Overview

Plato challenges his readers by depicting an elderly Socrates as an enthusiastic student of rhetoric who has learned from his teacher Aspasia to recite an inspiring funeral oration, an oration that conspicuously refers to events occurring after the deaths of Socrates and Aspasia, an oration that Aspasia, as a woman and a non-Athenian, was not eligible to deliver over the Athenians who died in war. This commentary, the first in English in over 100 years, assists the modern reader in confronting Plato's challenge. The Introduction sets the dialogue in the context of the traditional Athenian funeral oration and of Plato's ongoing critique of contemporary rhetoric. The Commentary, which is well suited to the needs and interests of intermediate students of Classical Greek, provides guidance on grammatical and historical matters, while allowing the student to appreciate Plato's mastery of Greek prose style and critique of democratic ideology.

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9781108499408

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Reviews

'Sansone's Menexenus constitutes an intelligent, learned, and welcome attempt to take a dialogue often considered peripheral and return it to the center of Plato's philosophical concerns. In this as in other ways, it succeeds admirably.' Geoff Bakewell, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Author Information

David Sansone is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a career of over forty years he has taught a great variety of courses, and these have often inspired his publications, including Ancient Greek Civilization (3rd ed. 2017) and Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport (1988). The main focus of his research, however, has been on Greek language and literature, especially Attic tragedy and its influence on the development of Greek prose; his book Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric (2012) argues for the decisive effect Greek tragedy had on the creation of a formal art of rhetoric in fifth-century Greece.

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