Where did the Mirror Go? The Text of Plato [?] Alcibiades I 133c1-6

AbstractAt Alcibiades I, 133b-c, the reader expects, but does not according to the MSS find, the return of the mirror-motif that had supposedly explained the true meaning of the Delphic injunction. Hence it remains unclear why anything viewed within the soul should act in any way that resembles a mirror. I argue that the substitution of a single letter in one word, about which the manuscripts and modern scholars in any case disagree, can restore the necessary reference to a reflective surface, though not specifically to a mirror, since the term for a mirror could only be applied to sight. A failure to understand the underlying intertextual allusion to Cratylus 408c had resulted in a safe but unsatisfactory substitution by Late Antiquity, and other modifications followed thereafter in an effort to give meaning to the text.

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LESS CARE, MORE STRESS: A RHYTHMIC POEM FROM THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The Cambridge Classical Journal ◽

10.1017/s1750270521000051 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-29 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Tim Whitmarsh

Keyword(s):

Roman Empire ◽

Popular Culture ◽

Consumer Culture ◽

Late Antiquity ◽

Short Text ◽

Sexually Aggressive ◽

Distinctive Type ◽

Intertextual Allusion ◽

The Masses ◽

Embodied Selfhood

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

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