most people take to be, or perceive as, beautiful or noble, but the one that really is beautiful and noble. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition of tragedy may seem deeply counterintuitive to many readers, since the contemporary notion of tragedy treats loss, failure and suffering as so central as to constitute its core; without these, one might think, we are no longer talking about tragedy. Plato would say that the notions of loss, failure and suffering in tragedy depend on prior notions of gain, success and flourishing, and it is these latter that constitute the intellectual core of tragedy. This requires a kind of intellectual gestalt switch where one lets what usually is prominent in our understanding of tragedy – the lamentable limitations – fade into the background and what is usually obscured and left behind – the best life – come into the foreground. As in the case of comedy, I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best, noblest and most beautiful, that is, the life of wisdom and virtue, should be imitated as the best, noblest and most beautiful; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom in their own lives; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; and the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as actually living the best life.

Plato’s conception of, and norms for, tragedy provide the framework for my readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedo as ideal tragedies, in which Plato puts tragedy in the service of philosophy. The former makes detailed and repeated use of a particular tragedy, Euripides’ Antiope, while the latter puts itself in continual dialogue with tragedy by rejecting an alternative, more pessimistic retelling of Socrates’ death. As I will show, in both cases, understanding Plato’s incorporation of tragedy throws fresh light on the explicit arguments made within the dialogues. In Chapter 5, “Tragedy and the Best Life in the Gorgias,” I argue that Plato borrows from Euripides’ Antiope, in order to frame the terms of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the last part of the dialogue about whether the philosophical or the political life is best. I argue that Plato’s engagement with this tragedy is an instance of paratragedy, that is, the non-parodic adaptation of a work of tragedy in order to enrich the dramatic situation. What redeems the Antiope in Plato’s eyes is its content, in particular its endorsement of the superiority of the intellectual over the political life. In short, Euripides’ work may be read as, at least to some extent, promoting the finest and noblest life. In adapting the Antiope for his own purposes, Plato defends an account of the good life as spent in the cooperative pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This life runs up against two limits that are thematized in the Gorgias: human obstinacy, the refusal to cooperate and recognize the force of argument; and endemic uncertainty due to our finite capacity for argument. If we see Socrates as not merely defending this life in argument, but as actively living that life, then the Gorgias itself counts as a tragedy. Bringing to the light the way in which both the explicit arguments and the literary drama open up for the possibility of good tragedy sheds important light on the arguments concerning the nature and value of rhetoric.

Chapter 6, “Tragedy and Death in the Phaedo,” argues that Plato’s depiction of the last day of Socrates is not only a tragedy in Plato’s ideal sense but also constantly and repeatedly contrasts its own presentation of the death of Socrates with how a traditional tragedy might represent the event. This contrast brings into stark relief the intellectual, moral and emotional gap between ideal and actual tragedy. It further brings out an important disagreement between actual and ideal tragedy about the nature and goodness of death. For actual tragedy, death is the worst thing that can happen, since it deprives one of all present privileges and cuts off all future possibilities. In the Phaedo, death is presented as a kind of liberation, but this conception of death reveals the insurmountable limitations on the attainment of knowledge that living embodiment entails. The problem is not with argument itself, but with our all-too-human grasp of it. The conclusions of the dialogue present an optimistic picture of divine redemption, in which the gods guarantee that those striving after wisdom and virtue will finally attain their goal when their souls are purified of the body. However, because of our embodied finitude, we can never actually be certain that the arguments revealing this redemptive picture really are sound. My interpretation highlights Socrates’ epistemic uncertainty and the role of hope, and it makes the misology passage more central to the dialogue’s argument than usually recognized.Footnote ²⁵

