Polemics in the Pseudoplatonica. The Academy’s Agenda and the Renaissance of Socratic Dialogue

Résumé En

Recent studies broadly agree in recognising the Academy as the context where most of the spurious dialogues transmitted in the corpus Platonicum were produced. However, scholars have to cope with the heritage of decades of studies devoted to isolating non-Platonic elements in these works, most notably influences from other Hellenistic schools. Attempts to solve this problem have followed two approaches. The first is to minimise the significance of these purported influences, in an effort to fit everything into a Socratic-Platonic background; another approach consists in interpreting these allusions as signs of philosophical polemics, to be read as evidence of the Academy’s engagement in the contemporary debate. In this paper, I intend to address the issue through the analysis of select passages from three dialogues (Second Alcibiades, Eryxias and Axiochus) in which scholars have identified traces of Stoic and Epicurean doctrines. I argue that most, if not all, of these references are effectively to be interpreted as a polemic against rival schools, and that their elusive appearance is conditioned by the literary genre of the Socratic dialogue.