![]() According to Hermias, what the ancients saw as a streak of juvenility was not the theme of love, but the contentious manner in which it was presented, as well as the contentious manner in which Plato argued against Lysias. Hermias begins his Commentary on the Phaedrus by taking on Plato’s critics who maintained that Plato in the dialogue argued for and against love ‘like a youngling’ ( hôsper meirakion), and that he contended against the speech of Lysias as a ‘contentious youngster’ ( philoneikou neou). In order to decide which is the syntactic function of kai gar in the given case, we must enquire into the meaning of meirakiôdes as it recurs in ancient references to the dialogue. ![]() For example, in Apology 34d3-5 Socrates addresses an imaginary critic: ‘My friend, I have a family, and indeed ( kai gar), as Homer says, I am “not of a tree or of a rock”, I am a man.’ The connective kai gar introduces the quotation from Homer in support of Socrates’ statement ‘My friend, I have a family’ so as to give it a special touch, but Socrates’ having a family does not causally depend on Homer’s saying. And yet, although the combination of kai and gar can occasionally have the force of the causal ‘for’, it usually introduces a clause that merely corroborates the aforesaid it then has the force of ‘and indeed’, or ‘for there is a further fact’ (5). The connective kai gar, which links meirakiôdes (‘of the freshness of youth’, ‘youthful’ (3), ‘boyishly mischievous’ (4), or ‘youthfully contentious’) to the statement about the dating of the dialogue, is thus given a causal force. As a consequence, Diogenes’ source was dismissed as a pedant who could not envisage Plato in his later years writing with passion on love. ![]() As early as 1792 the element of ‘youthfulness’ was identified by Tennemann with the theme of love (2). Grounds for discrediting the ancient tradition have been found in Diogenes’ clause ‘For the subject has about it something of the freshness of youth’, which has been taken as the actual basis on which the story of the dating was founded.
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