Abstract

Miller begins by contrasting two ways of regarding Plato’s Statesman. According to "the standard view," this late work is more a treatise than a dialogue. Here Plato’s doctrinal intent clearly overwhelmed his flair for dramatic invention. His positive teaching is presented by a stranger; Socrates the questioner is given a minor role. According to Miller, on the other hand, the Statesman is no less than any other Platonic dialogue a unity whose form and content, dramatic situation and argument, communicative function and "philosophic substance," are internally related. Furthermore, the doctrine it presents is adequately understood only if one regards it both as a mean between truth and ignorance about what is in question and as a means to the truth still in question. The dialogue’s "surface" and "subsurface" content, too, are internally related.