Laches before Charmides. Fictive Chronology and Platonic Pedagogy

Abstract

Despite long overdue scholarly discontent with the nineteenth century dogma that his dialogues are best understood in terms of Plato’s intellectual development,1 its most recent rival suffers from a similar disability. Christened “fictive chronology” by Charles Griswold Jr. in 1999,2 an ordering of the dialogues in relation to their dramatic dates replaces a story about Plato’s with another about Socrates’ development: both stories suffer from a characteristically modern and un-Platonic concern with time, change, and Becoming. The persistence of attempts to outflank Platonism by historicizing Plato is an interesting phenomenon in its own right: in addition to revealing the enduring influence of evolutionary patterns of thought, its latent cause with respect to Socrates is the influence of Leo Strauss, principal twentieth-century critic of the developmentalist reading of Plato and inventor of its Socratic counterpart.3 In any case, the research of Debra Nails4 has now allowed Catherine Zuckert5 to produce a comprehensive reading of all the Platonic dialogues based on fictive chronology while Laurence Lampert (2010) has recently applied the principle in detail to Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic.