Two men wrapped in conversation are walking beneath a grand vaulted ceiling modelled on the ruins of the grand imperial baths and triumphal arches in Rome (Fig. 13). The elder of them, bald and bearded, is pointing upwards; the younger, also bearded, gestures ahead and slightly downwards. Their identities are suggested by the (Italian) titles of the books in their left hands: on the left, with Timeo (Timaeus), is Plato (c. 428–348 BC); beside him, holding Etica (Nicomachean Ethics), is his greatest pupil, Aristotle (384–322 BC). To their sides many further figures, all male, some of them clearly identifiable, spread out over the floor and steps: some are simply onlookers; others converse in groups; some are absorbed in writing. This group of men could not have come together in this way at any single moment in history, but together they are the masters and pupils in the fresco that since the seventeenth century has been known as the School of Athens. Painted by Raphael between 1508 and 1512 for the Stanza della Segnatura, one of the rooms of Pope Julius II’s private apartment in the Vatican (probably a library), it has come to be seen as the most famous instance of the artistic use of anachronism in the construction of an image of antiquity. As such, it forms an appropriate starting point for our explorations in this chapter of the use of dialogue across time (among philosophers, among the dead, and between writers and readers) as a vehicle for the formation of intellectual communities that transcend human temporality.
Viewing the scene portrayed in the School of Athens as an anachronism is itself the result of changing critical fashions. In his life of Raphael (first published in 1550), the painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) claims that the image depicts sages reconciling theology with philosophy and astrology. He pays no attention at all to the temporality of the figures, though he names eight of them: Plato and Aristotle; the fourth-century BC cynic Diogenes lying on the central steps; the apostle St Matthew writing on the left; the Persian sage Zoroaster (dates uncertain) on the right side, holding a globe with his back to the viewer; and three of Raphael’s contemporaries – the young Federigo II, Duke of Mantua; the architect Bramante bent over a compass; and Raphael himself.1 A century later, by contrast, the French scholar Fréart de Chambray observes in his An Idea of the Perfection of Painting that the painting mixes times, notably through the figure (Vasari’s Zoroaster) that he identified as the second-century AD astronomer and geographer Ptolemy. Significantly, Fréart cites the painting by the title School of Athens and pays attention to space as well as time: he justifies naming one figure as the Athenian Epicurus (341–270 BC) on the grounds of when and where he lived, and he explains that Raphael has preserved the philosophers’ tranquillity by removing the ‘corporal exercises’ such as wrestling and fencing that would take place in ancient gymnasia.2
Fig. 13 Raphael, School of Athens (c. 1510), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican.
The first writer to apply the term ‘anachronism’ itself to the School of Athens seems to have been the painter and biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–96). Bellori wrote in a 1695 treatise on Raphael’s Vatican frescoes that the artist had intended to bring together ‘the schools of the most illustrious philosophers, not of one age alone, but of the most celebrated ages of the world’, and in doing so he had made use of ‘anachronism or the reduction of the periods in which they lived’.3 ‘Reduction’ (riduzione) here has the obsolete sense of a ‘bringing back’ of later figures into an earlier time (as we have seen, the Greek equivalent anagōgē and its cognates were used in the same way). But ‘reduction’ in its normal sense captures, too, the way in which Raphael’s fresco has been received as an icon of classicism. Implicit in that reception is a collapsing of multiple periods into a single, seemingly timeless, image of the classical.
Bellori justified his claim of anachronism by identifying sixteen of the human figures in the fresco. He concurred with seven of Vasari’s list of eight, but inferred from the mathematical images on a tablet held by his companion that Vasari’s St Matthew was actually Pythagoras (sixth century BC) – an identification followed by almost all scholars since.4 Besides Pythagoras, one other of Bellori’s identifications has received general assent: the figure conversing in a small group to the viewer’s left, though portrayed here as younger than Plato, unmistakably recalls ancient busts of Plato’s mentor Socrates (c. 470–399 BC). There is still much uncertainty, however, over many of the other figures. Bellori suggested that the dashing young man in armour with whom Socrates is conversing is Alcibiades, but a few years later this pair of figures was used as an illustration of Socrates and Xenophon.5 Among other names added by Bellori were a cluster of writers and thinkers from Sicily and Italy whom he linked with Pythagoras, namely Empedocles, Epicharmus and Archytas; as later scholars filled up the picture, they were joined by the leaders of the philosophical schools that claimed descent from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (the nineteenth-century German painter Johann David Passavant offered names for as many as fifty of the figures).6 While the project of making such identifications has been attacked,7 it is still clear that the painting depicts a chronologically impossible group, gathering together founders, students and successors of important philosophical schools.
Ever since Raphael’s chronological mixture was first identified, its aesthetic propriety has been disputed. While Bellori found it ‘very appropriate’, Fréart de Chambray accepted that Ptolemy’s presence was permitted by artistic licence (with an appeal to the treatment of Dido by ‘the incomparable Virgil’), but was scornful of Vasari’s identification of Zoroaster, ‘an old Scythian king’ and ‘magician’ of whom ‘assuredly Raphael had never heard’, and who ‘came into the world almost 2,000 years before Plato, and in a country extremely distant from his’.8 A century later Robert Bromley, a British clergyman who wrote a treatise on aesthetics, followed Fréart’s normative approach, criticizing Raphael for breaking the principle that the artist ‘shall not transport us by anachronismal fictions beyond the period in which the scene is laid’; in Bromley’s view, to ‘bring together upon the same spot those who are known to have lived ages asunder’ is ‘to destroy all the effect at once, by telling us we were imposed upon and deceived’. While he acknowledged that in scenes in heaven figures can ‘mix together in the same groups, whatever may be the distance of their ages’, what he found inadmissible in the School of Athens was the inclusion of living figures alongside the dead.9
But is the School of Athens an anachronism at all? The painting is cited in a philosophical discussion of anachronism by Annette Barnes and Jonathan Barnes. They argue that if Raphael does not imply that Socrates was actually alive at the same time as an old Plato, then ‘there would not be any anachronism’: ‘Whether a given representational work contains an anachronism depends upon the kind of representation it is and this in turn depends upon how we interpret the work.’10 While Barnes and Barnes appeal to the authority of Ernst Gombrich in support of the view that the School of Athens is not the kind of representation that can contain an anachronism, a similar view was already presented by the French critic Roger de Piles (1635–1709) in his Principles of Painting. De Piles suggested that Raphael meant to represent not ‘a simple history’ but ‘an allegory where the diversity of times and countries does not hinder the unity of the subject’, and that he had done so because ‘it was only by the succession of times that philosophy reached the degree of perfection in which we see it’.11 On one view, then, it is the ‘anachronism’12 of (one interpretation of) the title School of Athens that creates the ‘anachronism’ of the assemblage – as well as the spatial error (the inclusion of ‘Scythian’ Zoroaster) to which Fréart objected.13 But others would claim that the multitemporality creates anachronism whatever Raphael’s intentions.
