Abstract
I examine the use of the chorus in Plato’s Laws, treating it as a window into Plato’s cosmology and statecraft. The chorus serves as the primary and most familiar example of a specific type of motion prevalent throughout the dialogue, namely, circular motion. Such circular motion, I argue, lies at the heart of the Laws as the privileged and most honorable form of all motions, and it serves to unite the political, psychological, and cosmic worlds of the dialogue.
I follow Plato’s focus on circularity in its various manifestations: first as chorality, then as the rocking motions applied to children, then to the institutions of the symposium, pyrrhic dance, and movements of rural magistrates, and finally in the circular design of the city itself. I provide close literary and philological analysis of key passages from the Laws, as well as from relevant sources including Plato’s other dialogues (such as the Timaeus and Phaedrus), Hippocratic medicine (such as the text On Regimen), Presocratic philosophy (such as Philolaos and Archytas), and Greek literature that allow us to understand the Laws in the context of intellectual history.
I propose that the chorus serves as a metaphor for perfect, harmonious, and (crucially for Plato) circular motion, the embodied and visible model of the invisible movements of the soul. The circular chorus of the Laws, I argue, instructs citizens from an early age to consider circular motion as inherently the best kind of movement, which in turn primes them to accept Plato’s arguments about the circular movements of the soul and stars. The circular movement of the chorus thus serves as an expression of the well-ordered soul and cosmos. The use of the chorus is a way of modeling in the social sphere of the activities of the city-state what occurs in the souls of virtuous citizens, and what occurs in the fixed and regular courses of the heavenly bodies, the stars and planets. Its appearance throughout the Laws at all levels of Magnesia is not simply a literary device, but a means for Plato to saturate the entire state with an ethereal type of motion and thus to elevate the Magnesians above any other earthly city. My dissertation contributes to the study of the use of the chorus in the Laws by showing that, in addition to its uses for political ideology pointed out by previous scholars (such as in the projection of ideals of civic identity or participation), it also projects Plato’s cosmology.