Finally, I turn to the question of how Plato conceives of the relationship between comedy and tragedy. In Chapter 7, “The Unity of Comedy and Tragedy in the Symposium,” I provide an interpretation of the famous claim that “the same man” ought to be able to write both comedy and tragedy, and a speculative reconstruction of the arguments that Socrates might have used to secure that claim in his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes. I argue that ideal comedy and tragedy are unified in at least three ways. First, they constitute a teleological unity, in that they their ethical imitations both aim at moral improvement; second, they constitute an ethical unity, in that they both rely on, and endorse, a single theory of value, in which wisdom and virtue are good and ignorance and vice are bad; and third, they constitute an epistemic unity, in that the objects that they imitate – ridiculousness and seriousness in agents and actions – form opposite parts of the same branch of knowledge, such that one cannot know one without knowing the other. I further argue that actual comedy and tragedy are unified but in a much weaker sense that does not involve any knowledge. In the end, I discuss the possibility of tragicomedy and consider in what sense it might be correct to understand Plato’s dialogues as tragicomedies.

I.3 Interpreting Plato

Plato was both an unusually gifted writer, whose philosophical dramas have inspired the admiration of countless authors, and an incisive philosopher, whose theories and arguments have exerted an immeasurable influence on the history of philosophy. Though Plato did not invent philosophical drama – he is writing within the genre of the Socratic dialogue that was practiced by several other students of Socrates such as Xenophon, Alexamenus of Teos,Footnote ²⁶ Aeschines, Antisthenes, Aristippus and PhaedoFootnote ²⁷ – his unique genius has left interpreters with the daunting task of accounting for both the dramatic form and the philosophical content of his dialogues.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, many scholars have chosen to focus on one of these to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the other; thus, one finds ‘literary’ and ‘philosophical’ strands in Plato interpretation. One of the core difficulties seems to be connecting the detailed literary analyses to the philosophical arguments in such a way that they can be seen as mutually supporting one another, or, at a minimum, jointly aiming at the same larger purpose. What makes this interpretive difficulty even more pressing is that the dialogues contain very forceful and apparently sweeping criticisms of the fine arts in general and of drama in particular. There is thus a tension at the heart of Plato’s works between his own practice as a philosophical dramatist and the harsh criticisms of poetry he has his characters voice. While I am certainly not the first to notice this tension, in this book, I approach the problem in a novel way. First, this book aims to incorporate both philosophical analyses of Plato’s overt arguments criticizing drama and literary analysis of Plato’s practice as a dramatist within the same overarching account. While some scholars have focused on the philosophical arguments Plato provides in the dialoguesFootnote ²⁹ and others have focused on particular literary tropes in the corpus,Footnote ³⁰ the ambition of this book is to do both of these at once. Second, instead of remaining at the general level of poetry, my analysis approaches the problem from the perspective of the particular poetic forms of comedy and tragedy. The benefit of this approach is that it provides a framework for understanding Plato’s use of certain literary tropes as attempts to critically appropriate comedy and tragedy. Thus, I attempt to answer not so much the more general question of why Plato wrote dialogues but the harder and more specific one of how he constructed dialogues.

This book is not motivated by any particular ideology regarding the interpretation of Plato but, like all interpreters, I have particular interpretive commitments that will seem controversial to some and obvious to others. In general, interpreting Plato is a demanding task, and I take what I consider to be an ‘interpretive toolbox’ approach to the dialogues. I find that certain passages in Plato are best elucidated by using certain interpretive tools, whereas other passages require different tools. There is no preferred tool, and there is no secret key to unlocking the mysteries of Plato. Some dialogues will require more conceptual or linguistic analysis and argument reconstruction, whereas others will require more character analysis and literary background information. This book does not assume that readers already have the knowledge of the nuances of ancient Greek terms or, more broadly, of the literature and culture of Plato’s time, but it rather hopes to integrate these elements in a way that might advance and enrich their understanding of Plato. In many cases, these interpretive tools will need to be combined in various ways in order to understand Plato’s text. In the end, the question of whether one has chosen the right tool is decided by the quality of the interpretation it generates. Furthermore, I take it that the task of interpreting Plato involves both trying to clarify what the text actually says via a careful and close reading, and, more speculatively, articulating what the text might be implying or assuming by thinking through the philosophical issues that are discussed. I take it that Plato wants us, his readers, not merely to discover what Plato thinks but to think for ourselves along with Plato and so with and beyond the letter of the text. In that vein, the argument of this book does substantial reconstructive work that goes beyond what the dialogues’ characters explicitly say.

