Formes et genres du dialogue antique

This volume aims to explore the diversity of forms and practices of the ancient dialogue as a genre. As a literary work in its own right, a prose drama, the dialogue was first invented in the Socratic circles of 4th century Athens. The practice was not really theorised before the Hellenistic rhetoricians, but the genre displays a consistent diachrony despite some moments of eclipses.

We study here its main transformations in ancient times: the Platonic founding model, its redefinition in specifically Roman terms by Cicero, the “other” model of the Renaissance, and later by Tacitus, and the new syntheses arising out of the effervescence of the imperial period (Athenaeus, Lucian). But the dialogue is also a discursive modality or a specific textual sequence, which this book seeks to explore in its several forms or set figures: narrative strategy for Herodotus’ reported speeches; fictions of conversations interrupting the speech in Demosthenes; dialogue with the classics in Plato, Plutarch, and Clement of Alexandria.