Favorinus: My Ancient Roman dinner guest
I probably should be naming some mighty and mysterious genius, one of the great philosophers I study or a mostly-lost tragic poet, but it would feel wrong somehow.
To be honest, dinner with Plato or Aristotle is too mind-boggling a prospect. So I’ll just go with someone who would be excellent company: Favorinus. Sophist, érudit, and intellectual; man about town, leading light of the smart set around Aulus Gellius, friend of Hadrian (for a while), famous for his wit and eloquence, skeptical philosopher and chronicler of intellectual history. He was a collector of arguments and a lover of paradox, known for insisting that the best mode of education is to argue both sides of the case. Also a Celt from the provinces, and an intersex ‘eunuch’ or ‘hermaphrodite’ — an outsider who became the complete insider.
I’d get centuries’ worth of gossip, find out what his quarrel with Hadrian was all about, and get an answer to one of my favourite scholarly questions: why on earth did he claim, as a later source reports him saying, that Plato’s Republic was plagiarized from the sophist Protagoras?
Prof. Rachel Barney is Canada Research Chair in Ancient Philosophy at the Depts. of Philosophy and Classics, University of Toronto, and co-editor of Cambridge title Plato and the Divided Self.