From the Old Academy to Later Neo-Platonism

Harold Tarrant is the Professor of Classics at the University of Newcastle, Australia

• Contents: Preface; Part I Socrates, Plato, and the Old Academy: Midwifery and the Clouds; The Hippias Major and Socratic theories of pleasure; The composition of Plato's Gorgias; Plato's Euthydemus and the two faces of Socrates; Chronology and narrative apparatus in Plato's dialogues; Orality and Plato's narrative dialogues; Plato, prejudice, and the mature-age student in antiquity; Myth as a tool of persuasion in Plato; Review of Leonardo Tarán, Speusippus of Athens. Part II The Platonic Revival and the 2nd Century AD: Agreement and the self-evident in Philo of Larissa; The date of anon. In Theaetetum; Middle Platonism and the 7th Epistle; Logos and the development of Middle Platonism; Platonic interpretation in Aulus Gellius; Numenius Fr. 13 and Plato's Timaeus; Platonism before Plato: tracing a philosophy to ever earlier roots; The proximity of philosophy and medicine in the age of Galen; Shadows of justice in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. Part III Later Platonism: The Gorgias and the demiurge; More on Zeno's Forty Logoi; Olympiodorus and history; Restoring Olympiodorus' syllogistic; Politike Eudaimonia: Olympiodorus on Plato's Republic; Indexes.

'It is [...] really detailed scholarship and argument combined with a stimulating general grasp of the development of ideas in their intellectual context which makes this collection such a pleasure to read and a most useful work of reference.' Aestimatio