Perictione in Colophon : Reflections on the Aesthetic Way of Life. This item is unavailable.Perictione in Colophon : Reflections on the Aesthetic Way of Life

This, the sequel to the same author's much-acclaimed Xanthippic Dialogues, is a multi-faceted commentary on the post-modern condition, which takes the form of a part-Hellenistic, part-Arabian fairy tale. Archeanassa of Colophon, subject of a poem attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Plato, has returned to her birthplace in search of the lost manuscripts of another ex-lover, the poet Antimachus. There she encounters Perictione, Plato's niece, who lives alone in the ruined and brutalized city amid memories and dreams. Perictione tells the strange story of Merope of Sardis, the Nietzschean philosopher who both made and destroyed her life. Little by little Archeanassa comes to recognize that Perictione's story is also her own story, and that the mystery of Colophon is the mystery of modernity itself. Through dialogues, stories, and fantasies, the narrative explores the aesthetic way of life, and the possibilities of meaning in an age of inverted commas.

As original in form as it is inspired in content, Perictione in Colophon will take its place as one of the major philosophical statements of our time, and one which gives a moving and memorable account of two women seek, and finding, consolation.

This is how philosophy was meant to be learned.

Scruton has been called the most amusing philosopher writing today. This mock Platonic dialogue, which includes much narration and description, bears that characterization out. The aged Plato has dispatched his former lover Archeanassa to her hometown, Colophon, now under Persian rule, to retrieve the manuscripts of the poet Antimachus, an earlier love of hers. She finds Colophon utterly changed, a city of featureless office towers and a populace sharply divided into a gray mass of citizen-workers and an elite of imperial-military overlords. She also finds Perictione, a young cousin of Plato's who lives in her own Greek aesthetic oasis and who engages her in discussions of architecture, dance, and music. Those subjects come up as Perictione relates the life of her mentor Merope, an itinerant philosopher with whom she traveled before settling in Colophon. Cynicism, egalitarianism, and the decline of taste and civilization under both totalitarian and free-market conditions also figure in the women's exchanges. As in Plato's dialogues, character and incident prove as engaging as philosophy in Scruton's tour de force. Ray Olson