This volume offers perspectives on examples of key ingredients in Plato’s writing: particularly of argument, allegory, images, and myth, of intertextuality, and of paradox, but also his characterization of speakers he portrays in dialogue, now through narration, now direct dramatic presentation, and his assumed readerships. All the essays included were prompted by perception of something problematic: either in a passage within a dialogue itself, or in the way scholarship had tackled or failed to tackle a topic. First come three approaching the corpus as a whole, three different vantage points. The next group of three focus on arguments and disputants within the overall argumentative structure of three very different dialogues: Gorgias, Cratylus, and Parmenides. A third group contains two studies of celebrated imaginative fictions – the Noble Lie and the Cave – that perform key but unstraightforward roles in the philosophical strategy of the Republic. The final six chapters discuss the Laws. They explore further literary and philosophical dimensions of Plato’s writing in the last and longest of his dialogues, nowadays yielding up more philosophical rewards than was once the case.

The character of Cratylus in the Cratylus is puzzling. Initially he is portrayed as a teasingly mysterious figure, and he is silent for most of it. But he adopts a quite different demeanour when he joins the conversation towards its end. Now he functions as a mostly reasonable and altogether cooperative respondent, even if he takes rigid and extreme positions. I argue that Plato uses Cratylus first to sketch linguistic naturalism in the dogmatic and dialectically unelaborated form in which it was presented by its original author. Then after Socrates has made of it a full scale philosophical theory on his own account, he puts Cratylus to another use: as a proponent of a version of that original naturalist position which is now developed as the germ of a rival full-scale theory in miniature, incorporating semantic, epistemological, and ontological components, and constructed from paradoxical stances generated by a range of previous and contemporary philosophers, including notably Antisthenes: a construction of Plato’s own. Hence for Plato Cratylus’ fascination: in the end his strange doctrine forces engagement with an interconnected set of deeply serious philosophical issues.

Early attempts by Parthian rulers to take Babylon were short-lived, but in 141 BC they established their kingship by celebrating the New Year festival. Chronicles and astronomical diaries continued to be written. An independent ruler of Maysan in the Sealand, Hyspaosines, captured the port on the Tigris, took control of Bahrain and Failaka to control Gulf trade, and briefly claimed kingship of Babylon. He wrote in Aramaic. The Parthians regained control and rebuilt the Greek theatre. The old buildings and city plan continued to be in use, although the Summer Palace had been reroofed with terracotta tiles. New kinds of text were written on clay in cuneiform, astronomical science developed; an archive shows that temples were still active, and much older literature was still prized. Greek knowledge of the Epic of Creation was still alive in Athens from the time of Alexander until the sixth century AD. The cult of Bēl had spread west to Palmyra, to the Aegean island of Kos, and north to Edessa. In AD 116 Trajan visited the Summer Palace on a pilgrimage to the place where Alexander had died.

Adapting certain features of Empedoclean daimonology, Plato formulated a more rigorous theory of daimonification through virtue. He daimonified the soldiers of his ideal republic for their courage, and daimonified rulers (“guardians”) for their wisdom. In his Cratylus, Plato vouched for the daimonification of all people who were noble and wise. Plato’s Timaeus introduced the ultimate democratic principle of daimonification by identifying one’s guardian daimon with humanity’s higher consciousness (or nous).