“Neither oratory nor dialogue”: Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the genre of Plato's Apology

Abstract

In the first half of On Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus' mature critical essay, he presents the case that Isocrates, Plato and represent the three finest stylists when it comes to speaking with the diction approved by audiences. In the process of making an argument for the Demosthenic ideal, Dionysius needed to find commensurate speeches by Isocrates and Plato to compare with Demosthenes. For Isocrates, he compared the most elegant portion of On the Peace with a portion of an epideictic from Demosthenes' Third Olynthiac. It was a good choice. However, for Plato, finding an appropriate speech in the philosopher's writing proved more difficult. Of course, we would readily assume that by the first century BCE Dionysius should have felt compelled to use the Apology as the Platonic exemplar. It clearly ranks as one of the impressive speeches in all of history. For his part, were he not to use it, Dionysius was well aware critics would complain that the Apology presents itself as the ideal choice for this kind of analysis. So in anticipation of this objection and his otherwise obscure choice to use Socrates' funeral oration in the Menexenus, he dismisses Plato's Apology as something other than a true forensic and therefore not a viable candidate. He offers the following tantalizingly cryptic reason: There is one forensic by Plato, the Apology of Socrates; but this never saw even the threshold of a law-court or an open assembly, but was written for another purpose and belongs to the category neither of oratory nor of dialogue. I therefore pass over it. (On Dem. 23). Within his own lifetime Dionysius already felt compelled to respond to charges of impiety for committing the sin of suggesting that one could find infelicities in Plato's compositional style. In a letter responding to Gnaeus Pompeius' complaint that, You should not have exposed the faults of Plato when your purpose was to praise Demosthenes (Gn. Pomp. 1), Dionysius responded that had he not objectively compared the best discourses of Isocrates and Plato with those of his argument would have been unpersuasive as well as a criti