Tim Whitmarsh at Literary Review:
James Romm’s Plato and the Tyrant describes the next phase, when the city slid into tyranny under first a father and then his son, both named Dionysius. This is a work of history, but it is as compelling as any novel. Syracuse in the late-classical period found itself locked in a love-hate relationship with Athens. The frenemy cities could not get enough of each other. Plato and the Tyrant reconstructs a crucial chapter in that psychodrama.
Both Dionysius I and II seem to have hosted Plato, the famous Athenian philosopher, in Syracuse. I write ‘seem to’, because the only contemporary ‘evidence’ for Plato’s visit comes in a series of letters attributed to him. Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure of Plato (who barely speaks of himself in his works) a richer, more glamorous biography. Romm is a self-avowed maximalist: he not only accepts as Platonic the parts of the letters relevant to the Syracusan stay but is also open-minded about many of the details archived in the much later biographical accounts of Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius.
more here.
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