Irony and Plato's Menexenus

Few ancient dialogues are more puzzling than Plato's Menexenus. This is certainly not because of the logical complexity or the philosophical depth of the text. Rather, it is because our problems with understanding ancient Greek humour apparently prevent us from assessing the exact role irony is assigned in this text, which is composed of a clearly humoristic introductory dialogue and a puzzlingly serious funeral oration. Since the beginning of the 19th century, scholarship has been at a loss in understanding the text: It has been variously assumed that the Menexenus had a serious meaning, that it was only a parody, that the whole text was a fake, that only the Epitaphios was Plato's, that the dialogue was a fake, or that the inconsistencies of the Epitaphios resulted from multiple editorial phases. Nevertheless, each of these hypotheses has been deemed to be unsatisfactory. The present article examines the only hypothesis not yet put forward: The Epitaphios of the Menexenus, or at least most of it, might need to be read not as an ironical text, but as a serious political pamphlet by an unknown Athenian writer of the 4th century, catalogued, as sometimes happened in the history of texts, together with a Platonic fragment. Taking this view would solve the many problems associated with the Menexenus and, above all, the problem of understanding the contrast between irony and seriousness in the text

Art · Irony · Literature · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy

• The Image of the Past as Political Myth

  Open Access•Valerij Gushchin•ΣΧΟΛΗ Ancient Philosophy and the…•2019

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