However it is defined, the sort of multitemporal dialogue that Raphael portrays and critics such as Bromley deplore is an artistic commonplace. An example from Bromley’s own era is Nicolas-André Monsiau’s Aspasia Conversing with the Most Illustrious Men of Athens, which was shown at the Paris Salon in 1806. Besides being anachronistic in its suggestion of a modern literary salon, the painting includes Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Phidias and Pericles alongside some men who were born at around the time Pericles died (Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, the painter Parrhasius). The anachronistic grouping offered an idealized image of Athens at its political, poetic and artistic peak. A possible ancient parallel to Raphael’s technique is the ‘Mosaic of the Philosophers’ discovered in Pompeii, which shows seven men at leisure, one of them apparently instructing the others in the use of a (possibly anachronistic) armillary sphere. The mosaic has been variously identified as a representation of the Seven Sages (themselves a group whose membership was not clearly established), of Plato’s Academy, of philosophers from a later school, or perhaps of all three at once.14 While that mosaic shows figures interacting, there was also an ancient tradition of grouping isolated figures from different times: a hemicycle of statues set up at Memphis in the third century BC included Homer in the centre with Hesiod, Thales, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Plato and Demetrius of Phalerum among those shown on either side.15 This tradition continued in the medieval era with representations of the ‘Nine Worthies’, three pagan (Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar), three Jewish and three Christian.16 Particularly important for understanding the School of Athens is the tradition in medieval art of placing a group of exemplary figures beneath the abstraction that they exemplify. Raphael follows this tradition by including a personified figure of Philosophy above the School of Athens, but he introduces a striking innovation by placing it on the ceiling rather than on the same plane as the philosophers and by transforming isolated exemplars into small groups engaged in dialogues with which viewers can imaginatively engage.17
The sense of dialogue in Raphael’s fresco is intensified by its placement in the Stanza della Segnatura. Philosophy is joined on the ceiling by allegories of Poetry, Theology and Justice, each overseeing an anachronistic picture on the wall below. Beneath Poetry is the Parnassus (Fig. 14), which depicts Apollo and the Muses gathered in song on the top of a mountain, flanked by classical and modern poets as well as by one artist (Raphael again). As in the School of Athens, the identity of some figures is uncertain (Sappho alone is explicitly named), but the groupings that can be identified (Homer gazing upwards as Dante and Virgil look on) are connected more by poetic affinity than by date. Under Theology, facing the School of Athens, is the Disputation of the Sacrament, a fresco split in two layers, with Christ, the Virgin and biblical figures on the upper level, and some church fathers, popes and other figures below, gesturing or just looking at an altar which holds the sacrament, symbol of Christ’s intercession on earth. Finally, below Jurisprudence on the fourth wall are three allegorical figures (Virtues or Graces) and reliefs of Justinian and Gregory XI.
Fig. 14 Raphael, Parnassus (c. 1510), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican.
The School of Athens invites comparison above all with the Parnassus. Both paintings portray harmonious gatherings of figures we would call classical, medieval and Renaissance (Raphael’s contemporaries). Some elements in the Parnassus nonetheless seem to appeal to the idea of a succession of distinct historical times. As we noted in Chapter 2, Raphael places a modern lira da braccio in Apollo’s hands – the deliberate anachronism with which Panofsky concluded his study of the differences between medieval and Renaissance art. Another iconographic innovation is Apollo’s upturned gaze: as Luba Freedman points out, in classical art Apollo looks straight ahead or downwards, never heavenwards. Freedman reads Apollo’s glance as intimating that ‘the authority of the classical deity … has waned’.18 Apollo may well be acknowledging a higher force, but Raphael still had good reason for wanting him to retain much of his power. Apollo was interpreted in Raphael’s time as a typological precursor of Christ.19 He was also associated with poetic and prophetic inspiration: above the Parnassus the depiction of Poetry includes a motto, NVMINE AFFLATVR, ‘inspired by divine power’, that is modelled on Virgil’s description (Aeneid 6.50) of the Sibyl, who drew her prophetic power from Apollo. A statue of Apollo was prominent, too, in the Belvedere courtyard, towards which the window in the Stanza della Segnatura looked; the statue was displayed there along with other newly found statues (including the Ariadne that inspired de Chirico, at that time interpreted as a Cleopatra) that spoke of the greatness of Rome, and the entrance to the Courtyard was itself capped by another quotation from Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ revelatory journey to the underworld (Aeneid 6.258: procul este profani, ‘be far away, those who are profane’). On one reading, Parnassus celebrates the establishment of a new Augustan era in the Rome of Julius II, with Raphael himself as Julius’ Virgil.20
A similar typological scheme can be seen at work in the School of Athens when it is interpreted in its setting in the Stanza della Segnatura. On the wall opposite is Disputa, a fresco which imitates in its general structure the apse of a medieval church and which has as its focal point the sacrament, emblem of the light of divine revelation.21 In the School of Athens, then, Plato and Aristotle are walking as if through the nave of an open church towards the sacrament in the apse across the room. The whole anachronistic assemblage can be read, moreover, as supporting the Renaissance ideal of philosophical and theological concord. Many Renaissance humanists supported the proposition that the views of the idealist Plato and the empiricist Aristotle could be reconciled; Raphael’s depiction attends to their differences (reflected in Plato’s upwards and Aristotle’s downwards gestures) while hinting at the possibility of harmonious resolution. Another tenet held by some humanists (especially Neoplatonists such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Egidio da Viterbo) was the compatibility of Greek philosophy with Christianity; that Raphael’s painting promotes this idea is suggested by the work in Plato’s hands, Timaeus, whose account of the creation of the cosmos by a divine demiurge was often read in the Renaissance as a precursor of Christian belief.22
The Stanza della Segnatura has gained a further place in the history of anachronism from its discussion by Nagel and Wood in the final chapter of Anachronic Renaissance – itself a self-conscious tribute to its place in Panofsky’s conception of the Renaissance (with the acknowledgement that ‘in a deep sense our reasons are not so different’). For Nagel and Wood, the School of Athens – ‘a picture of sociable interaction, so harmonious and so inviting that one easily forgets the basic impossibility, the anachronism, of the scene’ – is an ‘instant fiction’ that tears ‘the substitutional web’. That is, it is an artistic performance that proclaims its own innovation, gesturing to the tradition of the stable centre found in many Church paintings, but instead portraying diversity, ‘the ceaseless circuitry … of intellectual discourse’ that spreads from the harmonious pairing of Plato and Aristotle, and in the process spatializing temporal difference along the surface of the wall. Central to Nagel and Wood’s interpretation is the position of Raphael’s Vatican frescoes at the moment when print culture emerges, enabling the seamless reproduction of images. They read the various paintings as thematizing in different ways tensions between unitary origin and dispersed transmission and between unmediated speech and mediated writing.23
Nagel and Wood open up fresh ways of reading the anachronistic dialogue portrayed in the School of Athens. Even as context suggests ways in which the paintings can be integrated into the political program of Julius II, their very form realizes and makes available an asynchronous time in which what the classical (or what comes to be identified as such) recurs and can be variously attended to as an object of significance in its own right. Perpetuation guarantees the unpredictability of such recurrences: different generations will come to the painting with an intellectual variousness that matches, perhaps exceeds, that of Raphael’s philosophers. At the same time, the radiant precision with which the figures are pictured, the depth of care that they bestow on their activities and which is answered by Raphael’s craftsmanship, encourages viewers to take pleasure and intellectual stimulation from them, in a manner that resists any simple narrative recuperation.
