From the plane tree to the gardens of Adonis : plant and garden imagery in Plato's Phaedrus

Abstract

Since at least the time the Akkadian version of The Epic of Gilgamesh was preserved in clay tablets nearly four thousand years ago, human beings have weaved plants and gardens into their stories. The way they appear in myth and literature is often as diverse as it is fascinating: they might figure as settings, metaphors, analogies, or be imbued with symbolism. This particular treatment of plants and gardens is not limited to myth and literature though. In a number of Plato's dialogues he utilises them in a similar way. This essay sets out to think about the plant and garden images in one of Plato's dialogues; more specifically, the Phaedrus. It seeks to address the following question: what might the plant and garden images in the dialogue mean, and how are we to understand them in relation to the text? We will come to see that during the classical period the plants and gardens mentioned in the dialogue were associated with love, madness, chastity, sterility, death, and more; in short, the whole gamut of themes taken up in the Phaedrus. Since many of these vegetal images appear in the text as part of the dialogue's setting, this means that as Phaedrus and Socrates converse with one another, they do so surrounded by images of the very things they discuss. We will also discover that the setting of the dialogue seems to influence both the flow of conversation and the language that Socrates uses. It would seem that there is more to the plant and garden imagery in the dialogue than first meets the eye.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English