Philosophical plasma in Dio Chrysostom’s Fourth Discourse on Kingship and Socrates’ Political Testament in Alcibiades

Abstract

On the basis of evidence obtained by unravelling enigmas in Dio’s fourth discourse and lifting the veil of mystery surrounding some of the crucial, sophistic-related passages from the mentioned writing, we were able to arrive to a conclusion that, no matter what the so-called sophists say of the phenomenon in their attempts to disguise the essence of things, the Second Sophistic is closely connected not so much with rhetoric as with philosophy itself or, to be more precise, Socrates’ political testament in the Alcibiades, as proved by Dio’s frequent use of philosophical, or rather Socratic plasma in his discourses. Paradoxically enough, after careful analysis of Dio’s invective against sophists, it turned out that his conception of the sophistic is basically the same as that of Isocrates, the only difference being that in the latter there was still a room for the legacy of the old sophistic, something to which Dio was fully opposed.