Abstract

I know of nothing that has caused me to dream more on Plato’s secrecy and his sphinx nature than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a volume of Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life to which he said No—without an Aristophanes? Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato was reputed to have been so “well regulated”(kosmiois) as never once to have been seen to “laugh excessively” (gelôn huperagan . . . kômikôn).1 Nietzsche describes Plato as so humorless as to be positively “boring” (1968, 117). John Sallis not only ascribes to this notoriously solemn philosopher a sense of ..