Reimagining the Madness of the Muses: Plato's Idea of Poetic Inspiration in the Second Sophistic

This thesis examines the reception of Plato’s idea of poetic inspiration in the Second Sophistic. In dialogues including the Ion and Phaedrus, Plato established an opposition between divine inspiration and techne, holding that divinely-inspired poets cannot claim to have knowledge or artistic skill, and provocatively depicting poetic inspiration as a form of madness. Plato’s problematization of the nature of poetic inspiration was well-known to readers in the Imperial period, and yielded a fascinating diversity of complex responses in the literature of this time. In this thesis, I take three major orators of the first and second centuries CE as case studies for how Plato’s idea of poetic inspiration was received in the Second Sophistic, examining both their reflections on the divine inspiration of archaic Greek poets and the way they cast themselves as divinely-inspired orators. Dio of Prusa rejects Plato’s depiction of mad poets, opting instead for a rational form of divine inspiration that preserves the moral authority of ancient poets like Homer (Chapter 2). Aelius Aristides, who considered himself divinely inspired, accepts Plato’s idea that inspired poets lack techne, but uses this same idea to support his argument against Plato that oratory is a noble pursuit, on the grounds that it is both divinely inspired and a techne (Chapter 3). Finally, Lucian of Samosata co-opts Plato’s depiction of the ecstatic poet for comic purposes, and deftly redeploys Platonic imagery to depict himself as an inspired orator (Chapter 4). These strikingly varied responses to just one Platonic idea testify to Second Sophistic writers’ creative engagement with Classical texts, artful methods of self-depiction, and insightful treatment of religious and philosophical themes.