“Total Reception”: Stesichorus as Revenant in Plato’s Phaedrus (with a New Stesichorean Fragment?)

Recent studies have construed Socrates’ quotation from the Palinode in the Phaedrus as a complex recreation of Stesichorus’ poetry and persona. After providing fresh evidence to this effect, I test it against the three main areas of the conference: transmission, canonization, and paratexts. Rather than simply echoing Stesichorus, Socrates fully re-enacts and somehow resurrects Stesichorean verse and performances. Only few lyric lines are quoted (and thus transmitted), and yet they trigger simultaneous allusions to biographical traditions and performative features. The Phaedrus proves a kind of Ur-paratext. Stesichorus’ lines are quoted and explained in a celebrated dialogue, and hence canonized. Not surprisingly, they soon made their way into lexica and proverb-collections (Socrates’ three-line quote lies behind a proverb equating paideia with the knowledge of ta tria Stesichorou). Moreover, the boundaries between text and allusion are intriguingly blurred: Socrates, I argue, concludes his speech with a poetic line of his own making, one that echoes the rhythm of the Palinode. Or is it a new Stesichorean fragment? The same uncertainty applies to Plato’s Stesichorean pastiche. By contrasting the flexible discourse of lyric poetry and the rigid textuality of rhapsodies, he builds on the 6th-Century opposition ‘Rhapsodes versus Stesichorus’, as W. Burkert famously called it. This fascinating phenomenon of multi-faceted resurrection may be tentatively called “total reception”.