Speaker identifications in Plato

Greek Learning Greek
1

I had been thinking about speaker identifications in Plato today, while listening to an audio-recording of Euthyphro that didn’t have them. I noticed that I had no trouble at all following the speaker, despite there being no real separation of voices for the two characters. I’ve heard audio-books in English where it was not so easy to follow dialogue. It seems obvious to me that Plato put in a fair number of cues to his readers to let them identify speakers even without printing the names.

And then later in the afternoon, I ran into this section from an article linked in another Textkit thread:

Another regrettable habit of editors is that of plastering the names of a dialogue’s speakers at the head of the text. And while I am about it, I take this opportunity of impugning the convention of inserting speaker-identifications within the body of the text. If the convention “is now regarded as essential” (N.G. Wilson, CQ 20 [1970] 305), it ought not to be, for such extra-textual interference destroys the text’s self-sufficiency and so does real damage to the way the text is read. In genuinely dramatic texts the practice is defensible, indeed highly desirable, inasmuch as it compensates for the degradation of the medium (the conversion of play to script), but Platonic dialogues are not dramatic but pseudo-dramatic, and identification of speakers is something that should be left to the reader to elicit from the text itself, part and parcel of the challenge built in to reading written dialogue. That said, the sad truth must be admitted that we modern readers are no longer capable of walking without the crutches that editors provide, and it would be deemed a dereliction of duty if OCT editors failed to provide them. But we should recognize that in a world true to Plato we would do without them.

2

I would say your experience certainly hints at the quality of the writing as well as at your own language skills!

However, I find the criticism you cited quite exaggerated. Modern editions of ancient texts contain lots of helpful additions or modifications that are not really true to the original, but that are very helpful nonetheless, such as the distinction betwenn uppercase and lowercase letters, diacritics, punctuation, chapter and line numbers, etc.

I think adding the names of the speakers is just one of those additions that make reading these texts a little bit more comfortable, which I consider a good thing. And I really don’t see what harm it could do, even if it is not “authentic”; it doesn’t change the meaning of the text, after all.

3

Just a small comment regarding comparing Platonic dialogues to drama. The original texts of the dramas did also not include any indications of speakers, so they were actually very similar to the dialogues in form. The main difference is that drama is in metre and dialogues are in prose.

4

True, but notice what the reviewer says:

it compensates for the degradation of the medium (the conversion of play to script)

The plays themselves did contain speaker identifications, in that a different actor spoke each line. Then the play was degraded to a script (written down), and lost the speaker identifications. Since the play was never intended to be read as a script (as we do today), our addition of speaker identifications is more justified than it would be for Plato, which was always meant to be read from a text.

(Of course, we could imagine that Plato was writing down the actual spoken dialogue of real discussions conducted by Socrates. But that seems fanciful, even for the Apology).

5

I’m curious, what is your audio source for Euthyphro?

6

Myself, actually.