Abstract

The author argues, that the exigencies of inter‐school rivalry, initially between the Academy and the Peripatos, but then between later Platonists and both Stoics and Aristotelians, demanded that Platonism become more formalized than it was left by Plato himself, and that it was primarily Xenocrates, in a vast array of treatises, both general and particular, who provided the bones of this organized corpus of doctrine. Not that the Platonists were ever subject to anything like a monolithic orthodoxy. Platonic doctrine was not anything handed down centrally, from above; it was rather a self‐regulating system, in which everyone knew what it meant, broadly, to be a Platonist, and managed to stay within those parameters, while squabbling vigorously with each other, as well as with the other schools.