Introduction

It is a distinctive and essential feature of Plato’s political philosophy that, at its peak, its theme is the relationship between philosophy and politics as such. The Republic’s doctrine of the philosopher-king is a stunning answer to the challenge that philosophy is poisonous to the healthy community, that its irreverent skepticism corrodes the pious and patriotic spirit upon which the city relies, especially among the young, whom philosophy is most apt to seduce. The bewildering claim for which Plato is justly famous is that if one carefully attends to the distinction between philosophy and its corrupted counterpart, sophistry—personified in the Republic itself by Socrates and Thrasymachus, respectively—one learns that philosophy suffers unjustly from the reputation belonging properly to its sinister or misguided doppelgänger. The true philosopher is so far from being a pernicious or parasitic presence in the city that he is in fact the city’s, nay, humanity’s only hope of bringing an end to the ills that beset us, of creating the just community, and of bringing meaningful happiness into the world. In short, the solution to the most profound and comprehensive political problem is, according to Plato’s Socrates, the rule of true philosophy. And yet this most famous Platonic doctrine has from the start been the object of intense controversy. For, as it has seemed to many, the Republic’s proposal for a regime of philosophic rule amounts to a call for Plato’s followers to become utopian dreamers doomed to quixotic failure. Inevitably, various readers have come to doubt Plato’s seriousness in proposing this regime as a blueprint for political action: some see the Republic rather as a didactic exercise in studying the elements of political life, others see an attempt to defend philosophy amid the hostile Greeks who had only recently executed Plato’s own teacher for philosophizing, and still others allege a propagandistic agenda aimed at elevating Plato’s way of life, his friends, and his school. The effect of the Republic, then, has been to deepen the puzzle it seeks to address about the relationship between philosophy and politics. If it is meant as a serious political proposal, should its author be judged a visionary or a fool? If it is not, what was his purpose in writing it?1

There is one source of information that would seem to promise wondrously direct access to Plato’s inner thoughts and opinions on these matters. Along with the philosophic dialogues making up the bulk of the Platonic corpus, the manuscript tradition has also preserved a collection of thirteen letters addressed from Plato to a variety of correspondents across the Greek political world of his day. And it so happens that in all these letters, Plato either actively engages in, or discusses circumstances in which he has previously engaged in, practical political dealings and decision-making, mostly as one whose wise counsel has been sought by men in powerful political positions. Above all, Plato’s infamous entanglements and dramatic misadventures in Syracuse, where it seems that he attempted to turn the young tyrant Dionysius toward the study of philosophy, feature prominently in these letters: all but three of the thirteen are addressed to people connected to the events in Sicily, and Letter Seven—by far the longest, most famous, and most extensively studied of the thirteen—contains a lengthy and detailed account of Plato’s actions and reasoning throughout the decades-long affair, albeit from the point of view of an interested party in a series of contentious and controversial historical episodes. In these documents, then, it would seem that we are afforded a glimpse of Plato in action, not as the hidden author of philosophic dramas in which he himself has no role, but as political adviser to real people regarding real cities and events. To the extent that deeds offer more reliable evidence of a person’s inner thought than do their words,2 these letters—as providing ostensible documentation of Plato’s political actions—present themselves as an ideal source of confirmation and clarity regarding Plato’s genuine answers to some of the great political-philosophic questions, and indeed regarding the question of philosophic kingship itself. A careful study of the Platonic letters therefore has the potential to illuminate Plato’s understanding of the highest theme of his political philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and politics, and therewith the many weighty problems involved in this theme that he seems to address in the Republic: the nature of justice, the good of the human soul, the good of the political community, the good as such, and the possibility of knowledge, among others.

Such hopes regarding these documents, which have survived together in the manuscript tradition under the single heading Epistolai (Epistles or Letters), are, however, not likely to remain intact once we have begun to review the existing scholarship pertaining to them. The Letters, like the rest of the Platonic canon, has been scrutinized over the past two centuries by philologists, historians, and students of philosophy, all harboring grave doubts as to the authenticity of many of the texts that have been attributed to Plato since antiquity. For the most part, the Letters is now viewed as a motley collection of jewels and scraps from within and without Plato’s literary estate—with considerable disagreement as to which are which. Its contents are seen as ranging from genuine Platonic private and open letters that were somehow preserved or retrieved to forgeries by counterfeiters writing centuries after Plato’s death. Accordingly, while some of the letters seem to be inconsequential and utterly mundane, others have struck readers as being tinged with Platonic genius, bearing the marks of carefully constructed narratives, well-executed rhetorical or apologetic purposes, and subtle irony. Clearly, our assessment of whether and how the Platonic letters can be used as evidence of Plato’s true views concerning philosophy and politics will hinge on our determination regarding the provenance and intended purpose of each or all of them.

