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2 results

  • Chapter 12 - Beginnings

  • Christopher Whitton, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose
    Published online:
    10 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019, pp 473-494

  • Summary

    This short chapter first reviews the argument of the book, then goes back to beginnings. The Institutio opens with strong generic positioning, situating Quintilian’s project against Cicero’s Orator and Sallust’s Jugurtha. Pliny’s cover note (Epistles 1.1) operates more discreetly, but reveals itself, through precise reworking of Quintilian’s cover note to Trypho, as an infrared invitation to read this collection of letters as ‘Quintilian in Brief’. Further traces of Quintilian’s first and last prefaces (Institutio 1.pr. and 12.pr.) in Epistles 1.2 and 9.1-2 offer final, open-ended confirmation that the Insitutio is hard-wired into the Epistles from start to end: Latin prose imitation, in Pliny’s hands, is a very fine art.

  • 2 - Platonic ring-composition and Republic 10

  • Edited by Mark L. McPherran, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
  • Book:
    Plato's 'Republic'
    Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    25 November 2010, pp 32-51

  • Summary

    Ring-composition makes it possible for the culminating insights and conclusions of a work to be experienced as moments of recognition. It is found in every kind of temporally extended artistic composition, on every scale, and in a bewildering variety of patterns: ABA, ABBA, ABCBA, ABCCBA, and so on indefinitely. Scholars have inferred that it is a marker of oral composition; but ring-composition of various kinds is pervasive in later Greek literature as well as well, including Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, and various orators and epigrammatists. It has tended to go undetected in philosophical texts-or perhaps to be ignored as philosophically insignificant. The chapter remedies this partially for the case of Plato, and the Republic in particular, after noting some other instances of ring-composition in Plato and Aristotle. It shows ring-composition in Plato and Aristotle, and explanatory regress more generally, as expressing a distinctively Platonic-Aristotelian conception of philosophical method.