Isocrate ospite di Platone nel dialogo sui poeti di Prassifane *

Abstract

Isocrates as a Platon’s guest in Praxiphanes’ dialogue On Poets

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the character of Praxiphanes’ work On Poets and especially to reconsider, more closely than previous critics have done, why Isocrates appears in this work not only in dialogue with Plato, but in a dialogue on literary topics, particularly on poets. According to some important passages of Plato’s Phaedrus and several discourses of Isocrates, Praxiphanes’ choice of Plato and Isocrates as protagonists of the work On Poets is justified. This choice
is actually determined not only by the general awareness of the role which poets play for Plato and Isocrates in developing a personal form of literature, but also by the knowledge of the passages where both of them talk about the poets’ role in education.