It is my hope that the present volume will bring what has been until now a minority view concerning the Letters to the forefront of active debate, a view according to which the Letters would gain tremendous new importance for the study of Platonic political philosophy. According to this view, which I call the “literary unity thesis,” the Letters is not at all what it has seemed to most modern readers, but is rather a single work, written with a unity of purpose and coherent teaching, marked throughout by Plato’s subtlety, artfulness, and political philosophic insight, and intended to occupy an important place in the Platonic corpus. The literary unity thesis posits that the Letters is something like an epistolary novel—though an unusual one to be sure—a manner of semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical literary experiment, and, for its time, a brilliant innovation of literary form. Most important among the implications of this thesis is that Plato decided to produce a text of which the purpose must be, at least in part, to provide his most demanding and attentive readers with some guidance in thinking more deeply about the practical difficulties that necessarily beset the philosophic political actor who would take his bearings by the claims made famous in the Republic and the Laws.

This volume is intended to advance a threefold strategy in the service of the literary unity thesis. To begin with, the present introductory essay will provide a review of the scholarly history pertaining to the Platonic letters so as to explain how such a strong critical prejudice has built up against what I take to be an undistorted view of the whole collection. Second is a new English translation of the Letters, prepared with a view to the student who wishes to assess the literary unity thesis. This means a highly literal translation that is scrupulous with respect to the consistent rendering of key words, and an apparatus consisting of hundreds of footnotes to supply background information ranging in subject matter from manuscript variants, to historical context, to indications of Platonic idioms or wordplay lost in translation. Third and most important is an interpretive essay that will attempt to bring out the political philosophic lessons revealed in the Letters when read and interpreted according to the literary unity thesis.

Indeed, the interpretive essay really has two intended purposes. Primarily, the point is to attempt to blaze an interpretive trail into what must seem in many ways uncharted literary territory, with the hope of discovering a new source of insight into Platonic political philosophy. In doing just this, however, I will also hope to demonstrate by deed that the Letters bears being read in accord with the literary unity thesis, and thus to offer that thesis the best possible support. Yet because the plausibility of this thesis is still so little acknowledged, there is need here at the start for some preliminary engagement with the prevailing views of the Letters, to survey and to understand the scholarly work that has been done thus far and to explain why conclusions reached and accepted by so many impressive and respectable readers of the Platonic corpus are in need of such radical revision.

Ancient Views of Plato’s Letters and the Influence of Richard Bentley

The third-century CE biography of Plato by Diogenes Laertius remains the most important extant source of information on the Platonic canon in antiquity (Hackforth 1913, 1). By way of discussing two bygone librarians’ attempts to order and organize Plato’s works, Diogenes lists the thirty-six texts that, according to him, were held to comprise the Platonic corpus in his day. Included in one of the trilogies into which the third-century BCE librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium organized Plato’s texts, and in one of the tetralogies arranged by the first-century BCE librarian Thrasyllus, was the Letters, a text comprising the same thirteen Platonic epistles contained in the best manuscripts extant today.3 This strongly suggests that ancient readers of Plato considered the Letters to be a genuine article of Platonic writing deserving of careful philosophic study.4 Both Cicero and, much later, Plutarch quoted freely from the Letters with evident confidence in its authenticity.5 We may add to those well-known examples the second-century CE Platonists Albinus and Alcinous, whose introductions to Platonic philosophy each treat the Letters as a Platonic work worthy of careful study, and the tenth-century Islamic philosopher al-Farabi, who describes the Letters as Plato’s final work, in which he “gave an account of how to abolish the ways of life of nations and the corrupt laws that prevail in the cities, how to move the cities and nations away from them, and how to reform their ways of life” (1962, 70).6

It is common to trace the origins of suspicion regarding the Letters back to the Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris written by Richard Bentley in 1697.7 In proving the spuriousness of the collection of letters traditionally ascribed to Phalaris, a Sicilian Greek tyrant of the sixth century BCE, Bentley’s tour-de-force display of philological acumen (from which the epistles of Phalaris have never recovered)8 made two crucial contributions to the critical study of ancient epistolography. First, drawing upon a passing remark of the philosopher-physician Galen, Bentley identified an important age and motive for the forgery of documents under the names of famous authors: at the height of the competition for preeminence between them, the libraries of Pergamum and Alexandria “gave great rates for any treatises that carried the names of celebrated authors” (1874, 78).9 By teaching them the significance of this remark, Bentley has assisted generations of scholars seeking to allege the spuriousness of ancient texts—especially such relatively short and simple texts as letters tend to be—in their concoction of provenance hypotheses; forgers out to dupe the librarians for the sake of money, as well as students in the schools of rhetoric who, in subsequent centuries, were assigned to write speeches and letters in the voices of famous figures of antiquity (79, 583), have become the imagined authors of spuria hastily granted the imprimatur of librarians eager to incorporate “lost” works of famous writers into their exclusive collections. Second, Bentley’s arguments not only set a standard of learning and rigor that subsequent generations of European classicists would strive to emulate;10 they gave a blueprint for the demonstration of spuriousness that is still recognizable in contemporary scholarship. It is in fact hard to imagine that any attempt at this genre of criticism could be carried out with comparable force and influence—so much so, that it will be instructive to review Bentley’s original procedure as a model, so that we may understand what would be required to establish the inauthenticity of part or all of the Platonic collection.