When Raphael portrayed ancient philosophers conversing together, he (or whoever was responsible for the conception) was drawing on a long literary tradition of using chronologically impossible philosophical dialogue to represent intellectual connections and hierarchies. One of the most famous examples is the grand scene in Plato’s Protagoras which portrays the assembly of sophists and their followers that Socrates and Hippocrates find when they visit the home of the wealthy Athenian Callias (314e–315b). Like the School of Athens, the dialogue lacks firm chronological anchoring: to cite just one inconsistency, a dramatic date of 420 BC is suggested by the fact that Pherecrates’ comedy Wild Men is at one point said to have been staged ‘last year’, but those present at the scene include the sons of Pericles, who died in the plague at Athens a decade earlier.24 This ‘carefree anachronism’, along with the ambience of Plato’s description, has led to the suggestion that the Protagoras scene directly inspired Raphael’s design.25
Anachronism was a common feature of philosophical dialogue in antiquity. In Plato’s Socratic dialogues, it takes a number of forms: some works (such as the Protagoras and also the Gorgias) have incompatible chronological indications;26 the Symposium describes a party celebrating the tragedian Agathon’s first dramatic victory in 416 BC, but includes references to later events, including events after Socrates’ death in 399 BC; the Menexenus, unlike the Symposium, does not have quite such a precise occasion, but includes a speech by Socrates which refers to events after Socrates’ death; and other dialogues show Socrates engaging in dialogue with figures who seem either too early (Parmenides) or too late (Euthydemus). To look beyond Plato, Socrates also appears in anachronistic dialogues such as Xenophon’s Symposium, in which Xenophon himself (born c. 428 BC), or at least a narrator-figure who resembles him, is present as an adult at a party commemorating an athletic victory in 422 BC; and in the Aspasia by another fourth-century Socratic, Aeschines of Sphettus, in which Socrates relates a conversation between Aspasia and Xenophon’s wife (though Xenophon probably married only after Socrates’ death).27 Non-Socratic parallels include a short dialogue on alchemy between Ostanes (a possibly legendary Persian magus, dated by Pliny to the time of the Persian Wars) and Cleopatra, and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, which gestures to anachronism through participants (Galen, Plutarch and Ulpian) with the same names as famous but asynchronous intellectual figures from the Roman imperial period (only Galen is unquestionably the celebrity himself).28
Anachronisms in philosophical dialogues were discussed by a number of ancient critics.29 The chronological inconsistencies in the Symposium and Menexenus are examined in two works by the second-century AD rhetorician Aelius Aristides (3.577–82, 4.50–1), while those in Protagoras, Gorgias, Parmenides and Xenophon’s Symposium are discussed by speakers in Athenaeus (5.216c–18e, 11.505f–6a). Both authors pay close attention to chronological indications such as archon-dates, and they may well have drawn their material from a second-century BC treatise Against the Admirer of Socrates by the grammarian Herodicus of Babylon. For both, chronological criticism was not an end in itself, but motivated by a desire to impugn Plato’s reliability more generally, in Aristides’ case as a response to Plato’s attacks on rhetoric and to the critique of Athenian politicians in the Gorgias (515b–519b), in Athenaeus’ as an exercise in self-definition against a canonical fellow-writer of sympotic dialogue.30 Assuming that the dialogues were meant to be reports of actual conversations, Aristides dismisses them as ‘fictions’ (3.586), while Athenaeus’ speaker claims that philosophers ‘lie about everything and do not realize that much of what they write goes against the times (para tous chronous)’ (5.216c). It is even suggested in Athenaeus that two characters in Plato’s dialogues, Gorgias and Phaedo, rejected the ideas attributed to them by Plato (11.506e) – a suggestion that is itself probably an anachronism. Plato’s loose handling of time was felt to be emblematic of his other alleged distortions of the thought of the characters depicted in his dialogues.
The importance of accurate chronology in the dramatic setting of dialogues was also stressed by Cicero. In his dialogue Brutus (on the history of oratory), a writer of consular rank, C. Scribonius Curio, is criticized for depicting a conversation in which the characters discuss a meeting of the senate supposedly held during Julius Caesar’s first consulship while the actual details of the discussion relate to his subsequent campaigns in Gaul (218–19). Again, in a section from a lost speech, For Gallius, which is cited by Jerome (Epistles 52.8.3), Cicero laments the popularity of a staged work, Conversations of Poets and Philosophers, in which at one point Euripides and Menander, and at another Socrates and Epicurus, converse – men ‘whose lives we know were separated not by years but by centuries’.31 Besides criticizing anachronisms in others, Cicero wrote dialogues on ethical and philosophical themes (notably Republic and Laws) which strongly engage with Plato’s dialogues and yet avoid their anachronistic cast-lists.
