Plato became the master for every dictator by sidesteping the Socratic method in his platonic state. Plato invented the subjective in an attempt to demean the objective and shuffle away the predicate philosophy of Socrates. The Platonic Idiom expreses the infirmity of western civilization.

“This extraordinary new work” by the philosopher and author of Plato’s Cratylus “has given us nothing less than a radically new Socrates” (Michael Naas, author of Plato and the Invention of Life). Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato’s work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates. Looking closely at the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato’s works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of this powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen’s withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Theages, a dialogue whose Platonic authorship was not questioned in antiquity but has been doubted by most modern scholars. The book's introductory chapters confront such problems as the dialogue's purpose and meaning, its authenticity and date of composition, its depiction of Socrates' divine sign, and its relation to other Platonic and Socratic literature. The commentary deals in detail with a wide range of philosophical, philological and literary questions. A new text is also offered here, the first to be founded upon a complete knowledge of the manuscript tradition. "Joyal's commentary is the first work that has done justice to the Theages as a genuine document of Ancient Greek rather than as a work to insult and denigrate because it does not reach the heights of the best Platonic dialogues. Philologists and philosophers can gain immeasurably from Joyal's work." Gnomon "There can be no doubt that this edition will stand for many decades as the standard work" The Heythrop Journal "For anyone who does serious work on the language or text of Plato, and anyone who wants to explore an early monument of Socrates' transition from hero to saint, this ambitious study will yield years of profit.� Classical World "�this is certainly an important book and will be of enormous interest to students of Plato" Scripta Classica Israelica "�the edition is a pleasure to use, and an important tool of scholarship. It made me think. What more could one want?" Phoenix .

Plato's philosophical dialogues can be seen as his creation of a new genre. Plato borrows from, as well as rejects, earlier and contemporary authors, and he is constantly in conversation with established genres, such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and rhetoric in a variety of ways. This intertextuality reinforces the relevance of material from other types of literary works, as well as a general knowledge of classical culture in Plato's time, and the political and moral environment that Plato addressed, when reading his dramatic dialogues. The authors of Philosophy as Drama show that any interpretation of these works must include the literary and narrative dimensions of each text, as much as serious the attention given to the progression of the argument in each piece. Each dialogue is read on its own merit, and critical comparisons of several dialogues explore the differences and likenesses between them on a dramatic as well as on a logical level. This collection of essays moves debates in Plato scholarship forward when it comes to understanding both particular aspects of Plato's dialogues and the approach itself. Containing 11 chapters of close readings of individual dialogues, with 2 chapters discussing specific themes running through them, such as music and sensuousness, pleasure, perception, and images, this book displays the range and diversity within Plato's corpus.

Seven essays provide new and detailed explorations of the complex relationship between Plato and the Greek and Roman Stoic traditions.