Bentley’s proof of the spuriousness of the epistles of Phalaris proceeds in the following, meticulous way. First, he marshals every piece of evidence of which he is aware—which, as his exposition often provokes the reader to assume, must very nearly amount to every piece of evidence in existence—for the dates of Phalaris’s birth and death and the general course of his life. He then advances his arguments, which we may group broadly into three categories. Most important are the arguments whereby Bentley identifies elements of the epistles that bespeak either a date of composition much later than Phalaris’s death (i.e., an anachronism) or an author unacquainted with details Phalaris could not but have known. There are many examples of this: some epistles make use of words or phrases known to have taken on the intended meaning only centuries after Phalaris; others seem to mistake the geography of Sicily or fail to take note of its distinctive mode of currency; still others seem to be quoting from tragic or comic poetry, which, as Bentley seeks at great length to demonstrate, did not exist at all in Phalaris’s day. But the most important argument from anachronism is that whereas Phalaris himself must have spoken Greek in the Doric dialect of his native land, the epistles bearing his name are written in (a rather late form of) Attic. “If we had wanted this argument,” Bentley speculates in an earlier letter, “there had been nothing else to be done, but to let [the great defender of these epistles, William Temple,] enjoy his own opinion sine rivali” (1874, 582).

And yet, while they cannot have the same force to compel any reasonable mind, there are other arguments to be made: “In a disquisition of this nature, an inconsistency in time and place is an argument that reaches everybody. All will cry out that Phalaris, etc. are spurious, when they see such breaches upon chronology. But I must profess, I should as fully have believed them so though the writers had escaped all mistakes of that kind” (Bentley 1874, 560). Here, then, we may place the remaining two categories of argument. One type infers from evidence external to the text itself: had the epistles of Phalaris been extant in the centuries following his death, there are other authors whom we might expect to have referred to them, authors who spoke about the writings of tyrants or who tried to fix the age of the art of letter-writing. The absence of such references will seem, or can be made to seem, damning. But it is the category of argument I have reserved for last that is most subject to debate and controversy. These are the arguments contending that the style or diction of the text does not match the purported author’s, or that what Bentley calls the “matter” it contains would not have been discussed thus or at all if they were genuine. Hence we have three modes of argument: from anachronism (or anatopism), from external evidence, and from style and matter.11

Where, then, do the epistles of Plato stand? It is significant that Bentley himself, who wrote further Dissertations claiming to prove the inauthenticity of the collections of letters attributed to Themistocles, the Socratics, and Euripides in like manner, saw nothing objectionable in our collection. In the words of J. Harward, “Bentley was prepared to pull down any idol: and no other scholar has had an equal knowledge of Greek epistolary literature,” yet he actively defended the authenticity of the Platonic epistles (1932, 78).12 But Bentley’s seal of approval was powerless to protect the Letters from being swept up in the storm of scholarly suspicion that was to descend on the Platonic corpus some hundred years following, and greatly inspired by, his Dissertations. And aside from, or in addition to, the disfavor into which Thrasyllus’s judgment regarding Plato’s dialogues would precipitously fall, Bentley had shown how easily and how often forgers had succeeded in duping casual and scholarly readers for centuries on end by the production of spurious letter collections. By the nineteenth century, all letters purporting to have been penned by celebrated ancient Greek writers or statesmen were, as it seemed, presumed guilty of inauthenticity until proven innocent. Plato’s were no exception.13

It must be noted that “the sceptical attitude in the extreme form in which it was held almost universally in Germany and England” (Harward 1932, 71) in the mid-nineteenth century is now generally seen as having been unduly harsh,14 just as the pendulum is seen as having swung too far in the opposite direction with those who argued for authenticity in the first decades of the 1900s.15 But it would be too much for our purposes here to attempt to trace the long and winding path of scholarly debate regarding the authenticity of the Letters through the twentieth century and up to the present day.16 As will be evident, it suffices for us to take note of where there has been consensus, and where debate has continued to simmer and even to rage.

