Everything about Epinomis totally explained
The
Epinomis (
Greek: Ἐπινομίς) is a
dialogue in the style of
Plato and traditionally included among Plato's works. Today it's widely considered spurious because of its contents and because already some ancient sources attributed it to
Philip of Opus.
Title
The title
Epinomis designates the work as an appendix to Plato's
Laws (whose title in Greek is
Nomoi). Our sources also make reference to it as the thirteenth book of the
Laws (though this presupposes the division of that dialogue into twelve books, which "is probably not earlier than the Hellenistic age"), as well as under the titles
Nocturnal Council (because it deals with the higher education of that Council, beyond what is described in
Laws, in
mathematics-based
astronomy) and
Philosopher (probably because the Nocturnal Council's members are "the counterpart of the guardians in the
Republic who are said to be the true philosophers").
Dramatis personae
The persons involved in the dialogue are the same as in
Laws: Clinias of
Crete, Megillus of
Sparta, and an
Athenian stranger.
Question of authenticity
The
Epinomis forms part of the traditional canon of Plato's works (for example, it's included in the ninth and last of the
Thrasyllan tetralogies). Already in antiquity, however,
Diogenes Laertius and the sources used by the
Suda attributed the work to
Philip of Opus.
The authenticity of
Epinomis has also been questioned on the grounds of its philosophical content. Leonardo Tarán, while finding parallels for many of the allegedly un-Platonic elements of the dialogue's style, declared it spurious based on (in the words of a sympathetic reviewer) "the much firmer ground of the misunderstanding or contradiction of Platonic doctrines, such as the placing of astronomy above dialectic as the supreme object of study, the rejection of the
Ideas, the introduction of a fifth element,
aether, between fire and air, and the elaborate theory of daemons inhabiting the three middle elements."
Werner Jaeger detected the influence of
Aristotle's
On Philosophy (a lost work Jaeger believed to have been published shortly before
Epinomis in
348/
347 BC) on much of the
Epinomis, including the idea of the "fifth body."
Gerard Ledger's
stylometric analysis of Plato's works supports the authenticity of
Epinomis, finding statistical similarities between this dialogue and
Laws,
Philebus,
Sophist, and
Timaeus (as well as the
Seventh Letter). Holger Thesleff, who suspected that Plato collaborated with younger associates in writing many of the works attributed to him, considered the closely related style of
Laws and
Epinomis to be a "secretary's style."
Further Information
Get more info on 'Epinomis'.
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