Note 33 — Chapter III · THE ART OF THINKING

Along another line it should have been clear that the dialogues of the philosophers were drama and not history. It would appear (Croiset, Littérature Grecque, vol. III, pp. 448 et seq.) that with Epicharmus of Cos, who was settled in Megara at the beginning of the fifth century, philosophic comedy flourished brilliantly at Syracuse, and indeed fragments of his formal philosophic dialogue survive. Thus it is suggested that Athenian comedy and sophistic prose dialogues may be regarded as two branches drawn from the ancient prototype of such Syracusan comedy, itself ultimately derived from Ionian philosophy. It is worth noting, I might add, that when we first hear of the Platonic dialogues they were being grouped in trilogies and tetralogies like the Greek dramas; that indicates, at all events, what their earliest editors thought about them. It is also interesting to note that the writer of, at the present moment, the latest handbook to Plato, Professor A. E. Taylor (Plato, 1922, pp. 32-33), regards the “Socrates” of Plato as no historical figure, not even a mask of Plato himself, but simply “the hero of the Platonic drama,” of which we have to approach in much the same way as the work of “a great dramatist or novelist.”