Prominent Arguments Concerning Provenance and Authenticity

We begin with the most important fact. No argument of the truly definitive type—which means, above all, argument from anachronism—has ever been leveled with any force or credibility: the Letters contains no references to people, events, or places about which Plato could never have known, and as for the collection’s dialect and diction, “it is generally admitted by all scholars who have examined the letters from this point of view, that the language in which they are written is definitely the language of the fourth century” (Field 1930, 198).17 Likewise, the known history of letter-writing can accommodate the existence of a genuine Platonic Letters: the extant letters of his contemporary and rival Isocrates, widely agreed to be genuine, confirm for us that Plato does not antedate the genre.18

As for external evidence against the Letters, arguments have been advanced, but they are characteristically inconclusive. The only ones to generate any sustained debate have been those that point to disagreements between the account of Sicilian history given in the Letters and those of some later historians, especially Diodorus Siculus and Cornelius Nepos.19 The obvious difficulty with these arguments, however, is that a disagreement between two historical accounts tells us nothing more than that at least one of them must be wrong. There is no reason to privilege Diodorus and Nepos over the Letters (or Plutarch, who appears to draw heavily from the Letters); in fact, if the Letters is genuine, it would contain the only extant account from a source contemporary with the events it narrates, and so would have an important claim to greater authority. At any rate, the history in question is full of contentious issues that were bound to be presented in different lights by observers and participants on different sides, so that disagreement among the historical accounts, including the lost accounts from which our later sources were derived, was inevitable.20

There is one specific argument falling under the heading of “external evidence” that must be mentioned because it is the only one to have produced truly widespread agreement. Letter One has been decried as spurious for longer and more consistently than any of the others, the main reason being that in it Plato says he had served under Dionysius at Syracuse as autokratōr (309b2–3)—evidently the title of a plenipotentiary political or military position—which fact is recorded nowhere else.21 One could ask whether the argument outlined just above does not apply: Why should the inclusion of a detail in the Letters, even a major detail, not carry greater weight than its absence from later historical accounts?22 Perhaps, however, the problem is not only the lack of external attestation: perhaps doubts about Letter One have arisen from misgivings about the very notion that Plato would have agreed to take on such a position in a tyrannical government. Is that what lies, for example, behind R. G. Bury’s statement that “Plato could never have described himself as the ‘sole Dictator’ (autokratōr) of Syracuse” (1929, 393; emphasis added)?23

But here we enter the realm of “style and matter,” wherein the question is always whether one believes that Plato would have or could have written such and such a letter given what we know about Plato independently of the letter in question. This is indeed the realm in which the vast majority of discussion and debate has taken place, and the outcome has provided confirmation through experience of what Bentley opined long ago—namely, that arguments of this kind cannot produce firm and compelling conclusions regarding authenticity.24 By way of elaboration, we highlight here two problems often encountered. First, how are we to evaluate passages in the Letters that, in style, phrasing, or substance, either echo or diverge from passages in Plato’s dialogues? Does a similarity discovered between two texts indicate the work of a single hand or merely a forger’s attempt at imitation? Does an obvious disagreement between a dialogue and a letter betray a forger’s carelessness or a variation explicable only if the author had no fear of being discovered for an imposter? Hardly a piece of evidence of this kind has been advanced on one side without a critic on the other alleging that it is perfect proof of the opposite conclusion.25 Second, our answer to the question whether Plato would or would not have written a given letter depends upon our understanding of what he thought. But we arrive at this understanding mainly by way of the notoriously difficult task of interpreting Plato’s dialogues, which has been dividing his readers into hostile camps since antiquity.26 Arguments from the style and matter of the Letters, then, are bound to persuade only those who are in agreement about the interpretation of Plato as a whole.27 W. K. C. Guthrie’s description of the situation more than four decades ago remains perfectly apt today: “Throughout the literature on the letters one is baffled by the way in which Dr A will recognize unmistakably ‘the hand of the Master’ in passages which to Dr B are trivial, absurd and quite unworthy of P[lato]” (1978, 402n1).28

Franz Dornseiff and the Idea of Literary Unity

We have seen that arguments against the authenticity of the Letters generally come down to highly debatable claims about Plato’s philosophic and political outlook. Yet perhaps those inclined to athetize the Letters will seek to make progress along the following lines. Even if two readers disagree on which of the letters are “Platonic” in their style and content, will they not perhaps agree that, differing from one another as the various letters do, they cannot all be genuine? And if we can be sure that they are not all genuine, then the reliability of all those ancient witnesses who vouched for the whole collection, however astute they may have been, has been positively undermined.29 Indeed, there have been many scholarly allegations to the effect that the author of one letter has merely (and poorly) imitated another, or that some two letters give irreconcilable accounts of the same historical events.30 As Ludwig Edelstein puts it in his momentous rejection of the whole Letters, “One fact emerges clearly from my brief analysis of the so-called Platonic letters: they do not form a unity. . . . For the Plato of the letters has a chameleonic personality” (1966, 156).

