Encounters with Socrates: architecture, dialogue, and gesture in the Athenian Agora

Abstract

Analyses of Platonic dialogues nearly always acknowledge the location of a given conversation. Modern scholarship, however, rarely ventures beyond supplying a passing reference to the setting of a dialogue. This is not surprising given that Plato – and anyone who wished to emulate him – was chiefly concerned with providing philosophical discourses, not architectural treatises. However, this analysis argues that in several dialectical encounters and conversations architecture is much more than a generic, mute background. By deliberately situating Socrates and his companions in and around significant buildings in the Athenian Agora, Plato and his imitators offer us important clues to how the Greeks perceived and understood their civic realm. Ultimately, this investigation shows, for the first time, how speech and its attendant gestures were instrumental to the urban order of the ancient city.