Da Dioniso a Socrate : intervisualità del divino fra teatro e dialogo

Scholars have long been discussing the theatrical entanglements of Plato’s dialogues. However, such discussions are typically limited to textual and intertextual facts, with little or no regard to the quintessentially visual nature of theatre. By contrast, this paper explores the visual potential of the iconography of Dionysus and Socrates as two parallel phenomena. The beardless Dionysus placed in the east pediment of the Parthenon proved a major influence for both Aristophanes’ Frogs and Euripides’ Bacchae, as both plays toy with the image of the patron god of theatre as well as with his mythological background. Plato, I argue, appropriates this pattern. An image of Socrates-Silenus was placed in the Mouseion of the Academy at the beginning of the 4th Century, presumably as a foundation act. Plato’s dialogues were likely ‘published’ and delivered in this venue, so it can be argued that the Symposium’s celebrated description of Socrates-Silenus toys with the founding hero of the Academy in much the same way as playwrights do with Dionysus: in both cases, the literary image of the genre’s patron points to, and plays with, an actual statue that was visible to the audience. Plato’s intervisual affair with theatre, however, is even deeper: on the one hand, the image of Socrates-Silenus is arguably modelled on Aristophanes’ Clouds; on the other, Plato’s Symposium depicts Alcibiades in such a way as to conjure up the image of the ‘new’, beardless Dionysus as found in Frogs and Bacchae. Much like Dionysus in the Frogs, Plato’s Alcibiades intends to award a prize to a poet, but ends up changing his mind: Socrates’ seriocomic logoi, which are clearly meant to foreshadow Plato’s dialogues. Thus, Alcibiades-Dionysus passes the baton to Socrates as the patron of a new genre, which should be understood in and against the tradition of Attic theatre, by way of (inter)visual no less than (inter)textual references.