The interplay of textual references in Plutarch’s life of phocion

Abstract

The pair of Vitae Phocion/Cato contains a kind of anticipated synkrisis. This anticipation has implications on the speech strategy. Signs that Plutarch prefers Phocion are to be understood – he highlights the text with clues which organize the interpretation of the macrotext. This is to be seen in the way he resorts to comparing with models or to playing with the same hypotexts differently in the case of Phocion or of Cato, both of them close to the Socrates’ model. It is already 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. But in the Life of Phocion, on the contrary, the reader must fi nd out the hypotext and its paradigmatic dimension – either Herodot (Solon before Croesus’ treasure/Phocion before Alexander’s treasures) or Plato (Ap., Phd., Cri.) in the placid and soft attitude of Phocion 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.