The Interplay of textual references in Plutarch’s Life of Phocion

Abstract

The pair of Phocion and Cato the Younger contains a kind of anticipated synkrisis. This anticipation has implications for the author’s narrative strategy. Plutarch seems to prefer Phocion, if one might judge from the way he highlights the text with clues that organize the interpretation of the macrotext. This is to be seen in the way he cites models or plays with the same hypotexts differently in the cases of Phocion and Cato, both of them close to Socrates’ model. It has already been said that the ostentatiousness of the Socratic model in the reading of Phaedo by Cato permits the reader to glimpse a misunderstood appropriation of it. In Phocion’s Life, on the other hand, the reader must look for the hypotext and its paradigmatic dimension – either Herodotus (Solon before Croesus’ treasure/Phocion before Alexander’s treasures) or Plato (Ap., Phd., Cri.) – in Phocion’s placid and soft attitude in his last moments, where some coincidences of episodes before his death and that of Socrates are to be seen, or in Phocion’s behaviour throughout his life. He kept his constantia of character, even under hard circumstances, when Tyche was adverse to him and caused him to be misunderstood by the people or led to death by the manipulation of demagogues.