Often overlooked or forgotten, however, is the fact that Edelstein’s denial that the Letters forms a unity is in direct response to an earlier scholar’s claim that they do. During the first decades of the twentieth century, when debate over the authenticity of the Letters was at its most intense and prolific, the German classicist Franz Dornseiff advanced an astounding and original hypothesis in a short 1934 article entitled “Platons Buch ‘Briefe’” (“Plato’s Book, ‘Letters’”). Dornseiff held that if one resists the critical injunction to treat each letter separately and instead “reads through the whole [Letters] in order” as we have it in the manuscripts, one finds that the apparently disparate epistles actually “play off one another” and contain “certain motifs that are methodically developed” over the course of the text (223–24). As the title of his article suggests, Dornseiff argues that the Letters was in fact “published as a book,” the individual letters being either pieces of pure Platonic invention and hence fictional representations of events that may or may not have taken place in reality, or else versions of real letters Plato had sent in the past, heavily edited for adaptation to their new purpose (225). The thirteen letters, then, have been carefully arranged, not in chronological order or by addressee, but in accordance with a more complex plan whereby themes, motifs, and lessons are developed or juxtaposed to suit the author’s various intentions.31 Dornseiff was the first to postulate what I have called the “literary unity thesis.”

For many years, Dornseiff’s work did not receive the attention it deserved, but in the last few decades scholars have begun to recognize his perspicacity. There are now several studies postulating that the Letters has long been misunderstood by the great majority of its readers, that it forms a “corpus,” a “unified whole” arranged with literary, philosophic, or didactic purpose—and this in spite of Edelstein’s allegation of the author’s “chameleonic personality.”32 But those who claim to have discovered some connecting threads running through the Letters tend to stay away from the authenticity debate. Each finds the appropriate moment to announce his or her educated guess—that the text is a genuine work of Plato, or a post-Platonic piece of pseudepigraphy, or else the production of some redactor drawing entirely, partly, or not at all from Plato’s real correspondence—but focuses primarily on the considerable task of interpretation.33 That is, the literary unity thesis has been found by its various proponents to be compatible with each of several different answers to the question of authorship. It does not depend on any particular view regarding the Letters’ authenticity. What is more, the proof of the pudding is necessarily in the eating: it is the careful examination and literary or philosophic analysis of the Letters taken together that reveals its unity. And with so much pudding to eat, most lack the time to engage in lengthy speculations as to the identity of the chef.

Partly because of this, growing interest in the possibility of the Letters’ literary unity has not impacted the authenticity discussion, which still proceeds according to the precept that, to begin with at least, each letter must be examined and evaluated on its own.34 Hence, in the course of their assessments of authenticity, scholars sometimes note Dornseiff’s or Niklas Holzberg’s opinion that the Letters constitutes a Briefroman, only to dismiss it.35 The flimsiness of these denials on the part of so many competent researchers can only be attributed to a stubborn inertia in the discussions of authenticity stretching back as far as Bentley: by now, it has long been taken as gospel that a collection of epistles purported to be from the fourth century BCE can consist of only two things, authentic letters or imitations thereof. The literary unity thesis can be rebuffed with perfect equanimity, it is made to seem, because there is no evidence that the genre of the epistolary novel had become popular even by Cicero’s time, much later than even the latest proposed dates of composition for any part of the Letters (Harward 1932, 64–65).

Dornseiff recognized the challenge to reigning orthodoxies that the adoption of his view must entail: “That such a cyclically ordered book, with parts from different fictitious drafting dates, existed as early as 350 B.C. is indeed important for the history of literary forms” (1934, 226). Yet he maintains that this is the most plausible explanation, and the only way “to save the phenomena,” once one has recognized the character and unity of the work (226). Thus Dornseiff concludes that the Letters was “probably Plato’s last publication and shows his literary-artistic enterprising power still at its full height” (225). And is it, after all, so great a stretch to think that the greatest literary innovator in the history of philosophy produced one last, grand stylistic innovation? Indeed, the authenticity debate has been focused for so long on fine points of language or Platonic doctrine that many have lost sight of the most significant problems—problems that are immediately solved if these letters were written by Plato. Take, for example, the recent conclusion of Myles Burnyeat who claims that the author of Letter Seven, despite being “philosophically incompetent” and therefore not Plato, should nonetheless be “hail[ed] . . . as a distinctive, original, and interesting creative mind” who “borrowed the idea of a tragedy in prose” from Plato’s Laws “to make a tragedy in epistolary form out of Plato’s own life” (Burnyeat and Frede 2015, 136–37).36 One reviewer, otherwise persuaded by Burnyeat’s argument, has felt compelled to raise the question “Who is that masked writer,” the “astonishing figure who invented autobiographical correspondence and who all but invented the prose tragedy,” and who seems to have understood the nuanced distinctions between the political philosophy of the Republic and Laws better than any reader of Plato until the nineteenth century (Pappas 2017, 45)? Is attribution of the letter to Plato himself not by far the most parsimonious and credible explanation in this regard?37

