We need to pause now to look at this piece of writing, asking in what voice or voices it speaks to an inquiring soul. For we have now seen reflection on our problems taking place in two very different types of texts, one of which, as we shall see both here and in Chapter 7, attacks the other as harmful to the development of the soul. These Platonic criticisms of tragedy, and Plato's own practice of writing, reveal an acute self-consciousness about the relationship between the choice of a style and the content of a philosophical conception, between a view of what the soul is and a view about how to address that soul in writing. Much of our work on these issues will be done in Chapters 6 and 7, as we investigate two dialogues in which questions of writing and truth-telling are especially prominent. Here we cannot hope to raise all of the most interesting questions about the dialogue form as Plato in his middle period develops it, or even to give an exhaustive account of his criticisms of tragic poetry. But it will be useful to provide a sketch of some ways in which his writing defines itself against a literary tradition of ethical teaching; in particular, of the way in which it both acknowledges a debt to tragic poetry and distances itself from it.

We can begin by observing that this is a new kind of writing. Even Aristotle was at a loss about how to respond to it; in the Poetics he classifies the dialogues as prose dramas, alongside the realistic urban mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus.