Abstract
Critics, from Athenaeus in the second century CE and Eduard Zeller in the nineteenth, to the present day, have been concerned with problems of authenticity and the dating of Plato’s work, including the inconsistent internal dramatic dates of the dialogues and other anachronisms within them. This article examines the relationship between the imaginary time of the dialogues and Plato’s own context, between the blurring of time and temporal relationships in the dialogues and the arguments that they contain, the construction of anachronistic communities and genealogies within them, through which Plato negotiates his own relationship with Socrates, and the deconstruction and re-negotiation of familial relationships, particularly those between fathers and sons. It uses insights from recent explorations of temporality in queer theory to generate a historicist reading that emphasizes the affective role of time within Plato’s writing. It argues that Plato uses the temporal setting of dialogues to underscore themes of their arguments, and that these anachronic settings can be read as an artefact of Plato’s own reception of Socrates’ life and death, and its context in the turmoil of the Peloponnesian War and the loss and restoration of democracy.
