The End of Dialogue in Antiquity

'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity. This book, the first general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, openness and playfulness in changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today's world.

ISBN 0521887747   Pages 274 ISBN13 9780521887748 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Cambridge University Press   Weight (grammes) 580 Imprint Cambridge University Press   Published in Cambridge Format Hardback   Height (mm) 228 Publication date 08 Jan 2009   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 2008040781   Spine width (mm) 19 DEWEY 809.926   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

Introduction		Why don't Christians do dialogue? by Simon Goldhill		1
1		Fictions of dialogue in Thucydides by Emily Greenwood		15
2		The beginnings of dialogue: Socratic discourses and fourth-century prose by Andrew Ford		29
3		Plato's dialogues and a common rationale for dialogue form by Alex Long		45
4		Ciceronian dialogue by Malcolm Schofield		63
5		Sympotic dialogue in the first to fifth centuries CE by Jason Konig		85
6		Can we talk? Augustine and the possibility of dialogue by Gillian Clark		117
7		'Let's (not) talk about it': Augustine and the control of epistolary dialogue by Richard Miles		135
8		Christians, dialogues and patterns of sociability in late antiquity by Richard Lim		151
9		Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian 'afterlife' of classical dialogue by Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo		173
10		No dialogue at the symposium? Conviviality in Ben Sira and the Palestinian Talmud by Seth Schwartz		193
11		Dialectic and divination in the Talmud by Daniel Boyarin		217
		Bibliography		242
		Index		263

"The book's scope--from Thucydides and Plato, to Cicero and late sympotic literature, to the rabbinic tales and the Church Fathers--is wondrous. --BMCR

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