Clever.
I was always mildly amused at Plato launching his attacks on the drama by means of... um... an essentially dramatic form.

It's like using a TV programme to slag off TV. YOU HEAR THAT, CHARLIE BROOKER, YOU FAT, FATUOUS TWAT?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 14 Sep 2009, 11:58, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

Have you read the Ion?
"Socrates" slags off Ion for being a...fuck, can't remember, bard in English, it's not quite a rhetor... ah well. But tells him he is not a true artist, just an interpreter of interpreters. That the poet gets his inspiration from the Muses, and interprets it. And in his recital he only interprets what has gone before.

Plato writing as Socrates? Interpreting what has gone before? Eh? Eh? EH?
( Lampito rise with the moon, go to bed with the sun, Mon 14 Sep 2009, 12:04, Reply)

Linda Smith had a nice little joke
based on the idea that Plato was an annoyingly smarmy and meretricious student of Socrates, whom he spent his whole life following around and saying, "Wow! That's a tremendously clever thing to have said! I must write it down!"
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 14 Sep 2009, 12:07, Reply)

But you have to hand it to him.
Socrates never wrote anything down. So much stuff would have been lost.
And you don't know what is Socrates and what is Plato. Socrates could have been a twat; Plato could just be making him make sense.

Or not.
( Lampito rise with the moon, go to bed with the sun, Mon 14 Sep 2009, 12:09, Reply)

Hmmm
At least Plato wasn't above throwing in the odd pun here and there. And he's man enough to admit that most of the dialogues happen at drinking-parties.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 14 Sep 2009, 12:13, Reply)