Abstract

When Mr. Levinson refers to the etymologies as a "circus parade" without underscoring the fact that they take up better than half of the dialogue, he is suppressing a detail that fits his figure of speech rather badly: surely this is an extravagantly long parade for the one-ring Heraclitean-taming act that follows! If this major section were an unordered collection of linguistic facts, puns, and free associations, one could only think that Plato's usual uncanny sense of coherence and proportion had lapsed completely when he perpetrated it.