The same goes, indeed, for the rest of the Letters. As Harward has put it, “If [the Platonic Epistles] are not genuine, we can only account for their existence by crediting their author with a dramatic power which is not likely to have been found at that age except in a writer of original genius. . . . Those who think it likely that such a work as the 3rd Platonic Epistle issued from a school of rhetoric at that period, or was produced by an unknown rhetorician, show a want of literary perception which is remarkable in scholars of taste and ability” (1932, 69). Likewise, L. A. Post: “The writer of the Platonic Epistles must have been the greatest historical novelist that ever lived, and that while unknown to fame, or else no other than Plato” (1925, 61). As for Edelstein’s breezy rejection of Dornseiff on the grounds of the variety of personalities Plato appears to assume in the various letters, it seems quite to miss the point. Edelstein pretends to consider the literary unity thesis but fails to consider how much it must change the way we approach the question of authenticity. If we are to evaluate the hypothesis that the whole Letters has been constructed as a dramatic fiction (however much it may draw from real events), then we must treat the author’s apparently “chameleonic personality” as a literary device whereby the book’s protagonist, “Plato,” is presented in varying circumstances and hence from a variety of perspectives. Edelstein continues to think in terms of historical criticism when the task is one of literary-philosophic interpretation. Here again, Post is helpful: “Plato has several tones; the rhythm of his utterance varies with his moods. An analysis of the rhythms in the Letters and in the Laws shows how individual Plato’s later style was” (1925, 5).

The fact is that if one really takes the time to consider the interpretive possibilities concerning the Letters that open up under the literary unity thesis, one begins to wonder whether there is any serious question in the authenticity debate that does not collapse into irrelevance.38 For instance, one important critique against those who would defend the Letters as containing the genuine remains of Plato’s correspondence concerns the means of the letters’ preservation: How, why, and by whom would copies of these particular epistles have been kept and, later, collected?39 This problem, of course, disappears entirely under the literary unity thesis—Plato himself assured the preservation of the Letters along with the rest of his corpus. Still more to the point is the fate of arguments derived from stylistic or substantive comparisons between the letters. Parallel passages in two different letters need no longer raise suspicions of imitation: it is only natural that Plato should have returned to key themes over the course of the work, creating intratextual references that connect the individual letters to one another. Nor should it deter us to find the same theme, event, or person treated differently in different places. Just as the utterances of Plato’s Socrates must always be interpreted with a view to the context, such as the characters to whom he speaks and the concerns that motivate the conversation, so by having the letters directed to a variety of addressees in a variety of scenarios does Plato require that we examine the content of each letter in its own context.40 By triangulating from the disparate perspectives afforded to us in the Letters, we may be able to grasp Plato’s true view of a subject, the view that would cause him to characterize things one way to one correspondent in a given circumstance and otherwise to others in others.41

There must be some concern over the difficulty of falsifying such a thesis. How are we to distinguish between two letters of different provenance, on one hand, and two chapters of an epistolary novel written in different tones and making incompatible claims for the sake of an unspecified literary or didactic purpose, on the other? It is precisely here that, as we have already noted, there is no proof but in the pudding. Any assertion of the literary unity thesis must stand or fall with the particular interpretation of the Letters it accompanies. But what we have been at pains to argue here is that, despite the impression one would receive from the existing literature, there is nothing that precludes the consideration of our thesis as a serious possibility, and indeed much that recommends it. A crucial element of what Dornseiff saw in 1934 was that the idea of an epistolary novel with Plato as the semi-fictional protagonist was perfectly Platonic:

Is this so psychologically convoluted for a writer who, in every other one of his writings, hides himself to a great extent in the background, as only Homer before in all of Greek literature had done? Likewise here, then, he once more built a new kind of wall around himself, so that even after reading [the Letters] no one could say, “Now I have read a writing by Plato himself, in which he speaks to every reader ex cathedra.” (226)

It is therefore precisely when we cease naively to presume that the Letters can only be authentic if the letters are themselves naive Platonic self-representations that we recognize how profoundly Platonic a text we have before us. Arnaldo Momigliano, in his defense of Letter Seven, has captured the crucial point with penetrating force:

The Socratics were infuriating in their own time. They are still infuriating in our time. They are never so infuriating as when approached from the point of view of biography. We like biography to be true or false, honest or dishonest. Who can use such terminology for Plato’s Phaedo or Apology, or even for Xenophon’s Memorabilia? . . . The fact we have to face is that biography acquired a new meaning when the Socratics moved to that zone between truth and fiction which is so bewildering to the professional historian. We shall not understand what biography was in the fourth century if we do not recognize that it came to occupy an ambiguous position between fact and imagination. Let us be in no doubt. With a man like Plato . . . this is a consciously chosen ambiguity. The Socratics experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives. (1971, 46)

It is a strong mark in favor of the literary unity thesis that scholars who otherwise refuse or neglect to entertain it, including Momigliano, often acknowledge or adopt its key premises. Bury, for example, in dealing with the much-discussed question of Letter Seven’s intended audience, considers it “probable”

that not only is this letter an “open” letter addressed rather to the general public than to the parties named in the superscription, but that superscription itself is merely a literary device. The letter was never meant to be sent to Sicily at all. . . . So that what Plato is doing in this letter is to indulge in a literary fiction which enables him to publish in epistolary form what is at once a history, an apology and a manifesto. (1929, 473–74)42

If this can be imagined of one particular letter, why not of the whole collection? Only a bona fide attempt to interpret the whole Letters together, as a literary unity, can determine whether the text can bear such an interpretation.

