he sage and his foibles

 

It is remarkable that we have anthing, but do recall that books were now a commodity back in the day and he became well known.  Also a business letter to a ruler is just what would be kept in the rtecords leading to actual copying for a salable book over tyhe next two centuries when the Alexanderian world exploded into existence.

He was also esteemed.  Wheras Jesus did not write a thing yet was captured by trained memory retention transcribed into text inside decades of his passing because his thought was also esteemed.

So my first comment is that it is really risky to dismiss any such material unless you can prove the existence of a market for false attribution centuries later.  After all all letters have an individual as an intended reader and an objective as well  This is not where your finest thinking is put on display.

The fact is that we have a body written material sharing even his day to day corespondence and often as not taken by a scribe...

The sage and his foibles

Scholars cannot agree whether the letters of Plato are fake or genuine. Is this just a symptom of misplaced reverence?

Marble bust of Plato (4th-5th century CE). Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery

James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H Ottaway Jr Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. His latest books are the edited Seneca, How to Have a Life: An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely (2022), and Demetrius: Sacker of Cities (2023).

https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-controversial-letters-of-plato-reveal-about-us?

What kind of person was Plato? The question is hard to answer, because Plato kept himself hidden in his dialogues, using his teacher, Socrates, as a mouthpiece for views that may or may not be his own. Readers of Plato might wish for autobiographical writings from him, or private letters in his own voice, to reveal the inner man and give insight into his philosophical views. That wish, in the eyes of some scholars, has been granted: a body of 13 ‘Platonic letters’, including a long and detailed document known as Seventh Letter, appears to show us the man behind the masks. In the Seventh Letter, Plato appears to tell us part of his own life story, explaining the reasons why he became a philosopher rather than a political leader, and outlines crucial points in his philosophy – a goldmine, it would seem, for those who want to know Plato as a person or to fully explore his system of thought.

The beginning of Plato’s seventh letter (1807). Courtesy of the BnF, Paris

But other scholars, today a majority, claim that the goldmine contains only iron pyrite. They dismiss the Seventh Letter as the work of a forger or fraud, and banish it from the Platonic corpus, along with all the other letters attributed to Plato. A book by two leading Plato authorities, Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, blared out this condemnation with its very title, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter (2015). In his portion of the composite volume, Burnyeat mounted a scathing attack on the letter’s contents, labelling them the work of someone ‘philosophically incompetent’. That is as much as to say that other revered Platonists who’ve accepted the letter as genuine, among them A E Taylor – whose landmark Plato: The Man and his Work (1926) is still regularly reprinted after nearly a century – lacked the means to distinguish between the ideas of a hack imposter and those of one of antiquity’s greatest minds.

What is the general reader or armchair philosopher, who seeks an understanding of Plato (the man or his work), to make of a controversy in which noted experts stand at opposite poles, and on which so much depends? Such readers may not even know the letters exist, for they’re distressingly hard to find among recent printed editions of Plato’s works. The Penguin Classics series, for many in the United States a go-to venue for Greek texts in translation, once packaged the Seventh Letter, along with another epistle, in a composite volume headlined by the dialogue Phaedrus. But when Penguin updated its Phaedrus translation in 2005, it dropped the two letters from the new volume without explanation. Had the opponents of the Platonic letters, their numbers having grown over preceding decades, succeeded in conclusively dismissing them?

I cannot produce an answer to the question of whether Plato wrote some of the Platonic letters (he certainly did not write them all), nor can anyone, for no such answer is possible ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. I rather aim to explore the history of the debate, as confidence in the letters’ authenticity has waxed and waned over centuries, reaching its lowest ebb ever in recent decades but now, perhaps, rising once again. This history reveals a pervasive bias against Platonic authorship of the letters, based on a desire – unconscious, no doubt – to distance the exalted figure of Plato from their less-than-exalted content. Several of the letters relate to an episode in Plato’s life that Plato’s admirers find troubling: a failed attempt to collaborate with Dionysius II, the immensely powerful ruler of Syracuse, in an effort to reform the government of that Sicilian Greek city.