Leggere e Bruciare

Critica alla scrittura e segreto pitagorico nella Seconda Lettera pseudo-platonica

Abstract

A harsh debate has risen among scholars about the Platonic passages that contain a criticism of writing, since a correct understanding of Plato’s critical attitude towards writing is crucial for interpreting his work, and the famous unwritten doctrines attributed to him. Quite rarely, though, the scholarship has investigated the reception of such passages, and especially of the excursus in the controversial Seventh Letter, within the ancient Platonic tradition. In this paper, I will examine a key text, the spurious Second Letter of the platonic epistolary: a close survey of this document shows that some Platonists understood the critical attitude of Plato towards writing in a radical perspective that reminds of that of some modern interpreters of Plato. The forger uses the Seventh Letter as a model, and tries to present Plato as a Pythagorean: this “Pythagorean Plato” rejects the dialogue as a means of philosophical communication, rather choosing methods typical of Pythagoreanism in order to convey his teaching, such as the private letter, the riddle and the hypomnema. In this forgery, which belongs to the milieu of Hellenistic Pythagorean literature, Plato’s silence on the most important things is broken through a literary device, allowing his philosophy to be interpreted with a dogmatic approach based on the unwritten doctrines.