Socrate, bello e giovane: autorità e paternità del corpus nell’Accademia

In the second of the thirteen Letters attributed to Plato, the anonymous author presents us with a puzzling consideration: no work attributed to Plato is actually authentic, but all of them represent the thought of Socrates, who is described as ‘young and fair’. The present contribution situates the baffling sentence in the context of the renaissance of Socratic dialogue in Hellenistic times, assuming that the author of this epistle, through a playful literary game, suggests that all the Platonic corpus fixed by the Academy stays faithful to Socrates’ thought and teaching and that Plato, to whom all the dialogues of the corpus (genuine and spurious alike) are attributed, is – in truth – a new, ‘young and fair’ representation of his master.