Greek dialogues of the imperial period are usually discussed in the context of dialogic texts of the Classical period, in particular those of Plato. There seems to be a tacit assumption in scholarship, at times communicated explicitly, that the genre of dialogue was revived by Plutarch and that this revival is related to the general spirit of the period, which preferred Classical models and distanced itself from its more immediate past. This perspective, however, disregards the fact that dialogues of the imperial period, although they frequently allude to works of Plato and imitate them, in many respects reflect and incorporate post-Platonic developments of the dialogic genre.

The aim of my contribution is to rethink the use of the dialogue in the imperial period in the context of our knowledge of the genre’s development after Plato and in the Hellenistic period. For the sake of coherence, I will focus on dialogues of Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom. My choice is due to two reasons: first, these two roughly contemporary authors stand at the beginning of the so-called Second Sophistic period, and therefore connections between their works and the Hellenistic-period and early imperial literature are easier to determine than in the case of later authors; second, considered together, Dio and Plutarch composed thirty-odd dialogues of diverse length and formats which provide abundant material for analysis.

I will begin with an overview of Plutarch’s and Dio’s dialogic works. I will make an attempt at a typology of their dialogues (narrative and dramatic; mythological, historical, and ‘contemporary’; dialectical and non-dialectical; with named interlocutors and with anonymous interlocutors; with or without prefaces and/or dedications) and then discuss some recurrent, non-Platonic features such as:

1) prefaces and dedications (which precede a dialogue or, in the case of Plutarch’s Table Talks, every book) (Plutarch)

2) inclusion of the author, his friends, or family members as speakers (Plutarch, to some extent also Dio)

3) dialectical exchanges between anonymous interlocutors (Dio)

4) polemical discussions of doctrines of Hellenistic-period philosophical schools (Plutarch)

5) historical setting (Plutarch, Dio)

6) third-person narration (Dio)

I will examine these features in the context of our knowledge of earlier, now lost dialogic writings and extant dialogues of the Hellenistic and early imperial period (Pseudo-Platonica, Cicero, Philo of Alexandria) and argue that various formats of Plutarch’s and Dio’s dialogues reflect and continue the diversity of the genre in the preceding period. For instance, prefaces and dedications are an element of Peripatetic provenance, shared by Cicero and Plutarch; interestingly, in Plutarch they tend to accompany narrated rather than dramatic dialogues. Inclusion of the author as one of the principal speakers, also believed to be a feature of Peripatetic provenience, is shared by Cicero, Philo, and Plutarch. Even when they imitate Plato, Dio and Plutarch follow their predecessors who practiced Platonic mimesis from Aristotle (whose Eudemus, it seems, imitated the Phaedo) down to Philo (whose De animalibus imitates the Phaedrus).