Dialŏgus
（
διάλογος). A dialogue. As a form of literary composition,
apart from its purely dramatic use, the dialogue plays an important part in
the history of Greek and Roman letters. The vividness and pungency of rapid question and reply
were fully appreciated by the earliest writers. The Homeric poems abound in passages whose
great dramatic force is due to the use of this form. Herodotus continually employs it to give
picturesqueness and life to his narrative; and this is true even of Thucydides, in whose
history the so-called Melian dialogue at the close of the fifth book, the dialogue of
Archidamus with the Plataeans (ii. 71-74), and of the Ambraciot herald and the Acarnanian
soldiers of Demosthenes (iii. 113) are striking examples. The great popularity of the drama
must have been a direct stimulus to the use of the dialogue in prose literature; so that it is
not surprising to find Plato employing it in his philosophical writings, thus following the
example of Alexamenus of Teos and Zeno of Elea (cf. Mahaffy,
Hist. of Class. Gk.
Lit. ii. pp. 170-174). In this way the philosophical argument is worked out in a most
attractive form, the attack and defence excite a lively interest, and the reader is artfully
made to accept the truth of the doctrine by witnessing, as it were, the utter overthrow of its
assailants. The
ἠθοποιΐα, or character-painting, of the
dialogues of Plato has never been surpassed, even by the greatest dramatists. The subtlest
touches are here given with wonderful deftness, and a whole gallery of portraits is presented
to us as varied, as delicately drawn, and as life-like as those of Euripides, of
Molière, or of Shakspeare. In some of them, however (e. g. the
Parmenides,
Protagoras, and
Symposium), the artistic mistake has been made of
reporting the conversation in the
oratio obliqua; and in these the
sustained indirectness of construction, the crowded infinitives, and the absurdity of
supposing one man to repeat from memory the whole of an intricate dialogue, greatly diminish
the pleasure of the reader.
The dialogues of Aristotle are very different from those of Plato, and are probably a
reversion to the models of Alexamenus and Zeno. The form is still nominally that of a
conversation, but in fact the
diverbium appears only in the introductory
parts, and after the argument is once under full headway it becomes an almost unbroken
monologue. The conversational
proœmium is, therefore, rather a
device to secure the attention of the reader, than an essential part of the work as a whole;
and the
ἠθοποιΐα is conspicuously absent.
Such of the philosophical and rhetorical writings of Cicero as adopt the form of the
dialogue are decidedly Aristotelian rather than Platonic in their arrangement and in their
lack of dramatic ability. Such are the treatises
De Senectute, De Amicitia, the
Brutus, the
Tusculanae Disputationes, the
De
Oratore, and the
De Republica.
The so-called
Dialogi of L. Annaeus Seneca (
Dialogorum Libri
xii.) get the name from the frequent introduction of a second speaker with the words
inquis, inquit, dicet aliquis, etc., but they are in no true sense of
the word dialogues at all.
In Latin literature the title
Dialogus is given
par excellence to a work of Tacitus (
Dialogus de
Oratoribus), a conversation between a number of literary celebrities of the time of
Vespasian, who in it discuss the decay of oratory under the Empire. The style shows that the
dialogue was composed at the time when the writer was in the Ciceronian period of his studies
and was endeavouring to imitate the diction of that great master. Hence it differs in
many respects from the later Tacitean compositions, so that some critics from the time of
Lipsius have even suspected its authenticity; but in a letter of Pliny (
ix. 10, 2) addressed to Tacitus is found an evident allusion to the
Dialogus, even did not a careful study of the piece itself yield sufficient
evidence of the authorship. See Weinkauff,
Untersuchungen über den
Dialogus des Tacitus (Cologne, 1880); and the elaborate work of Hirzel,
Der Dialog, 2 vols.
(1895). Editions are those of Ritter
(Bonn, 1859), Michaelis
(Leipzig, 1868), Peter
(Jena,
1877), Andresen
(Leipzig, 1879), Bährens
(Leipzig,
1881), Peterson
(Oxford, 1893), Bennett
(Boston, 1894), and
Gudeman
(Boston, 1894).
