Abstract

Although acknowledging both the style and terminology of the Seventh Letter to be genuinely Platonic in character, Edelstein is nevertheless convinced that "the whole concept of Plato the man and the philosopher proposed in the epistle is in contradiction with the spirit and the letter of Platonic teaching." In order to expose this "perversion" of true Platonism, he seeks to establish the spuriousness of the letter first on grounds of historical discrepancy, secondly on grounds of philosophical discrepancy with the dialogues. A final section seeks to confirm these findings by setting the Seventh Letter in the context of the other letters—evidence against the genuineness of which Edelstein finds "overwhelming." Through an ingenious use of Plutarch's Life of Dion and carefully selected references from the dialogues, the first section seeks to persuade the reader that the author of the letter is confused about Plato's own youth and early manhood, about both the motivation and the accounts of the journeys to Sicily, about the content of any advice given to Dion and Dionysius, and finally about the portrayal of Dion, Dionysius, and Plato himself. Edelstein's own suggestion is that the letter was forged about twelve years after Plato's death by some unknown admirer who, wishing to reinterpret Plato's life more favorably, modelled his version on Timoleon of Corinth. From Edelstein's point of view, it is important to urge the spuriousness of the letter on historical grounds before coming to grips with the so-called philosophic digression since it is the letter's interpretation of Platonic philosophy and philosophic method that he wishes above all to reject. Drawing less heavily on the dialogues and more on his own sense of contradiction, Edelstein attempts to establish the unplatonic character of both the philosophical testing of Dionysius and the views on philosophical writing. The account of philosophic method as a "passing in turn from one to another [of the Four], up and down" is dismissed as evidently divergent from dialectic—although no serious attempt is made to analyze or compare the two. Finally, interpreting the doctrine of the Fifth as indication that for the author of the letter "the Ideas themselves are thoughts" and "as thoughts of the mind are as it were part and parcel of the mind," Edelstein moves to his conclusion: the forger of the Seventh Letter is a post-Platonic member of the Academy for whom the Ideas are only conceptually real. It is of course disappointing that "one must resign oneself to classifying him as a Platonist of sorts whose name and background are unknown."—R. D.