Philosophical Framing: The Phaedran Setting of Leucippe and Cleitophon

This paper explores Plato's Phaedrus as a literary and philosophical intertext in the preamble of Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Cleitophon . The novel's Phaedran frame playfully but programmatically foregrounds the tension between the fictive orality and textuality in this disjunctive work, and stimulates the reader's reflection on metaliterary issues, such as how to read fiction. The Phaedran play with the presence of writing, the absence of an authorial figure, and the question of how to read fiction, mark the novel's affinity with the modern category of Metafiction, and find parallels in contemporary fiction, such as the works of Lucian and Apuleius. Karen Ni Mheallaigh is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on ancient fiction, especially the works of Lucian, and the novel. She has published on Lucian and on pseudo-documentary fiction in antiquity, and is currently working on a monograph on Lucian and Metafiction, which is based on her doctoral research.