The Story and Structure of the Letters

The Letters is unique in the Platonic corpus—indeed, it may be unique in the whole history of philosophic literature. However comfortable we may have become in the world of Plato’s dialogues, however accustomed to its characters and formulas, to the tone and rhythm of its conversations, we are in bewildering new territory in the Letters. It is helpful, therefore, even before turning to the text itself, to orient oneself by taking a survey of the whole work, in an attempt to understand its basic structure and to acquaint oneself with the people, places, and events to which the text regularly refers. What follows is intended to provide the reader with just such an orientation, but no more. I present my own, lengthy attempt to interpret the Letters only after the translation, in order to encourage the reader first to study and think about the text independently.

The thirteen letters in the collection vary greatly in length. Eight of them (Letters One, Four, Five, Six, Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve) are less than 425 words long; four more (Letters Two, Three, Eight, and Thirteen) are between 1,200 and 1,700 words; at some 8,800 words, Letter Seven dwarfs the others. In fact, the first six letters taken together and the last six taken together each comes out to just about half the length of the seventh. The arrangement of the Letters thus presents a pleasing and intriguing symmetry: Letter Seven, flanked on either side by four short and two longer letters, occupies the central half of the whole work. But the Letters’ centerpiece commands our attention for reasons more interesting than its length and position. Letter Seven is something of a literary masterpiece unto itself—complex, layered, and sometimes tortuous—and has enjoyed the most durable reputation for authenticity of all the Platonic letters. Moreover, owing to the wealth of autobiographical details it contains, in addition to a famous “philosophic digression” that appears to elucidate Plato’s famous theory of the Forms, Letter Seven has received by far the most scholarly attention of any of the Platonic letters.

More important still, Letter Seven could be said to contain a road map to the Letters as a whole. Out of the thirteen letters, ten deal directly or indirectly with Plato’s connection to the political drama that unfolded in the major Sicilian city of Syracuse in the first half of the fourth century BCE—a drama that culminated in a chaotic and destructive civil war. The Syracusan story line thus dominates the Letters, and Letter Seven is largely structured around Plato’s autobiographical narration of his long relationship, spanning some three decades, with the two men who would eventually become the major antagonists in the struggle over the regime: the hereditary tyrant Dionysius the Younger and the tyrant’s uncle Dion. The historical and other contextual information offered by Letter Seven, then, provides a way for us to get our bearings with respect to the chronology, characters, subject matter, and significance of most of the other letters.

It is therefore possible for us to extract a helpful narrative from Letter Seven. But we wish to do so in a way that imports a bare minimum of historical and biographical information from other sources. For we are seeking to understand the story told by the Letters itself; other accounts, especially where they supplement or contradict the details provided in the Letters, threaten to confuse matters by distracting us from what is internal to Plato’s text. In the summary account that follows here, then, we are informed by such outside sources only in regard to the dates of, and corresponding lengths of time between, Plato’s visits.

Plato made three trips to Sicily. It was during his first visit, at the age of forty, that Plato encountered a twenty-year-old Syracusan named Dion, brother-in-law to Dionysius the Elder, who was then still the ruler of Syracuse (324a–b). From this fateful meeting in about 387 BCE, Dion became a zealous proponent of Plato’s moral and political teachings (327a–c). Twenty years later, when Dionysius the Elder was succeeded by his son, Dionysius the Younger (and Plato was now sixty years of age), Dion called upon Plato to return to Syracuse as the new tyrant’s tutor and adviser, evidently in hopes of realizing the dream of philosopher-kingship or something like it—an idea made famous by Plato’s Republic, which had in all likelihood been written and published by this time (327c–328a). Despite some misgivings, Plato decided to accept the invitation and journeyed to Syracuse for the second time (328b–329b). But slanderers in Dionysius’s court whispered in the tyrant’s ear of conspiracy between Dion and Plato, and Dion was exiled to the Peloponnesus in the fourth month following Plato’s arrival (329b–c). Dionysius at first compelled Plato to remain, but when Syracuse went to war with Carthage, the two men settled upon terms for Plato’s and Dion’s future recall to Syracuse, and Plato was at last allowed to go home to Athens (329d–e, 338a–b).

