The End of Dialogue in Antiquity

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Cambridge University Press, 8/6/2018
EAN 9781108823845, ISBN10: 110882384X

Paperback, 276 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity. This book, a general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, openness and playfulness in changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today's world.

Introduction
why don't Christians do dialogue? Simon Goldhill
Part I. Classical Models
1. Fictions of dialogue in Thucydides Emily Greenwood
2. The beginnings of dialogue
Socratic discourses and fourth-century prose Andrew Ford
3. Plato's dialogues and a common rationale for dialogue form Alex Long
Part II. Empire Models
4. Ciceronian dialogue Malcolm Schofield
5. Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE Jason KÃƒÂ¶nig
Part III. Christianity and the Theological Imperative
6. Can we talk? Augustine and the possibility of dialogue Gillian Clark
7. Let's (not) talk about it
Augustine and the control of epistolary dialogue Richard Miles
Part IV. Christianity and the Social
8. Christians, dialogue and patterns of sociability in late antiquity Richard Lim
9. Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian 'afterlife' of Classical dialogue Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo
Part V. Judaism and the Limits of Dialogue
10. No dialogue at the symposium? Conviviality in Ben Sira and the Palestinian Talmud Seth Schwartz
11. Dialectic and divination in the Talmud Daniel Boyarin.