The dramatic background of the arguments with Callicles, Euripides Antiope and an Athenian anti-intellectual argument

This paper does not aim to establish the ‘dramatic date’ of Plato’s Gorgias, nor does it seek to establish with any precision the date at which Euripides’ fragmentary Antiope was written. Nor does it aim to show that Athenian anti-intellectualism had some fixed beginning and conclusion rather than persisting, in some fashion, as long as intellectuals frequented its public places. It does, however, have aims that may easily be mistaken for these. While Plato was not too particular about fidelity to a dramatic date, he frequently shows a strong desire to supply an intellectual background for the views that his characters will propound and the debates that follow from them. In the case of dialogues that employ a single interlocutor that certainly tends to produce a reasonably coherent dramatic date, but what matters to Plato is not so much fidelity to history as the appropriate intellectual context. It is not concerned to argue that Euripides’ play Antiope was performed at a given festival, but it is very much concerned to demonstrate that its status as a post-412 play rests on flimsy foundations and does not agree with important evidence. And it aims to show that a particular kind of anti-intellectual argument, or anti-intellectual rhetoric, one that finds a place both in Zethus’ criticism of Amphion in the Antiope and in Callicles’ criticism of Socrates in the Gorgias, did have a place in public debate in the Athens of the late 420s B.C., and for very good reasons.