Elaine Scarry in The Boston Review:
When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, and when they turned their attention back to him, they found the infant’s mouth full of golden sweetness. Cicero provides our first surviving record of the legend, which is repeated with variations over centuries, always as a portent of the sweet style the infant would ultimately possess.
Plato’s honeyed voice was celebrated in classical antiquity by thinkers as different as Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius. Praise for Plato’s literary genius regularly recurs until at least the early nineteenth century. As the Romantic poet Percy Shelley writes, “Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive.”
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