«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Beyond the Boundaries:an Egyptian Literary Adaptation of Greek Philosophy m 79 n Etman's only engagement with the Greek tradition in creative writings, see Etman 2000, 2001, 2002). In the play under discussion, Etman makes Greek philosophy more easily available to non-academic readers. The philosopher in question, as the title of the play declares, is Socrates, who was not only a well-known Greek philosopher, but has dominated the subsequent history of Western philosophy. The “Socratic tradition” presents to us Socrates so vividly in an unprecedented way in the whole history of Greek civilization. Howev- er, Etman's Socrates is based on the assessment of the evidence of which he is capable. The author exercises, at the same time, his creative ability upon Socrates' portrait, and regards him as a symbolic figure. We cannot count the number of books and articles about Socrates that have come out to light over the years, many of them have been written by scholars of high standing, and of the highest reputation. So in the context of such an enormous bulk of the scholarly literature, and of all those innumerable writ- ings, anyone undertaking the task once more must produce another presenta- tion of Socrates that proves original. For this reason it was not an easy task for Etman to produce a presentation that may prove worthwhile. The inevitable obstacle that confronts, and will always confront, anyone writing on Socrates is that there is what is called “the Socratic problem”, since he left no writings, and all that we know about him comes from the writings of philosophers, comic poets, and historiographers (see Guthrie 1990, p. 6; Kahn 1998, p. 1ff; Johnson 2008; McCoy 2010, p. 118f.), we are left to guess what he really thought. We know him only as seen in the writings of others, which we call “the Socratic tradition”. Our main sources of information are: Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. Apart from the stream of allu- sions and anecdotes we encounter in ancient sources, Plato and Xenophon, in particular, transmitted a unique picture of Socrates to posterity. Etman's play reproduces, in a way or another, these sources, with some Egyptian alterations and adaptations that allow it to appear as a separate piece of creative writing (cf. Forsyth 2006). The ancient historiographer Xenophon, who was a contem- porary of Plato and wrote about Socrates (but his information was at second or third hand, put together from various sources), says at the end of his work Apologia , 34: “ of both the wisdom and the nobility of this man [i.e. Socrates], I cannot refrain from writing of him nor, in writing of him, I cannot refrain from praising him ”. Xenophon's words, I would suggest, may be applied to Etman's interest in Socrates. Etman's play implicitly voices the same words. The play is divided into two acts. The first one is divided into 4 scenes, entitled respectively: Socrates' Shoes Are Not For Sale, The Price Of Freedom, Towards A Clean Environment, and finally The Worst Calamity Makes One Laugh. The second act is divided into three scenes: Waiting For The Defeat,