Thrasylus' Platonic Canon and the Double Titles

Abstract

the p)ublished editions. .. 1 In translating Diogenes Laertius for THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY, R. D. Hicks writes: To each of the works Tlhrasylus affixes a double title, the one taken from the name of the interlocutor, the other from the subject.2 The present study proposes to inquire whether the usual association of Thrasylus with the double titles for the Platonic corpus is fact or fiction. As Classicists frequently admit, in Greek literature there is not necessarily complete correlation between the title of a treatise and its theme. The Anabasis of Xenophon, for example, treats at greater length the katabasis of the Ten Thousan(d Greeks. In interpreting Soplhocles, likewise, the titles should not deter one from weaving the theme of the Antigone around Creon, and of the Ajax around Odysseus, as H. D. F. Kitto does in his excellent analyses.3 The case of Homer's Iliad is almost too obvious for comment the theme concerns merely one incident in the career of one hero during approximately fifty days in the last year of a ten year struggle around Troy.4 Also in the Platonic canon, there is no necessary correlation between the first titles, which by tradition are by far the more popular, and the subject of the composition. In fact, of the thirty-five dialogues in Thrasylus' canon (not including the thirteen Epistles) the popular titles of twenty-nine manifestly do not denote the theme of the treatise twenty-five dialogues derive their names from a character who participates in the discussion 5, two from famous persons to wlhom reference is made in the discourse 6, one from the condition of two of' its charac-