In the opening of his introduction to The Portable Plato, Scott Buchanan writes the following sentence:
"In the year 1948 the reading of Plato's dialogues by a large number of people could make the difference between a century of folly and a century of wisdom."
I have been teaching Plato's dialogues to first-year American university students since 1960, and I have watched and listened, like Er between heaven and hell, as generations of students have read Mr. Buchanan's sentence and responded with cynical silence or rueful laughter. I have met young men and women in the text of the Republic and the other dialogues for 40 years, autumn and spring, year upon year upon year; it has been my experience to witness the cynical silence and riotous amathia of the 1960s, the rueful laughter of the whining 1990s, the what-shall-we-call-it of the new century. Like Er, I have told my tale to living men — and women. And I still have hope.
Buchanan reminds us that there is a legend that Plato was a comic poet before he met Socrates, but that the story is probably false; Buchanan maintains, however, that "Plato was certainly a comic poet in the dialogues," and that the dialogues are peopled by "characters [who] are stylized to the point of becoming . . . the stock characters of comedy." And in his discussion of the theatrical machinery of the dialogues, Buchanan provides us a dramatis personae for each of the dialogues he includes in his text. The upshot of Buchanan's argument seems to be that, like Socrates himself, we begin the dialogues in perplexity and end in perplexity and laughter, a comedic point of view. Perhaps this is so; perhaps this is not so. Perhaps we are to exit, like Socrates, laughing.
