Audit · black-box characterisation · primary-source verified
Reference Model · Baseline · Upstream of Record · c. 428–348 BC
The whole European tradition is, on the safest reading of it, “a series of footnotes to Plato.” — A. N. Whitehead, 1929
Treat the corpus as a model, not a shrine. Every later system is a fork that imports its primitives — the Forms, the Cave, the soul’s parts, the examined life. This audit goes to the artifact and asks what the baseline actually defines, which primitives are load-bearing, where it tests itself, and what it ships with a flag still attached. The works themselves are below, fetched verbatim from public-domain source; the analysis is the auditor’s.
Lead with the verdicts. The detail sits in the per-work cards below.
The corpus in developmental layers — read as releases of one evolving model. The ancient tetralogy ordering is a transmission scheme; this layering is the modern stylometric reconstruction, and it is a convention, not a proof.
An audit also says what is not the model. The disputed set has contested provenance and cannot anchor; the spuria are works transmitted under Plato’s name that the audit rejects — counterfeit weights.
Disputed · unverified provenance
Seriously defended and seriously doubted. Held out of the baseline.
Spuria · rejected
Not now thought Plato’s; the appended tail of the corpus.
The evidence chain: every secured work, its Stephanus range, its public-domain source, and the size of the verbatim text on record. Sorted by length.
| Dialogue | Stephanus | PD source | Text secured |
|---|