Dr Carol Atack: List of publications

Critics, from Athenaeus in the second century CE and Eduard Zeller in the nineteenth, to the present day, have been concerned with problems of authenticity and the dating of Plato’s work, including the inconsistent internal dramatic dates of the dialogues and other anachronisms within them. This article examines the relationship between the imaginary time of the dialogues and Plato’s own context, between the blurring of time and temporal relationships in the dialogues and the arguments that they contain, the construction of anachronistic communities and genealogies within them, through which Plato negotiates his own relationship with Socrates, and the deconstruction and re-negotiation of familial relationships, particularly those between fathers and sons. It uses insights from recent explorations of temporality in queer theory to generate a historicist reading that emphasizes the affective role of time within Plato’s writing. It argues that Plato uses the temporal setting of dialogues to underscore themes of their arguments, and that these anachronic settings can be read as an artefact of Plato’s own reception of Socrates’ life and death, and its context in the turmoil of the Peloponnesian War and the loss and restoration of democracy.

Both Xenophon and Isocrates use the past to analyse and comment on political problems of the present, and to provide authority for political programmes of the present and for the future, through connecting them to revered past figures and mythologies. For both, idealised versions of historical Greek communities provide a counterpoint to the disappointments and decline of present-day politics and politicians. Figures from the distant past become exemplars for political action in the present, and their achievements, and the political and social arrangements under which those achievements were completed, models for political reform. Xenophon and Isocrates draw on the wider Greek politeia tradition of writing about political and social customs, educational practices, and institutions, seen in both free-standing pamphlets, and sections embedded within longer historical, rhetorical and philosophical works.1 With the exception of Xenophon’s Lacedaimoniōn Politeia, both Xenophon and Isocrates embed politeia elements in larger works.