Despite the criticisms of Cicero and others, anachronisms in philosophical dialogues could be defended as a feature of the genre. The fifth-century AD Roman writer Macrobius appeals overtly to Platonic precedent to defend his own anachronistic presentation of the characters gathered at the discussion he depicts in his Saturnalia (set in the early AD 380s): ‘It should not be viewed as dishonest if one or two of those whom the gathering brought together reached maturity later than the age of Praetextatus [a high-standing official in the imperial service who is one of the dialogue’s principal characters].’ He mentions the Protagoras and Timaeus (the latter not discussed by Aristides or Athenaeus), but appeals particularly to the Parmenides, whose title character ‘was so much older than Socrates that Socrates’ boyhood hardly coincided with the other’s old age, and yet their discussion is about difficult issues’ (1.1.5–6). Just as Plato in that dialogue introduced a young Socrates (see below), Macrobius presents a young character who went on to play an important role in Roman intellectual culture and who speaks already with the authority his scholarship would later gain for him: the grammarian Servius, whose commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid identified many of its anachronisms.32
While the ancient critical attitude to anachronistic dialogues is largely negative, modern scholars have tried to show their constructive potential. One of the most successful examples of this approach is M. M. McCabe’s discussion of Plato.33 Countering the tendency of readers in the tradition of analytical philosophy to extract arguments from their dialogic context, she observes that it can be impossible to separate argument, dialogue and dramatic setting, and that we should use the presences, absences and connections that the dialogue form offers to help us read the arguments that Plato is presenting. Plato, on her reading, was concerned above all with the communication of ideas and arguments and with their relationships to each other. His dialogues are intellectual engagements that go beyond immediate conversations with those present.
Plato’s use of anachronism is shown in different ways in Euthydemus, Parmenides and Menexenus. The cast of characters in Euthydemus includes Socrates, his friend Crito, and two sophists, the brothers Dionysodorus and Euthydemus. The two brothers are not historical characters, but caricature fourth-century ‘eristic’ philosophers, who engaged in a combative form of argument based on the aggressive identification and use of fallacies and errors. Although such argument had its roots in the work of fifth-century philosophers, by retrojecting a later and more developed form of this philosophical method to Socrates’ lifetime, Plato creates a dramatized encounter that leads the reader through the process of analysing the arguments themselves.34 Towards the end of the dialogue, moreover, Crito reports a conversation he has had with a ‘man who thinks that he is extremely wise’ (304d5) whom commentators often identify with Plato’s rival educator Isocrates; by leaving this character unnamed Plato avoids an explicit anachronism.35 The use of anonymous and imagined speakers is one way in which Plato manages the impact of anachronism, especially in his later dialogues.
Anachronism operates differently in Parmenides, one of Plato’s most austere and philosophically difficult works. Plato uses a setting common in dialogues, a religious festival (in this case, the Panathenaea), to bring non-Athenian characters into the city and in contact with each other – here, at a reading of Zeno’s book (127c–d). The anachronistic element lies in the appearance of both people and ideas at the wrong time. This is the only Platonic dialogue to represent Socrates as a youth, while Parmenides is described as ‘very old’ (in his sixties) at the time of their meeting (127a7–b6). Debra Nails, who has catalogued the dramatic settings for all Plato’s dialogues, argues for a dramatic date for this discussion of 450 BC, but notes that there is a great deal of circularity involved in this identification, with the dates for Parmenides’ life often being inferred from Plato’s text.36 It is in fact unclear whether the meeting is historically possible at all:37 Diogenes Laertius (9.23) gives an earlier date for Parmenides that would preclude his having visited Athens during Socrates’ youth.38 Whether or not the conversation could have taken place, the proleptic depiction of Socrates’ philosophical talent emphasizes his future importance,39 while the arguments he presents for Parmenides to criticize are the metaphysical theory of Forms, normally associated with Plato himself. The young Socrates, Parmenides suggests, is trying to develop his theory ‘too early’ in his intellectual career (135c), signposting Plato’s deliberate anachronism in voicing his own later ideas through him. Such interventions may signal authorial recognition of the artificiality of the dialogue. Plato lends a further layer of multitemporality to all the Socratic dialogues by leaving unspoken the extent to which he makes Socrates the mouth-piece for his own ideas.
The anachronisms in Menexenus relate (on the surface at least) more to history and rhetoric than to philosophy. The dialogue portrays Socrates offering his companions a civic funeral speech prepared by Aspasia, the partner of Pericles, constructed of parts left out of the speech she is represented as having written for Pericles (presumably that presented by Thucydides). As Aelius Aristides carefully calculated, its narrative of Athenian history goes down to the King’s Peace in the archonship of Theodotus (387/6 BC), at which time Socrates has been dead for thirteen years and Aspasia was probably dead too. Within the dialogue, there are hints of the anachronism: Socrates claims that orators prepare funeral speeches in advance so that they are not tied to the context of their delivery (235d), and when he turns to events after his own lifetime he flags them as ‘not ancient’ (244d2). The anachronism itself has been variously interpreted. Some scholars suggest that Aspasia’s funeral speech is a parodic distortion of Athenian patriotic rhetoric, designed to highlight by contrast the superiority of philosophical discourse or to critique the legacy of Pericles’ leadership.40 Others read the anachronism against the dialogue’s pervasive concern with death. It is not just that the dialogue is one of ‘ghosts’ (Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s phrase).41 The theme of death is highlighted too by Socrates’ claim that he imagines he is living on the Isles of the Blessed (the traditional posthumous home of noble heroes) when he listens to Athenian patriotic speeches (235c) and by a section in Aspasia’s speech in which dead Athenian soldiers address their sons from the underworld (246d–7c). The imagery of death has suggested to some critics another way in which philosophy trumps rhetoric: Socrates’ example remains more alive than the gullible and vainglorious Athenians.42
Death is a motif in many other philosophical dialogues in antiquity. Plato’s Phaedo dramatizes the death of Socrates, while many of his other dialogues are set in the period leading up to that event; in his version of Socrates’ defence speech, moreover, he presents Socrates expressing his hopes for the underworld, where he will meet and argue with many great figures of the past, writers and heroes alike (Apology 41a–c), entering into dialogue with the ultimate anachronistic community. Cicero’s Republic presents a conversation that took place just a week before the death of its main speaker, the consul and victor of the Third Punic war Scipio Aemilianus in 129 BC, while his On Old Age is set in 150 BC, a year or two before the death of the elder Cato. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (which starts with an echo of Phaedo) and Macrobius’ Saturnalia are similarly set just before the deaths of their leading characters Ulpian and Praetextatus.43
The theme of death can also be suggested by literary allusion alone. In Protagoras, Plato has Socrates describe his response to the sophists present in Callias’ house through quotations from Odysseus’ account of his sight of heroic figures from the past (see p. 195): first Socrates introduces Hippias with ‘after him I saw’ (315b), the start of a line in which Odysseus describes catching sight of Heracles (Odyssey 11.601); then he continues ‘“And I saw Tantalus” – for Prodicus of Ceos was in town too’ (315c, quoting Odyssey 11.582). The effect is to present the crowd scene as a vision of the underworld. The trope was picked up, too, in Aelius Aristides’ critique of Plato: he complains that in Symposium Plato ‘advances the years’ in a manner that is impossible ‘unless the symposium was put together in the Elysian Field’ (3.579–80) and that in Menexenus he ‘contrives that the dead are together with one another as if they are alive’ (4.50).
