Plato and the Power of Images by Pierre Destrée Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

Abstract

366 BOOKREVIEWS recent effort at covering all of Euripides’ plays, J. Morwood’s The Plays of Euripides (London, 2008). Its scholarly engagement also far outdoes the other, much earlier efforts to give roughly equal attention to each of the plays and bind them under consistent intellectual impulses: G. Grube, The Drama of Euripides (New York, 1941); D. J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama (Toronto, 1967); and T. B.L.Webster,TheTragediesof Euripides(London,1967). All in all, this is a valuable contribution to research on Euripides’ works, and it will be auseful addition tomany undergraduate andgraduate libraries. ROBERT HOLSCHUH SIMMONS MonmouthCollege,rsimmons@monmouthcollege.edu * * * * * Plato and the Power of Images. Edited by PIERRE DESTRÉE and RADCLIFFE G. EDMONDS III. Leiden, NL and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017. Pp. viii + 243. Hardback, $133.00.ISBN 978-90-04-34501-0. Plato is the great philosopher of ideal forms who stoutly asserts that they are the eternal and absolute reality of which the phenomena of the visible world are imperfect transitory reflections. Yet no one has rendered those mere reflections with greater skill and minute perception, or marshalled images with greater rhetorical power, than Plato. Plato and the Power of Images offers a diverse set of illuminating and provocative essays on this fundamental Platonic paradox: it aims to explain, among other things, how Plato can at once harshly condemn images and image-making poets and yet still make use of vivid and intense imagery in his own writing. The volume contains an introduction by the editors, twelve chapters, each with footnotes and a bibliography, and indices of passages andof subjects (the latter very brief).The first six chapters explore images as used in various dialogues; the lastsix are devotedtothe Republic. The collection begins with two essays on the image of Socrates in Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium. Andrew Ford argues that Alcibiades’ comparison of Socrates to Sileni figurines and Marsyas is really an allegory for the Platonic text itself, “a cunning kind of verbal icon that, like Sileni, has a precious hidden meaning for those able topenetrate its surface sense” (15–16).ElizabethBelfiore, working from the same speech, undertakes a study of Socrates and Achilles as mirror-images,of Socrates as akindof Achilles in reverse. BOOKREVIEWS 367 Francisco Gonzalez and Radcliffe Edmonds III offer perceptive essays that distinguish, on the one hand, between poetic and philosophical erôs, and, on the other, between the right and wrong use of images. Just as the poet, or the lover of sights andsounds, sees and is attracted to only what the beautiful image contains, so Phaedrus gets stuck upon the bare words of Lysias’ speech, whereas the philosophical lover, who uses beautiful images correctly, allows them to lead him tosomething further,arecollection of his pre-incarnate vision ofbeauty. Christopher Moore investigates Plato’s use of various images as they relate to the theme of self-knowledge, giving special attention to the figure of Prometheus in the Protagoras and Typhon in the Phaedrus. Gerd van Riel considers images through the lens of Plato’s theology, detailing Plato’s preference, stated in the Sophist, for eikastikê technê, which accurately reproduces the proportions of the model, over phantastikê technê, which adapts the original proportions to a particular perspective. Grace Ledbetter’s “The Power of Plato’s Cave”—the first of the six essays on the Republic—argues that Plato structures the cave-narrative in such a way that Socrates andGlaucon themselves enactthe veryascentdescribedtherein.Olivier Renaut examines the city-soul relationship as ametaphor which achieves the task of transferring the power of reason to the power of law for an audience of citizens whoare notphilosophers. Penelope Murray convincingly details the “psychological parallelism” (200) between poetry and tyranny, showing how the critique of poetry in Book 10 recalls the earlier portrayal of the tyrant: the image of the tyrant demonstrates the state of the soul which poetry threatens to produce. Douglas Cairns discusses Plato’s tripartite soul as a metaphor intendedtoelucidate the behavior of persons and considers how Plato’s fundamental concern with the agency of persons “intrudes” upon the metaphor in various ways. A. G. Long’s and Kathryn Morgan’s complementary essays, each one dealing with Plato’s Ship of...