Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues

This new study challenges traditional ways of reading Plato by showing that his philosophy and political theory cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the literary or aesthetic features of his writing. More specifically, it shows how Plato's well-known cosmological dialogues--the Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias--are structured using several books of the Odyssey as their shared source text.