Abstract

Tarán’s case against the authenticity of Epinomis depends on the claim that it is incompatible with Plato’s Laws. Behind this claim is the uncritical assumption that the Athenian Stranger of Laws speaks for Plato. While the Athenian Stranger of Epinomis clearly does not do so, the same is equally true, albeit more difficult to detect, of the Stranger in Laws. Once the Athenian is recognized as both ambitious and impious, a reconstruction of the last sentence of Epinomis — on which Tarán’s incompatibility thesis principally rests — reveals the theological-political continuity between the two dialogues: the Stranger is intent on bringing the city into being while securing divine sanction for his own code of laws and divine honours for himself. Plato appended the Epinomis to the Laws in order to make it easier for the student to recognize the Stranger’s intentions as well as to draw attention to Book VII of the Laws, the centre of the dialogue once Epinomis is recognized as its thirteenth book; it is here that the Stranger describes how a mathematical and astronomical man may become a god to other men.