About half a decade later, Plato now being older than sixty-five, Dionysius’s summons for Plato to return again to Syracuse came riding a wave of reports that the young tyrant was consumed with desire for philosophy (338b–c). In response, Plato departed in 361 BCE on his third and final journey to Sicily with the intention of “testing” Dionysius’s purported passion for philosophy; but their relationship deteriorated further following Plato’s arrival, and Plato incurred the tyrant’s ill will by repeatedly taking sides against him—especially in regard to the status of the still-exiled Dion and of his highly valuable estate, which was under Dionysius’s control (340b–341a, 346a–349e). Having fallen into clear and dangerous disfavor, not only with the tyrant but also with some of his angry mercenaries, Plato engineered his escape from the city, in which he had been trapped for about a year, with the help of Archytas, ruler of the nearby city of Tarentum, whose friendly relations with the Syracusan court Plato had orchestrated on his previous visit (350a). In the final episode recounted in Letter Seven, Plato and Dion crossed paths at Olympia, evidently on the occasion of the Olympic games of 360 BCE: Plato was on his way home to Athens, but Dion, having at last run out of patience with Dionysius, had in mind a homecoming of a different and defiant kind (350b–c). He invited Plato to join him on a campaign to march on Syracuse and depose the tyrant. But Plato would have no part in the revolution (350c–d). Dion did succeed in overthrowing Dionysius, only to be assassinated in the following months by a pair of brothers he had befriended in Athens during his exile and whom he had brought with him on his campaign against Dionysius (333d–334a).

This sketch of Plato’s dealings in Syracuse, taken from Letter Seven, brings the arrangement of the whole Letters more clearly into focus. The first four Platonic letters belong to the period following Plato’s third and final return from Syracuse to Athens. In Letter One, Plato writes briefly and stormily to Dionysius, chastising the tyrant for having treated him so shabbily. In Letter Two, he writes to Dionysius again, but this time at greater length and with much greater goodwill: although there are signs that Dionysius is catching wind of Dion’s tyrannicidal machinations, it seems in Letter Two that the embers of Dionysius and Plato’s relationship are still glowing rather more than we might have expected. In Letter Three, however—yet another letter to Dionysius—those embers have more or less been extinguished: Dionysius has evidently denounced Plato as the mastermind behind Dion’s plot to overthrow the Syracusan dynasty, and Plato writes vigorously in his own defense. Letter Four is from Plato to Dion himself, ostensibly in the midst of Dion’s initial success in deposing Dionysius.

Letters Five and Six form a kind of digression from the narrative of Plato’s affairs in Syracuse. In Letter Five, Plato writes to the young Perdiccas, ruler of Macedon, with some political counsel and a recommendation to take on Plato’s associate Euphraeus as an adviser. In Letter Six, he writes jointly to Hermias, ruler of Atarneus, and two of Plato’s own students who live in the vicinity of Atarneus, in an attempt to establish a mutually beneficial friendship between the three of them. In Letter Seven we return to Syracuse, but the setting is now the dark period following Dion’s assassination. Plato writes in reply “to the intimates and comrades of Dion,” that is, to the anti-tyrannical party carrying on the fight for Dion’s political vision in the ongoing Syracusan civil war, who have apparently sent to Plato to ask him to aid in their cause. The long and complex Letter Seven is quite obviously meant to serve more purposes than just Plato’s reply to this request. Letter Eight, however, also addressed to the “intimates and comrades of Dion,” is rather more to the point in this regard. Plato does his best here to counsel the Syracusans as to how they might put an end to their suffering and woe.

After Letter Eight, the Letters no longer follows such a neat trajectory. Four brief and varied letters now follow, which (like Letters Five and Six) we cannot so easily place on the timeline of events in Syracuse. Letter Nine is addressed to Archytas, the philosophic ruler of Tarentum, whom Plato had put on friendly terms with Dionysius during his time in Sicily; Letter Ten, the shortest in the collection, is a note to a companion of Dion’s whom Plato has never met; Letter Eleven is a response to a man named Laodamas, who has invited Plato to help in the founding of a new colony; and Letter Twelve is another to Archytas, briefer still and more puzzling than Letter Nine.

Letter Thirteen, which is prefixed in all the manuscripts with a note denying Plato’s authorship, concludes the Letters with a flabbergasting return to the Syracusan drama. This letter, addressed to “Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse,” evidently belongs to the months immediately following Plato’s second visit to Syracuse, which is to say his first stint as prospective teacher of Dionysius the Younger. Whereas all the other letters pertaining to Plato’s activity in Syracuse had followed Plato’s final departure, this one belongs to a much more active and apparently hopeful period of his relationship to Dionysius. What the reader learns in this letter will cast much of what has preceded in a new light. The Letters thus shares with so many of Plato’s works that charming quality of making the reader think, just when a first study of the text has been completed, that all this has only been the necessary preparation to study the text anew.