The recurrent motifs of death and the underworld are intimately connected with the use of anachronism to create a sense of intellectual community. Macrobius’ Saturnalia presents a cast of ‘nobles and other learned men’ discussing the ancient traditions of Rome during the final stages of pagan culture at Rome a few decades earlier.44 Cicero’s Republic is set during a political crisis that he identified as the beginning of the troubles the Roman Republic now faced. Scipio’s reminiscences, moreover, enable him to bring in some further characters from the more distant past, such as Masinissa, king of the Numidians, and, famously, a dream (6.12–33) in which he converses with his relative by adoption, Scipio Africanus, victor of the Second Punic War, who had died in 183 BC when the younger Scipio was only two years old.45 In the dream (a possible model for Anchises’ speech in the sixth book of the Aeneid (pp. 196–8)), Scipio receives a prophecy of his own future while being granted a vision of the harmonious structure of the cosmos and with it of the insignificance of human achievements when viewed from space. Particularly suggestive is the use of anachronism in the scene from Plato’s Protagoras with which we began this section. While the presentation of the underworld as a place of individual existence is challenged elsewhere by Plato, in the Protagoras Socrates’ joking assimilation of two of the sophists at Callias’ house to Heracles and Tantalus as seen by Odysseus in the underworld may be read as a comment on the fact that many of the dialogue’s characters were long dead when Plato wrote the dialogue. If Raphael was inspired by this scene to portray the harmonious conjunction of Platonism and Aristotelianism, Plato himself creates through anachronism a picture of the intellectual milieu of Athens during Socrates’ lifetime, the better to differentiate Socrates himself.
We saw in our Prelude that Lucian sends the ferryman Charon up from the underworld to gaze on human folly in the world above. Travel between the lower and upper worlds is a plot device that he exploits for satirical and philosophical purposes in several of his other works too. In his dialogue Fisherman it is a group of philosophers who are presented as returning to life. The reason for their return emerges from the opening exchange, where Socrates encourages the other philosophers (all leading figures from the fifth, fourth or third centuries BC, including Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus and Chrysippus) to throw stones and lumps of earth at a man who has attacked them. Their enemy turns out to be one Parrhesiades (‘Son of Frankness’) – and a live ringer for Lucian himself: like Lucian, Parrhesiades is originally from Syria (28.19), and he has written a work strongly resembling Lucian’s Auction of the Lives, which depicted philosophers being sold as slaves (27.4). The philosophers plan to kill Parrhesiades straightaway, but relent when Parrhesiades proclaims his innocence. Socrates suggests that they summon an embodiment of Philosophy, and she in turn persuades them to try Parrhesiades on the Acropolis. Parrhesiades is in due course acquitted after defending himself with the plea that his attacks were made not against the old philosophers but against modern imposters who affect to follow austere philosophical doctrines while in fact pursuing money and fame. Their fakery is then staged as one after another they are caught with a fishing line (hence the dialogue’s title) and brought up to the Acropolis to be examined. The dead philosophers are forced to accept that their ideals and the intellectual communities bound by them have not persisted across time. The dialogue closes with Philosophy sending them back to Hades and Parrhesiades descending to the lower city to continue his investigations.
The contrast of past and present established by the anachronistic dialogue in Fisherman is strongly mediated through various parts of the literary tradition.46 The plot – a comic writer being tried by philosophers – is a reversal of Plato’s Apology, where Socrates identifies comic poets as his ‘old accusers’ (19c), alluding to his portrayal in Aristophanes’ Clouds (which is itself referenced in Lucian’s dialogue (28.25)). In addition, the opening arrival of angry philosophers recalls the entrance of the chorus in plays such as Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Knights, and the sequence that follows (a contest followed by a series of tests) is a typical structure in Old Comedy too. A further literary layer consists in the lines of verse that the characters trade: after Socrates’ initial appeal that the philosophers ‘all join shields together against him’ (28.1, evoking the tradition that Socrates showed courage in battle as a hoplite), his hexameter appeal ‘that pouch give aid to pouch, and staff to staff’ (alluding to the typical apparatus of a Cynic philosopher) is a mock-epic variant on Nestor’s appeal to the Achaeans in the Iliad (2.363: ‘that clan give aid to clan, and tribe to tribe’).
Lucian also draws on comic antecedents for the plot-device of raising the dead as a way of bringing past and present into an anachronistic dialogue. Demes, a play composed by Eupolis in the late fifth century BC which now only survives in fragments, includes in its cast politicians from different stages of Athenian history – Solon, Miltiades, Aristides and Pericles. The surviving fragments show that the drama made much of the meeting of worlds enabled by having figures from the past interact with, and criticize, the habits of contemporary society. In one fragment, for instance, Aristides ‘the Just’ is shown arguing with an informant; the two men represent their respective ages, Aristides that of the time of Athens’ greatness around the Persian wars, the informer the corrupt present (fr. 99.78–120 Kastel–Austin).
Another possible inspiration for Lucian is the contest in the Underworld staged in Aristophanes’ Frogs between tragedians of different generations. Performed in 405 BC, soon after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, and at a time when Athens’ military fortunes were low, the play shows Aeschylus and Euripides competing for the throne of tragedy in the Underworld – with Sophocles ready to challenge Euripides if he should win. The contest fortuitously coincides with the arrival of the god Dionysus, who has journeyed to Hades to fetch Euripides because he misses him so much. Throughout, Aristophanes plays on the contrast of old and new: Aeschylus’ grand style and themes match the greatness of Athens at the time of the Persian Wars; Euripides represents the vocal and volatile Athenian democracy of the final years of the Peloponnesian War.47 Though the pay ends with Dionysus declaring Aeschylus the victor and returning with him to the world above in order to save Athens, Aristophanes does much to overturn any simplistic nostalgia for the old days through the close and loving attention he pays to Euripides’ sophisticated mannerisms and the ‘new music’ he espouses. Bringing Aeschylus back to life is not going to help Athens win the war.
It would be equally rash to take Lucian’s anachronistic group of philosophers in Fisherman as a serious reflection on the history of philosophy. The contrast of past and present is undercut by divisions among the old philosophers: at the outset Socrates rebukes Aristippus and Epicurus for slacking – evidently a hit at their hedonist philosophies (28.1). As we shall see, moreover, in some of his other works Lucian does attack some of the philosophers who are persuaded to acquit Parrhesiades; indeed Auction of the Lives, the work which has upset the philosophers, can easily be read as satirizing the founders of the philosophical schools rather than their modern followers, as Parrhesiades disingenuously claims.
