The textual transmission and history of Plato, Symposium 201d1-212c3
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Date
2019-12-17
Authors
Tomlinson, Jessie
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Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the history and textual transmission of Plato, Symposium 201d1–212c3. The first chapter summarizes the content of the passage. This summary reveals a passage which is of great interest at various levels to the study of Plato. Chapter two deals with the direct tradition. It demonstrates that the medieval manuscripts form a bipartite stemma, while the papyrus vacillates between the two branches of the stemma; the result is that the primary witnesses show a stable text. Chapter three looks at the indirect tradition. The variant readings of the testimonia do not link any author closely to any of the primary witnesses or manuscript families; in short, the testimonia do not provide compelling evidence to suggest that the state of the text in antiquity was different from that recorded by the medieval manuscripts. The first part of chapter four examines the indirect tradition (direct quotations); the second part of the chapter explores the ways in which Symposium 202d1–203a8 influenced later authors. The first part demonstrates that the variants in the testimonia conform to practices of quoting common in antiquity, showing that, for the most part, the text that the testimonia transmit is essentially the same as that transmitted in the primary witnesses. In the second part, a selection of passages demonstrates that the influence of Symposium 202d1–203a8 extends far beyond that of manuscript transmission and verbatim quotation.
To explore the textual tradition, the starting point has been the 1989 edition of Vicaire and Laborderie, but their readings have been checked against those of the apparatus to the forthcoming second volume of Platonis Opera in the new Oxford Classical Text, and, in some places, against the manuscripts, papyrus, and editions of the testimonia themselves.
The thesis concludes that the ancient transmission of Symposium 201d1–212c3 was relatively stable; that the testimonia show that the state of the text in antiquity resembled that transmitted in the primary witnesses; and that the influence of Symposium 212d1–203a8 can be seen from Plato’s immediate successors to modern day sources.
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