THE Ole vatne MOVEMENT EDITED BY PAUL A. VANDER WAERDT CONTRIBUTORS Julia Annas Teme i Joseph G. DeFilippo Charles H. Kahn Voula Tsouna McKirahan Phillip T. Mitsis Donald R. Morrison David K. O'Connor Thomas L. Pangle Christopher J. Shields Oita tea Gisela Striker Harold A. S. Tarrant Paul A. Vander Waerdt[1] The Origins of the Socratic Dialogue Diskin Clay 1. Sokratikoi Socrates—Socratic, Pythagoras—Pythagorean, Plato—Platonic, Ep- icurus—Epicurean: some philosophers have a way of becoming adjec- tives, and their followers substantives. In their transformation first into adjectives and then into substantives these philosophers are usually transformed into a philosophy or a school; only rarely are they trans- formed into a way of life.' But none (so far as I know), except Socrates, has lent his name to a genre of literature that is the mimesis of a philo- sophical life. The first attestation of the adjective Zwkpatuds appears not in the writings of the “Socratics” but in Aristotle, who refers to the Zwk- patuxoi AGyou along with the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus as a recognizable yet nameless genre of Greek “poetry” (Poet. 2, 1447b11). Aristotle's difficulty is that Greek failed to recognize the generic term crucial to the philosopher and critic of poetry. If mimesis, and not meter, is the critical concept that grounds a description of both the po- etic and the prose forms that imitate humans in action, then some prose works are the proper subject of a larger theory of mimesis, which would include both the pipot of Sophron and the genre Aristotle iden- tifies as that of the Sokratikoi logoi; and these would be included along As in the case of the Pythagorean mode of life (Bios) described by Plato in Republic 10, 6oob.[24] Diskin Clay with music, dance, and painting in a vastly extended theory of ro. ‘1tuKrj as mimesis. Greek was inadequate to Aristotle’s theory because it did not recognize the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus or the Sékrati- koi logoi as “poetic,” that is, mimetic. Like Sophron, the authors of Sdkratikoi logoi were t8oT0v0t. But what precisely does the adjective “Socratic” mean? Were these logoi Socratic in that they resembled the kind of discourse Socrates gave his name to—that is, the heuristic method of question by someone who professes to be asking more than rhetorical questions, and answers by someone who might or might not be able to produce a satisfactory re- sponse? This was indeed a feature of some of the Sdkratikoi logoi, but Aristotle's conception of poetry as mimesis and the term mimoi suggest a larger interpretation of the adjective: just as the mimes of Sophron represented the different sexes and the variety of human types en- gaged in their characteristic pursuits, the authors of Sokratikoi logoi im- itated the character of Socrates as he engaged in his characteristic manner of conversation and interrogation. But Aristotle's association of the Sicilian mime with the imitations of the conversations of Socrates seems to suggest even more, and at the same time to create a problem for an assessment of the literary char- acter of the Sokratikoi logoi. The fragments of the mimes of Sophron (and the scant testimonia for the mimes of Xenarchus) leave absolutely no doubt that his representations of men and women were of lower- class men and women, speaking in a Doric dialect of great interest to later grammarians, and, in Greek terms, fundamentally comic charac- ters. They can be said to represent a low representation of low charac- ters, or, in the words of the “Tractatus Coislinianus,” “the imitation of an action that is laughable and without any grandeur.”® Presumably, the mimesis of Socrates and his conversations by the writers of the Sakratikoi logoi was on a higher level both in the object of its imitation and in its language. But in search of the origins of the Socratic dialogue it is well to keep in mind Aristotle's significant pairing of the Sophronic mime and the Socratic dialogue, for this is the beginning of the tradi- tion that associates Plato with the Sicilian mime of Sophron. There were Socratics and Socratics. I am interested in Plato and the associates of Socrates who composed Sokratikoi logoi, or the Attic mimes Acadia. oti wiunors mpékews yehotas Kai duoipou weyéBous, 3.1, in the edition of R. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics 2 (Berkeley and Los An- gees, 1984), p. 23. Mimes are one category of dramatic or “practical” mimesis for the “Tractatus,” and diminutives such as Zwxparibwov (3.2.1) are a source of laughter. In Po- tics 144983 1-32, Aristotle speaks of comedy as the representation of men of the meaner sort but a representation that does not encompass every kind of vice (uiunow daviotépav, ob pévtor katd wagav Kaxiav). For an exploration of Aristotle's opinion of the low character of the comedian that matched the object of his imitation, G. F. Held, “Zmovdaios and Teleology in the Poetics,” TAPA 114 (1984): 159-76.