Lucian reverses the direction of travel between the worlds above and below to similar satirical effect in another of his works, Menippus or Oracle-consultation in Hades. The title-character was a third-century BC Cynic philosopher and satirist Menippus, a predecessor of and inspiration to Lucian (in Fisherman Diogenes complains that he has betrayed his fellow-philosophers by not taking part in the attack on Parrhesiades (28.26)). The extent of Menippus’ influence on Lucian is hard to determine since none of his works survives, but they did evidently include encounters with the dead (one was called Necyia (Underworld Visit) after the title of Odyssey Book 11); a report survives, too, that Menippus himself would assume the guise of a Fury, with a grey tunic reaching to his feet, and proclaim that he had come from the Underworld as an inspector of wrongdoings (Suda phi 180 Adler).48 Menippus’ Underworld concerns can also be glimpsed through his influence on the versatile Varro, who (besides his historical works) wrote 150 (largely lost) books of Menippean Satires. These books included one work certainly set in the underworld, On Suicide, in which Hannibal was quizzed on his suicide (fr. 407 Astbury), and another entitled Tomb of Menippus.49
Lucian’s dialogue Menippus starts with the title-character returning to the upper world after a visit to the dead, spouting lines of verse. After telling his startled friends that he has just been ‘keeping company with Euripides and Homer’ and has ‘somehow become infected with their poetry’, he explains that he was driven to visit the underworld because he had reached an intellectual impasse: as a boy he had been delighted by the tales of the poets; he had then turned to philosophers – and been confused and disenchanted by their disagreements. So he had decided to travel to Babylon to consult a magus, and with his help he was able to visit the Underworld so as to consult Tiresias on the best path to philosophy.
While Menippus’ sketch mirrors some ancient accounts of the development of the human race as a move from poetry to philosophy,50 Lucian’s portrayal of his experiences in the underworld militates against any notion of intellectual ascent. Comedic inspiration is drawn from a vision of the underworld as a place where all social and physical distinctions are collapsed. Menippus cannot tell apart Nireus and Thersites – the most beautiful and ugly of the characters in the Iliad – now that they are just bones (38.15). The rich and powerful are indistinguishable from the other inhabitants of the underworld: the likes of the Persian kings Xerxes and Darius and the Samian tyrant Polycrates could be seen begging at crossroads (38.17). Lucian does allow that (as in Raphael’s frescoes) like-minded groups from different eras may converse, as Socrates does with the equally loquacious Palamedes, Nestor and Odysseus (38.18). As he concludes from the sight of the dead that life is but a pageant of shifting roles arranged by Fortune (38.16), Menippus is ready to receive the secret truth that Tiresias whispers to him: the disputes of philosophers can be safely ignored; best is the life of ordinary people, living for the present, taking nothing too seriously (38.21).
Lucian returns to many of the themes and figures of Menippus in his Dialogues of the Dead, a series of short dialogues set in the underworld. In the opening dialogue, Diogenes the Cynic asks Polydeuces, who returns to life every other day, to summon Menippus to the underworld, where he will find even more to mock than he does in the world above (Menippus’ previous underworld knowledge is ignored). The ensuing dialogues show the arrival of Menippus, now properly dead, and his initial meetings with some of the underworld’s inhabitants, including philosophers such as Pythagoras and Socrates (77.8). As in Menippus, dialogue with the dead opens up the possibility of contrasting past and present – but here decline from the Socratic peak is already seen with Aristippus and Plato (77.6.5). Again as in Menippus, the underworld is free from distinctions: a transtemporal group of rich Asiatic kings, Croesus, Sardanapallus and Midas, is subjected to Menippus’ mockery (77.3), and former beauties such as Narcissus and Helen are indistinguishable skulls (77.5.1). This ‘equality of status’ is given a political spin by the ex-god Chiron, who praises it as ‘for the people’ (dēmotikē). But Menippus responds with the same message of contentment with one’s lot that Tiresias had expressed in Menippus. Chiron had abandoned immortality because of the lack of variety, but Menippus warns him that he may get bored by the repetitiveness of existence in the underworld too (77.8.2).
Lucian’s virtuosity is kept up in subsequent dialogues as he lets his writerly imagination play in new ways on this very repetitiveness. Some feature people (portrayed by Homer as) alive at the time of the Trojan War (77.23, 26, both set in the immediate aftermath of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld). Others include Alexander and contemporaries (77.12, 13) or invented stereotypes (77.16–20). But Lucian does also continue to play with asynchronous groupings of peers. In one dialogue, the Cynic philosophers Diogenes, Antisthenes and Crates, realizing they are at leisure, go off to mock newcomers (77.22). In another, Lucian, dropping the theme that distinctions are unimportant in the underworld, presents Alexander and Hannibal arguing over who was the better general (77.25), with Scipio Africanus (like Sophocles in Aristophanes’ Frogs) as middle-man, prepared to stand aside for Alexander but not for Hannibal (77.25).
Lucian’s underworld experiments have had an extraordinary influence in Western Europe since the Renaissance. One early exponent was Erasmus, who wrote in 1529 a short Charon in which the ferryman is preparing a large new ship to ferry all those killed in the wars plaguing Europe at the time.51 Erasmus here signals a contrast with the age of Lucian, who has Charon complain of the lack of custom owing to the spread of peace, a common theme of imperial Greek literature – though Lucian adds the twist that people die of gluttony or because they are murdered for their money (77.14.2). A different direction for the genre was heralded by Ulrich von Hutten’s Arminius (c. 1520), in which the eponymous character, leader in the first century AD of a German revolt against Rome, pleads before Minos, with Tacitus (who describes the revolt in his Annals) to support him and with Alexander, Hannibal and Scipio all present. The dialogue played an important part in the emergence of Arminius as a figurehead for German nationalism.
