A Meeting in Oea, or Concerning Plato (1970) by Aleksander Krawczuk
Good Reads meta-data is 243 pages rated 3.38 by 21 litizens
Genre: fiction.
DNA: Ancient Greek.
Tagline: It’s a long (winded) way to Alexandria.
Verdict: All trip, no arrival
It is 150 A.D. when a near-sighted, round-shouldered, shuffling scholar leaves Carthage (Tunis) to go to the distant and fabled library at Alexandria, where he hopes to complete a biography of the divine Plato. The trip does not go smoothly and Scholar becomes stuck in Oea (near Tripoli). Travelling by the inland road he misses the shores of Tripoli.
In his trials and tribulations Scholar finds solace in passages from Plato’s works. He also describes some of Plato’s life, like the name of his mother, father, and sister, as well the brothers. We learn the back stories of some of the characters whom he chose to name in his dialogues like Cephalus and Polemarchus. Plato never married and sired no children it seems, though why is neither alleged nor suggested. Indeed, there as much basic biography in this book as in Robin Waterfield’s book on Plato subtitled ‘A Life.’
I needed a map and Wikipedia to follow his path.
Originally published in Poland in 1970 it might well have seemed to be social criticism then and there, though that is not immediately apparent to this reader.
It is largely expository with little dialogue and no action to speak of. The result is slow moving, but it does move, and at times is moving. Those with short-attention spans need not bother.
The resident Mechanical Turk at Amazon struck again because I had earlier searched for a biography of Plato, as in the Waterfield reference above.
The author Polish was professor of Philosophy with other like titles.
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