Extract

As a special literary–philosophical form of writing, dialogue has its origin in Socrates' philosophical activity; *Aristotle's description of written philosophical dialogues as ‘Socratic logoi’ (Poet. 1447b11) reflects the association of the form with representations of Socratic conversations, often written by members of Socrates' circle (like *Plato (1)), in which he is himself often the, or a, main speaker. A typical ‘Socratic’ conversation, or dialogos, will be one in which question-and-answer plays a leading role. As the genre develops in antiquity, this element gradually declines in importance, being replaced by long speeches either exclusively by the main speaker with short interjections by others, or more often by different speakers. The beginnings of such developments are already visible in the Platonic corpus, although there they are partly the result of experimentation with the genre.*Diogenes (6) Laertius (3. 48) says that some people claimed that *Zeno (1) of Elea was the first writer of dialogues, and that Aristotle (fr.