Dialogues of the Dead were particularly popular in France and Britain during the ‘quarrel of ancients and moderns’ at the end of the seventeenth and start of the eighteenth centuries.52 Fontenelle, who sided with the moderns, published in 1683 a collection of New Dialogues of the Dead, explaining in a programmatic epistle to Lucian that he had ‘suppressed Pluto, Charon and Cerberus, and everything that was worn-out (usé) in the Underworld’.53 The collection itself was divided into three sections, ancient, ancient and modern, and modern, with the first and third including anachronistic dialogues (e.g. Anacreon and Aristotle; Paracelsus and Molière) as well as conversations between contemporaries. Fontenelle thus pays tribute to Lucian as founder of the genre while marking his distance as an ancient. Conversely William King, a follower of the ‘ancients’, satirized one of the ‘moderns’, the classical scholar Richard Bentley, under the name Bentivoglio, with frequent allusions to Bentley’s arguments that letters attributed to the sixth-century BC Sicilian tyrant Phalaris were later forgeries; Phalaris appears in person, disputing with a Sophist who claims to have written the letters.54 Other practitioners, including Fenelon in France and Lord Lyttelton in Britain, took over from Lucian not just the format but also the fondness for literary allusion. Just as Lucian included Menippus in his dialogues, Lucian himself becomes a character in later dialogues, conversing with Herodotus in Fenelon and with Rabelais in Lyttelton, and similary Fenelon converses with Plato in Lyttelton.55
Later imitators tend to exploit the form of the anachronistic dialogue in a rather different way from Lucian. For Fontenelle and William King, as we have noted, the ancient form is exploited in a dialogue about the meaning of antiquity itself. Many other dialogues, too, engaged with the difference of antiquity. Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead include just one sentence spoken by a female speaker, and she is a goddess (Persephone).56 In the modern genre, by contrast, women play a large role: Fontenelle, for instance, includes a dialogue between Dido and Stratonice, wife of the Seleucid king Antiochus, in which Dido complains of Virgil’s anachronism, of which she has learnt from listening to Virgil himself.57 The contrast of ancient and modern in the treatment of women is overtly thematized in a dialogue by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that Lyttelon included (anonymously) in his collection. Montagu’s dialogue features Plutarch in conversation with a modern bookseller. Plutarch is upset to discover from the bookseller that buying a stock of his works had proved to be a financial disaster, but is relieved by the thought that people’s morals must have improved so much that they no longer need his guidance. The bookseller assures him that that assumption is far from the truth: people now prefer to read Lives of the Highwaymen or Lives of Men that Never Lived (that is, novels). And when Plutarch regrets not writing a life of Lucretia for women at least, the bookseller assures him that they would read it only if Lucretia had actually been caught in the arms of a slave.58
Another difference in the modern genre lies in the way that issues of ethnic and national self-definition are treated. Whereas von Hutten’s Arminius recuperated an ancient opponent of Rome, later the anachronistic dialogue became a forum for debate on the inheritance of ancient Greece. One eighteenth-century version (possibly written by Voltaire) portrays Pericles in conversation with a modern Greek and a Russian. Pericles is astonished that the modern Greek knows nothing of him or of other Athenian heroes; he does not even know that he lives in part of ancient Athens.59 While this hapless figure conforms to stereotypes of Greek degeneracy under the Ottoman empire, the Russian by contrast tells Pericles that he is a descendant of the Scythians – but knows the history of Greece and can read ancient Greek. The debate is re-phrased in The New Lucian, a collection by a Victorian author, H. D. Traill, which includes a dialogue between Plato and the earlier nineteenth-century writer Walter Savage Landor, who had used Diogenes as a mouthpiece for criticisms of Plato in one of his Imaginary Conversations. Traill presents Plato as initially dismissive of his ‘barbarian’ critic, but Landor himself rejects the culture of his contemporaries as either Persian or Scythian – that is, given over either to the ‘pursuit of pleasure’ or to the ‘pleasure of pursuit’ (hunting) – and making a claim instead for the ‘immortal’ Greek spirit: ‘no man’s birth into its service can be an anachronism. A Greek cannot be born out of due time.’60 Greekness is here a figure both of timelessness (‘immortal’) and of extreme timeliness.
That Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead avoid overt comparisons of the Greeks of his own day with their forebears should not be attributed to a deficient sense of historical consciousness. It reflects, rather, a deliberate choice (shared with many of the writers of his day) to engage with the Greek past as a literary phenomenon, filtered through the words of Homer and other classic authors. It is through this commitment to a literary canon that he transmits and interrogates the labile constructions of Greek cultural identity.
The same varied engagement with canonicity and death is found in Lucian’s still more inventive and influential True Histories. Here a narrator figure, who is at the end identified with Lucian, recounts with ironic proclamations of truthfulness his remarkable adventures on the moon, inside a whale and in other strange settings. At one point he is driven over the seas and stumbles on the Isles of the Blessed (14.4–29), where he finds gathered together the epic and cultural heroes of the Greek tradition, and even Persians like the two Cyruses (who doubtless owe their presence to Xenophon). Through this fiction Lucian is able to mock traditional scholarly themes – chronological difficulties are set aside as Theseus and Menelaus compete for Helen – and to parody the ultimate sort of anachronistic dialogue, the dream of unmediated access to the author: Lucian converses with Homer directly, but, unable to escape the banal scholarly tradition, he fluffs his chance with tedious queries about Homer’s place of origin (Babylon!) and the (mistaken) interpolations detected by the likes of Aristarchus (14.20).61
Lucian’s encounter with Homer on the Isles of the Blessed offers a fantastic transfiguration of the way in which the dialogue between reader and author was often configured in antiquity. A good example is provided by Vitruvius’ extensive discussion of the experience of reading in the preface to Book 9 of On Architecture. While the book itself is devoted to sundials (and thus to the measurement of passing time), the preface offers a rich panegyric of the transtemporal encounters that are made possible by intellectual exertion. By contrast with the short-lived bodily splendour of the athlete, Vitruvius hails the discoveries that have brought lasting benefit to the human race while creating the possibility for individuals to engage with wise figures from the past (9 preface 17):
Many people born in our memory will seem to discuss the nature of the world with Lucretius as if in person, or the art of rhetoric with Cicero, and many of our posterity will converse with Varro on the Latin language, and similarly many scholars as they deliberate over many things with Greek sages will seem to be having private conversations with them; in sum, the opinions of wise writers, absent in body but flourishing with age, when they are present in our counsels and discussions, all have greater authority than those who are actually present.
When Vitruvius figures reading as a ‘private conversation’, he develops an idea that occurs frequently when ancient authors conceptualize interactions with their predecessors. Authors are addressed in the second person in poems such as Simias’ epigram for Sophocles (5 Gow–Page) and in works of literary criticism;62 as we have seen, the trope continued beyond antiquity in the letters that Petrarch addressed to classical authors (p. 39).