Though I go beyond the letter of the dialogues, I still take this book to provide an interpretation of Plato’s philosophical position. The problem of Platonic anonymityFootnote ³¹ – the fact that there is no character called Plato in the dialogues – poses an interpretive challenge, but it does not entail that we cannot discover Plato’s views. Those who insist that the main philosophical protagonist’s assertions are not invariably perfect guides to Plato’s views are correct, since one must take the dialectical situation into account and ask questions about what Socrates is trying to accomplish by making just this claim to just this interlocutor. Is he offering his own view, is he expounding the view of another, or is he just trying to figure out what the interlocutor thinks? However, in cases in which the most plausible reading has Socrates expounding what he himself thinks, it is reasonable to afford such claims special weight. What Socrates actually says may be incomplete, containing merely the beginnings of a view, or even in a more exploratory vein, the pursuit of certain implications of a given premise, but one must nevertheless take such claims seriously in one’s interpretation.

Throughout this book, I will be speaking about Plato’s ‘audience.’ In the narrow sense, I mean the fourth-century Greeks that he was aiming to reach with his works.Footnote ³² It seems a reasonable hypothesis that Plato’s intended audience is reflected in Socrates’ conversation partners and the internal audiences within the dialogues.Footnote ³³ These would be primarily citizen youth and men, especially from wealthy families, who had the leisure for intellectual pursuits (cp. Ap. 23c), including those who joined Plato’s Academy.Footnote ³⁴ According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato also attracted female students (3.46), so women were not excluded from his audience, though given the limited freedoms afforded to women at that time – the intellectual and political equality of men and women in the kallipolis was not to be found in Athens – it is likely that they were not his main target. In a wider sense, we contemporary readers of Plato are also part of his audience, and Plato may well have hoped that, like Homer, he would reach audiences long after his death. In trying to read and understand Plato from our perspective, it is often useful to keep in mind the assumptions and cultural reference points of his contemporary audience. This is especially the case for Plato’s longstanding and complex engagement with poetry, which might seem eccentric and obsessive if we did not make certain assumptions about the status of poets as moral and epistemic authorities in his day.

In recent years, many scholars have come to regard the individual dialogue as the basic unit of interpretation. The core hermeneutic commitment that this perspective entails is that the arguments must be understood in their native context and that one misses something important by ignoring that context. The very idea of reading Plato’s dialogues as comedies or tragedies is naturally sympathetic to this interpretive principle, and several of my chapters take an individual dialogue as the relevant unit. However, my chapters on the nature of comedy and tragedy make use of various dialogues. This strategy is necessary, because there is no sustained theoretical treatment of comedy or tragedy in any individual dialogue.Footnote ³⁵ One might worry that my approach is guilty of cherry-picking the evidence by plucking these passages out of context and putting them to a purpose for which the relevant arguments are not intended. I attempt to mitigate this danger by including an account of the dialogical context when giving close readings of the relevant passages. In short, in the case of passages that are especially important to my account, I will also show that the relevant dialectical context supports my reading as well.

The dialogues that this book discusses range from the Apology to the Laws, and this raises the vexed question of the dialogues’ chronology. The book attempts to trace a thread in Plato’s thought about tragedy and comedy, and it is agnostic about larger questions of chronology. Thus, my book draws from dialogues across what are traditionally considered Plato’s three periods.Footnote ³⁶ I do not deny that there are differences and developments in Plato’s thought across dialogues, but my focus will be on what is broadly consistent among them, arguably reflecting Plato’s basic commitments about virtue and vice, the goodness and desirability of wisdom and the value of the life of philosophy. The kind of project that this book attempts is simply not interested in telling a historical story about Plato’s evolving views,Footnote ³⁷ and what is different about the Apology and the Laws is less important than what they have in common and how they can fruitfully be brought into dialogue with one another.Footnote ³⁸