Katarzyna Jażdżewska - Böcker

Greek Dialogue in Antiquity reexamines evidence for Greek dialogue between the mid-fourth century BCE and the mid-first century CE - that is, roughly from Plato's death to the death of Philo of Alexandria. Although the genre of dialogue in antiquity has attracted a growing interest in the past two decades, the time covered in this book has remained overlooked and unresearched, with scholars believing that for much of this period the dialogue genre went through a period of decline and was revived only in the Roman times. The book carefully reassesses Post-Platonic and Hellenistic evidence, including papyri fragments, which have never been discussed in this context, and challenges the narrative of the dialogue's decline and subsequent revival, postulating, instead, the genre's unbroken continuity from the Classical period to the Roman Empire. It argues that dialogues and texts creatively interacting with dialogic conventions were composed throughout Hellenistic times, and proposes to reconceptualize the imperial period dialogue as evidence not of a resurgence, but of continuity in this literary tradition.

The role of commentary as a basic method of research used broadly in both Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages still awaits further analysis. Commentary as a research and didactic method becomes especially interesting in a multicultural perspective: were Buddhist and Arabic texts commented in the same way as it was done by late antique and medieval scholars? The extensive medieval commentary literature still awaits scholarly assessment from the perspective of theory of literature as well as methodology and history of various scientific disciplines.