Rethinking Plato
The recent discoveries of hidden layers in the Platonic dialogues is intriguing but not totally surprising: Plato was always a tricky writer, and many layers of meaning had already been discovered. But this new discovery deepens our understanding and also shows again the enormous creativity of Athens at its best. So many things were started there—Herodotus invented history and figured out what and how to relate it. His model was magnificient, but you sort of had to be Herodotus to manage that sort of writing and scale. Thucydides immediately took another cut at writing history, using a different and simpler model, and Thucydides’s was the model mostly followed thereafter.
It reminds me in a way of how most chess grandmasters founded schools—Alekhine, Nimzowitsch, Tarrasch, Tartakover, Max Euwe, Reuben Fine, and so on. They all wrote books about strategic play, books with titles such as My System and No, MY System and the like. But Emanuel Lasker, world chess champion for many years, never developed a school. The reason, I’ve read, is that Lasker would simply play along whatever lines his opponent liked. Lasker figured if he played a game that his opponent favored, then the opponent would in effect come out and fight, and Lasker could then beat him into the floor. Lasker simply banked on being the better player and the better fighter, and generally he was right.
So Herodotus is like Lasker, whereas Thucydides is (to my mind) a lesser light—but easier to follow.
And Plato is like a super-Herodotus. I spend most of my freshman year in college reading, studying, and discussing the Platonic dialogues, and I highly recommend that activity. The dialogues are sufficiently deep and complex, though, that the discussion part is quite important: it’s very hard to dig deeply into a dialogue on your own, but in discussing it, many things are revealed—though not, as it turns out, all the big things.
Take a look at this page, which begins:
In a paper in the journal Apeiron and the draft of the related book currently being circulated (see below), I argued there were musical structures embedded in Plato’s dialogues. Correspondence with an expert in ancient Greek music has now clarified the nature of these structures. The paper argued that Plato divided each dialogue into twelve parts, each of which corresponded to a musical note in a twelve-note scale. This scale was, I claimed, similar (1) to the equally-divided scales of a school of Greek theorists called the Harmonists and also (2) to the scales produced with a monochord, an instrument important in the later Pythagorean tradition. I have now been convinced that the scale embedded in the dialogues is not like the Harmonists’ scale, but would in fact appear naturally with a monochord (whether theoretically or practically with an actual instrument). This moves the debate ahead, and strongly reinforces the main claim of the Apeiron paper that the symbolic structures in the dialogues are evidence of Plato’s Pythagoreanism.