A subtle exploration of this conception of literary community is found in Dio Chrysostom’s dialogue On Socrates and Homer. The dialogue starts on the question of who (if anyone) taught Socrates. When Dio himself offers the answer ‘Homer’, he is met with the obvious response: ‘how can one say that a man who never met Homer nor ever saw him, but lived so many years later, was a pupil of Homer’ (55.3). Dio stresses against this chronological pedantry that learning is a matter of imitation and attention, not seeing and associating. As proof of Socrates’ attention he points to the similarity of the two men’s intellectual projects. Even the difference between the genres in which they worked is less important than the aims they shared. Dio suggests that Socrates has engaged in a transtemporal conversation with Homer, and his own dialogue, by drawing out and accentuating the shared qualities and forms of thought on which this conversation depended, allows his readers to participate in this dialogue for themselves.
Dio elaborates a slightly different perspective in his account of a day spent comparing the Philoctetes plays by Athens’ three greatest tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. His perception of them is in some ways conventional: in keeping with the image found in Aristophanes’ Frogs, he stresses the ‘magnanimity and ancient flavour’ of Aeschylus and the political focus of Euripides, while placing Sophocles in the middle (52.4, 11, 15). At issue here, however, is the way he stages reading as the self-conscious practice of anachronism. Dio realizes that he is in a position that was unavailable to those who lived in the fifth century BC: as he explains, Sophocles competed as a young man with Aeschylus and as an old man with Euripides, while Aeschylus and Euripides never competed with each other; the tragedians, moreover, rarely competed with each other with plays on the same subject (52.3). In Dio’s study, however, the three authors jostle together in an almost timeless domain of learned comparison. Almost, but not quite. Before embarking on his examination of the three plays, Dio draws attention to the circumstances that shaped his reading. He was suffering from an illness; he began reading after some light exercise, a ride in his carriage, breakfast (52.1). He notes, with a hint of self-depreciation, that his planned reading constitutes ‘quite an indulgence and a novel solace for illness’ (52.3). His encounter with the great tragedians does not take place on a plane of timeless intellectual contemplation, therefore, but in the time of the body, a time measured out by eating, regimented movements, recuperation from illness. At the same time as his utterance, as a written document, pulls away into timelessness, the detail with which he locates his thinking in time makes his reading irreducibly individual. His aspiration to critical reflections that transcend temporal setting arises precisely from an anxiety about the all-too timely, corporeal frame from which these reflections emerge.
The asynchronous elements of the reading experience are captured by the language Dio employs. Because the opportunity to read the three plays alongside one another is so precious, he says, ‘I played the producer (echorēgoun) for myself most dazzlingly, and tried to pay close attention, as if I were a judge of the foremost tragic choruses’ (52.4). Dio is projected out of his own time and situation as he acts out the historically situated role of the chorēgos (the individual who paid as a public liturgy for the production of a play). Despite this imaginative investment, he cannot but read and act conditionally, in the mode of the ‘as if’. He oversees the production of critical judgements rather than performances, arranging a virtual ‘competition’ which enables him to examine literary affiliations (between Homer and Euripides, for instance) and observing the evolution of a genre. Reading becomes a means of scrutinizing the complex temporal structure of the ‘present’.
A different kind of dialogue with the past emerges in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ treatise Demosthenes (22). Reflecting on the various emotions (‘disbelief, anguish, terror, contempt, hatred, pity, goodwill, anger, envy’) he experiences while reading Demosthenes, Dionysius suggests that the speeches themselves delineate their emotional structure so clearly that they serve almost as stage directions for readers: ‘the words themselves show how one should enact them, feigning now irony, now indignation, now rage, now fear’. His emotional response leads him in turn to reflect on how much greater the affective force generated by Demosthenes’ rhetoric must have been for those who heard the orator himself speaking: ‘given that we, so far separated in time and unconnected with the events, are carried away and overcome in this way and journey wherever the speech leads us, how must the Athenians and the other Greeks have been led on at that time by the orator on real and personal issues’. Reading Demosthenes prompts an attempt to form a psychological commonality with listeners in the past, whose reactions are imagined as an intensity of involvement (‘how must [they] have been excited’). But Dionysius can only sense rather than fully participate in the emotions felt by Demosthenes’ contemporaries. The combination of dialogue and distance that reading occasions is registered in his description of the experience of reading as bringing him closer still to the sensations felt by participants ‘in the Corybantic dances and the rites of the Mother-Goddess, and other similar ceremonies’, no matter whether those celebrations are ‘inspired by the scents, sights, or sounds or by the influence of the deities themselves’.63 The two distinct communities (‘the Athenians and the rest of the Greeks’ and the ritual agents) against which Dionysius measures his experience differ markedly: the audiences are located in a specific time and place and called on to make decisions on the basis of the speeches; the practitioners of ritual, by contrast, partake of a recurring experience that can be forged anywhere, and their actions are defined in terms of the emotions and senses. By forging simultaneous and differing affiliations to these experiential communities, Dionysius accentuates the unpredictably anachronic character of the communities created in reading.
Like the second-person address to authors, Dionysius’ use of ritual as a figure for reading finds echoes beyond antiquity. At the end of a lecture on Greek historical writing delivered in 1908, the renowned German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff turned to reflect on the labours involved in the historical reconstruction of antiquity. After evoking the spirit of research through the ‘indispensable’ Mr Dryasdust, he suggested that something further was needed to revivify dead tradition – the use of ‘our free formative imagination’. Finally, to illustrate the work required of the imagination, he turned to the underworld scene in the Odyssey that since antiquity has been one of the most important templates for the anachronistic dialogue:
We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly; but if they then abide our question, something from us has entered into them; something alien, that must be cast out, cast out in the name of truth! For Truth is a stern goddess…64
That ‘something alien’ is glossed by a modern scholar as ‘anachronism’65 – and however much Wilamowitz insists on the possibility that the historian can be something other than a ventriloquist, it is the poetic force of his evocation of scholarship as re-animation that lingers.66
The various types of anachronistic dialogue on which we have eavesdropped in this chapter all welcome that alien element that Wilamowitz strives in vain to exclude. We have, it is true, seen evidence of a desire to remain faithful to the historical moment even in its fleetingness. The School of Athens allows us to imagine a diverse range of conversations even as it intimates the possibility that conflicting discourses can be reconciled. Plato brilliantly evokes specific moments of intellectual conversation, and critics in antiquity took him to task for his occasional willingness to disregard the limits imposed by those moments. And yet something of the liveliness of Raphael, Plato and Lucian does lie in the way they in their different ways use dialogue across time as a way of transcending historical difference and constructing a sense of ethical or cultural communality – a sense that is necessarily fragile and fantastic, and can all too easily run the risk of being exclusionary; but one that is part all the same of a new dialogue across and never quite beyond time.