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First words: a valedictory lecture1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

M. F. Burnyeat
M. F. Burnyeat
Affiliation:
Robinson College, Cambridge/All Souls College, Oxford
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Extract

Mr Vice-Chancellor,

May I thank you for coming to preside at this occasion, and thank everyone else for coming to be presided over – most especially my colleagues in the Faculty of Classics. You were not all here when I joined the Faculty eighteen years ago, but you have all helped to sustain the atmosphere of cooperation, good will, and intellectual adventure, which has made this Faculty such a wonderful place to work and teach in. There is much that I shall miss when I go. But that is not what I want to talk about now. To borrow the words of our Chairman, Ian DuQuesnay, I should like this occasion to be a party rather than a wake.

What I want to say is this. It is too late now – twelve years too late – to apologize for not having given an Inaugural Lecture. There was no particular moment when I decided not to, just many many moments when other work seemed both more urgent and, to be honest, more interesting. The trouble with Inaugural Lectures is that you are expected to define your subject and say how it ought to be done. You begin by paying respectful tribute to your predecessor – in my case G. E. L. Owen, so the tribute would have been sincere and a pleasure to compose. But then comes the hard part, in which you set out ‘the aims and objectives’ (as the managerial language of our present rulers would have us call them) of your discipline. In other words, I would have had to tell myself and my colleagues where ancient philosophy in Cambridge ought to go and how it ought to get there.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 43 , 1998 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

2 The list (in my fallible memory) of the works we studied together on various occasions is the following: the fragments of (respectively) Xenophanes, Empedocles, Diogenes of Apollonia, Philolaus, Archytas; Gorgias, On not being; Plato, , Charmides, Meno, Republic 10Google Scholar, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Cratylus, Timaeus, Epistles, Minos; Aristotle, , Physics 5Google Scholar, De Generatione et corruptione, De anima, Metaphysics θ, Λ, and ΜΝ; Theophrastus, De sensibus, Metaphysics; Philodemus, Rhetorica; Lucretius, , De rerum natura 5Google Scholar; Cicero, Academica; Seneca, De ira, Epistulae morales; Plutarch, De communibus notitiis; Cleomedes, De motu circulari; Alexander, De fato; Galen, De optima doctrina, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis; Empiricus, Sextus, Adversus mathematicos 7Google Scholar; Alcinous, Didaskalikos; Plotinus, Enneads 5.1 and 6.8; Porphyry, De abstinentia; Proclus, In Platonis Parmenidem, In Platonis Timaeum; Simplicius, In Aristotelis Physica 1; Buridan, , Sophismata 8Google Scholar. My personal enlightenment was increased by an additional series of seminars with successive generations of graduate students: Plato, , Phaedo, Republic 8–9Google Scholar, Politicus, Philebus; Aristotle, , De partibus animalium 1Google Scholar, Metaphysics Z; Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus; Lucretius, , De rerum natura 3 and 4Google Scholar; Cicero, , De finibus 5Google Scholar; Galen, De subfiguratione empirica; Alexander, De mixtione; Sextus, , Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1Google Scholar; Plotinus, Enneads 1.6 and 3.7; Augustine, De doctrina Christiana.

3 πϱοαχηχοότας: for the translation, see Schenkeveld, D. M., ‘Prose Usages of Ἀχούω “To Read”’, Classical Quarterly 42 (1992) 129–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The fons et origo of this approach is Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (1964) ch.2Google Scholar; a longer and more explicit version may be found in Bloom, Allan, The Republic of Plato, translated, with notes and an interpretive essay (1968)Google Scholar.

5 Anyone who wants to be bored may read my ‘Sphinx without a secret’, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1983Google ScholarPubMed; repr. in Smith, Nicholas D. (ed.) Plato: Critical Assessments (forthcoming), Vol. I, 333–48Google Scholar.

6 ‘The Stoic–Platonist debate on Kathêkonta’ in Ierodiakonou, K. (ed.), Topics in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

7 Plato himself invokes a musical analogy at Laws 722de.

8 The Theaetetus of Plato (1990).

9 McPherran, Mark, ‘Knowing the Theaetetus’, Phronesis 38 (1993) at 331–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 How do I know? It is presupposed by obvious cross-references at the beginning of the Timaeus and at Laws 739, not to mention numerous apparent echoes and allusions in later dialogues.

11 Riginos, Alice Swift, Platonica: The anecdotes concerning the life and writings of Plato (1976) 185–6Google Scholar.

12 Depending on which source you follow, it was the first four words (Demetrius, , On style 205Google Scholar), or the first six (Quint. Inst. 8.6.64). For a modern analysis (of the first eight words), see Denniston, J. D., Greek prose style (1952) 41Google Scholar.

13 Translations throughout from the Loeb Classical Library, with corrections.

14 Cf. also 533d with Shorey's note (the ‘eye of the soul' buried in mud in the world below) and 519c (the philosophers feel they have been transported to the Isles of the Blest).

15 Cambridge University Reporter (1 Dec. 1989) 287–8Google ScholarPubMed.

16 Homeric role models and the Platonic psychology, (Diss., Cambridge 1990) 206–7Google Scholar, concluding ‘Before anyone can truly govern a state, s/he must first know the foundations of all knowledge, ethical included. Socrates went down to the Peiraeus yesterday; Apollodorus went up to town the day before’.

17 After the lecture Eric Handley pointed out to me that the repetition ‘god, god’ is itself a ritualistic formula: Bacch. Epin. 3.21; Diagoras, frag. 1.1; Verg. Ecl. 5.64.

18 See Baxter, Timothy M. S., The Cratylus: Plato's critique of naming (1992; originally a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis) 11Google Scholar.

19 Recollection and experience: Plato's theory of learning and its successors (1995; originally a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis)Google Scholar.

20 ‘The Meno and the mysteries of mathematics’, Phronesis 37 (1992) 116–83Google Scholar.

21 Parke, H. W., The Festivals of Athens (1977) 150Google Scholar.

22 The parts are roughly equal, Glaucon having only 801 more lines than Adeimantus: Auguste Diès, Introduction to the Budé edition of Plato, 's Republic (1947) xxii–viGoogle Scholar.

23 Distinguish ἀσθένεια from the diseases (νόσοι) later analysed in strikingly moralistic terms (81e–6a).

24 Quite acommon source of scribal dispute: cf. Rep. 537cl, Phileb. 19d7.

25 Closing words are another rich topic: each of the three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy ends with the word ‘stelle’.

26 First pointed out to me in an undergraduate essay many years ago by Jeremy Worthen.