In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a literary interpretation of the poem’s involvement in the dialogue, how the dialogue itself may be read literarily, and, most importantly, how these readings work together rather than as discrete, incidental literary interventions in Socrates studies. It uses concepts like the performatives of speech-act theory to demonstrate how the structure of the dialogue sanctions the poem’s transgressive playfulnes ... More

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a literary interpretation of the poem’s involvement in the dialogue, how the dialogue itself may be read literarily, and, most importantly, how these readings work together rather than as discrete, incidental literary interventions in Socrates studies. It uses concepts like the performatives of speech-act theory to demonstrate how the structure of the dialogue sanctions the poem’s transgressive playfulness as much as how Socrates’s performance of the poem informs that structure as well as its execution. As much as Couch City examines classical rhetoric and philosophy, it reverberates just as much into contemporary literary studies. The book marries careful structural reading of the poem and dialogue with broader conceptual investigation that may be applied to or re-read in the poem or its reading, producing an argument that rejects the notion that Socrates fails Plato’s philosophical project, but rather complicates it in literary fashion by performing sophistry in order to defeat sophistry.