The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues by Ruby Blondell (review)

212 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS ultimately destructive type necessarily characterized by an overly dominant thumos.3 The book ends with a brief epilogue, "The weaver's art: andreia in the Politicus and Laws," in which the question of the relationship between the thumos and andreia is taken up beyond the avowed scope of the book proper only to note that Plato appears to have ended his life doubting whether the raw drive of the thumos could ever truly be harnessed so as to serve the Platonic conception of andreia without the educational programme of an ideal state. It seems only fitting that Hobbs ends the book on such a note of uncertainty , since one of its signal strengths is its refusal to accept simple answers to the difficult questions it poses. Not everyone will be satisfied with the answers suggested, not even, I would hazard, Hobbs herself. A case in point: Hobbs frequently questions the very usefulness or even the desirability of human (let alone male) role models, since Plato himself seems ambivalent as to whether our hllmanity is to be fully embraced or utterly transcended. If one opts for the latter, then the importance of role models (human or male) as a tool for approaching Plato's ethical psychology would appear to be significantly undermined. Be that as it may, the refreshingly Socratic app. oach that Hobbs brings to the complex relationship between the thumos and andreia in Plato and the Hero is itself an example of Platonic scholarship worthy of emulation . JOHN P. HARRIS DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND CLASSICS UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA EDMONTON, AB T6G 2H4 RUBY BLONDELL. The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 452. ISBN 0-521-79300-9. There is now little excuse for the reader \tvho supposes that the only thing of value in the dialogues of Plato is philosophy, even if it were what Plato valued most. There is little excuse for attempts to analyse 3 Hobbs's reading of the end of the Symposium accords with, but does not cite, the conclusions reached by Diskin Clay, "T e tragic and comic poet of the Symposium," Arion n.s. 2 (1975) 238-261 (repriJ ted in John P. Anton and Anthony Preus. eds., Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy. 2 [Albany 1985] 186-202). For a different interpretation of the dialogue's conclusion, see John P. Harris. "Plato's Ion and the end of his Symposium," ICS2.6 (2001) 81-100. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 213 Plato without reference to the literary and dramatic vehicles by which he seeks to have us think through the issues. Even so, doctrinal approaches to Plato have a long modern history, while literary and dramatic approaches are only just acquiring the discipline needed to achieve the required level of persuasiveness. There are books which take several times the length of a dialogue in order to say little more of value than an attentive reading of the dialogue would offer. losing in the meantime the immediacy and attractiveness of the originaL and straying unnecessarily into speculative intertextual by-ways where the exacting reader never needs to go. While passages in the current book fail to persuade me of their accuracy or relevance, it is overall a substantial contribution towards giving discipline to the study of the literary Plato, and hence it can make a greater impact on the study of Plato the philosopher. In the opening chapter on "Drama and dialogue" the author, though giving most attention to the didactic Socrates and the Eleatic Visitor who will at some point oust him, takes a rather strong line against the idea of finding Platonic "spokesmen" within the dialogues (18), and emphasizes Plato's non-authoritarian manner (39). She sees the historical contexts as a means of relating the questions to real life (48), and the dialogue form itself "as an assertion of human plurality" (49). I should take this further, since the separate situations in which the speakers are embodied necessarily gives them different perspectives on issues under discussion, something that cannot have escaped an age in which Protagoras ' influence was so deeply felt. Dialogue is required to overcome any perspective that...

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