A set of ten essay-style questions in which Plutarch works through knotty problems in Plato's dialogues, from the Theaetetus to the Timaeus and Republic.
Platonicae Quaestiones ("Platonic Questions") is one of the philosophical essays collected in Plutarch's Moralia. Rather than a continuous treatise, it is a series of ten discrete puzzles Plutarch poses and then answers about difficult or seemingly contradictory statements in Plato's dialogues. Each question opens with a direct quotation or paraphrase from Plato and proceeds through a close, often technical argument to resolve the apparent problem, frequently citing Homer, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Aristarchus, and other authorities along the way.
The questions range widely across Plato's corpus. Plutarch asks why the god in the Theaetetus let Socrates act as midwife to others' ideas but forbade him to "give birth" himself; why Plato called the highest god both father and maker; how the divided line of the Republic should be understood; why the elemental triangles of the Timaeus are built from isosceles and scalene shapes rather than curves; how cupping-vessels, lodestones, and amber work if there is no void, per Plato's physics; whether the sun, moon, and planets are truly the "instruments of time" the Timaeus describes, or whether Plato means something subtler by that phrase; and how the tripartite soul of the Republic maps onto musical ratios and vocal registers. The final and longest question is a sustained grammatical inquiry into why Plato said that speech (logos) is woven together out of only two parts of speech, nouns and verbs, with the other so-called parts -- pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions -- treated as mere seasoning or connective tissue rather than independent bearers of meaning.
The work matters as a document of how a highly literate, bilingual Greek intellectual of the Roman imperial period read Plato: not as scripture to be paraphrased but as a body of difficult claims to be tested, defended, and sometimes gently corrected using physics, mathematics, astronomy, and grammar. It shows Plutarch's characteristic method across the Moralia -- posing a crux, surveying rival explanations, and settling on the reading he finds most coherent with Plato's system as a whole, including citing Aristarchus and Seleucus on the earth's motion in the course of glossing a line from the Timaeus.
“Why in the world did the god command Socrates to serve as midwife to others but forbade him to give birth himself, as is said in the Theaetetus?”
— Platonicae Quaestiones · read this chapter →
“Why in the world did he call the highest god the father and maker of all things?”
— Platonicae Quaestiones · read this chapter →
“the divine artisan put to use in fashioning that model of the universe.”
— Platonicae Quaestiones · read this chapter →
“Why did Plato say that speech is blended out of nouns and verbs?”
— Platonicae Quaestiones · read this chapter →
“and this is composed of a noun and a verb, of which the dialecticians call the one the "subject" and the other the "predicate."”
— Platonicae Quaestiones · read this chapter →
It is a set of ten essay-style questions in which Plutarch tackles difficult or puzzling statements from Plato's dialogues -- the Theaetetus, Timaeus, Republic, and Phaedrus among them -- and works out careful resolutions using physics, astronomy, mathematics, and grammar. It is not a summary of Plato but a problem-solving commentary.
Because Plato's cosmology denies the existence of a void, so ordinary phenomena like cupping-vessels drawing moisture, lodestones attracting iron, and amber's pull all have to be explained through the mutual displacement of air and matter. Plutarch works through each case to defend Plato's physical theory.
Plutarch argues that only the noun and the verb are true, independent parts of speech, because only their combination produces a proposition capable of being true or false. He treats pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions as connective or seasoning elements rather than meaning-bearing units on their own.
In discussing a line from the Timaeus about the earth's relation to time, Plutarch notes that Aristarchus proposed the earth's motion as a hypothesis and that Seleucus went further and asserted it as established fact, using this astronomical debate to help interpret Plato's wording.
He maps the Republic's three parts of the soul -- reason, spirit, and appetite -- onto the ratios of a tuned lyre, with reason positioned like the highest, governing string and appetite like the lowest, so that the soul's proper order mirrors musical concord.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: Amatorius · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti