From the book
The Lovers
Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordOinopidēs is the Greek personal name conventionally written Oenopides in English.
- In The LoversThe immediate visual evidence is unusually concrete: drawn circles and hands imitating inclinations.
- In this editionThe note at 132a–b identifies Oenopides of Chios as a fifth-century mathematician and astronomer and reports that he first found the slant of the zodiac, on Eudemus’ authority as preserved in Theon of Smyrna, page 198 Hiller.
- A place to readἢ περὶ Οἰνοπίδου ἐρίζειν — The second possible subject of the boys’ discussion.
Meaning
Oinopidēs is the Greek personal name conventionally written Oenopides in English. The opening has Oinopidou, its genitive, governed by “about.” It completes the uncertain alternative “either about Anaxagoras or about Oenopides.” Naming him does not identify the exact claim being disputed, since Socrates explicitly could not hear the conversation well.
Use in the book
The immediate visual evidence is unusually concrete: drawn circles and hands imitating inclinations. That combination allows the name to suggest a mathematical or astronomical subject without turning the opening into a technical lesson. The bodily gestures are themselves a form of explanation, so the scene already complicates the later opposition between being experienced in words and being experienced in deeds. Intellectual activity here involves drawing and miming as well as speaking.
Oenopides has no further role as an authority. Neither rival quotes him, and Socrates never asks whether one of his propositions is correct. The transition instead asks whether an activity contemptuously called philosophizing is fine, and then what that activity is. An entry about Oenopides consequently illuminates the starting scene; it cannot recover an otherwise lost debate between the boys.
The attraction of linking the inclinations to a specific astronomical discovery is understandable, but a plausible background remains different from a textual assertion. The indefinite “some inclinations” and the narrator’s repeated “appeared” keep the subject partially open.
Places to read
- 132bἢ περὶ Οἰνοπίδου ἐρίζειν — The second possible subject of the boys’ discussion.
Translation in this edition
The note at 132a–b identifies Oenopides of Chios as a fifth-century mathematician and astronomer and reports that he first found the slant of the zodiac, on Eudemus’ authority as preserved in Theon of Smyrna, page 198 Hiller. The edition then says the inclinations “can be read” as one circle’s tilt relative to another. That wording marks an interpretation. It should not be strengthened into a claim that the text names the zodiac, specifies an angle, or attributes the boys’ particular diagram to Oenopides. The English spelling and Greek transliteration are two renderings of the same name.