108 RHETORICA thinkers? No wonder Kirby opines “Quot lectores, tot Platones": There are as many Platos as there are readers of him. McCoy's reading of various dialogues is "partial" both in the sense of partisan and less-than-the-whole. But so are all readings of Plato. To disagree with McCoy over particulars strikes me as simply reflecting the fact that her Plato is not my Plato. I suspect many readers may be persuaded that the most consistent means by which Plato distinguishes sophists from philosophers is by their moral purpose without accepting that Plato's account is true (something McCoy does not claim), and perhaps insisting that the most compelling reading of certain dialogues requires us to accept that Plato did, in fact, try to distinguish the two on other grounds, including by method and doctrine. It is to McCoy's credit that she demonstrates familiarity with a broader body of literature than most philosophers who deal with Plato. Readers of Rhetorica will appreciate McCoy's account as a healthy counterpart to the long tradition ofbooks by philosophers that take every opportunity to equate sophists and rhetoric to the detriment of both. Her book should encourage historians of rhetoric who have not examined certain dialogues as part of the canon of rhetorical theory to include a greater variety of Plato's texts. Lastly, by portraying Plato as a sophisticated rhetor, McCoy facilitates a more candid assessment of what she describes as his most consistent theme. After all, if one does not believe in the forms (that is, if one is not a Platonist), then the only difference between sophist and philosopher is the latter's authentic concern for other people. The fact that Plato's rhetoric privileges Socrates in this regard no longer seems a compelling reason for us to do the same. Edward Schiappa University ofMinnesota Casper C. de Jonge, Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Hali­ carnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supple­ ments 301), Leiden: Brill, 2008. xiii + 456 pp. ISBN 9789004166776 Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek intellectual active in Rome in the last decades of the first century bce. Not all of his writings have survived, but those that do include (as well a lengthy work on Roman history) a substantial and interesting corpus of literary and rhetorical criticism, including studies of the classical orators and Thucydides, and a treatise on style (On Composition). Modern scholarship has often treated him with scant respect, but he has begun to be taken more seriously in recent decades. Building on that work, and contributing a distinctive anci original approach of his own, de Jonge has achieved a remarkable further advance in our understanding. His focus is on Dionysius' integration of ideas from the whole range of language disciplines—philology, technical grammar, philosophy Reviews 109 and rhetoric; metrics and musical theory also make appearances, though they are less central to de Jonge's enquiry. After an introductory chapter, de Jonge examines Dionysius' general conception of the nature of language; his treatment of the grammatical theory of the parts of speech, and his critical application of this theory; the theory of natural word-order; similarities and differences between poetry and prose; and Dionysius' use of experimental alterations to word order (metathesis, or "transposition") as a tool of practical criticism. One of the study's aims is to use Dionysius as a source for the state of the language disciplines in the late first century (for the most part known only from sparse fragments), and in particular to illustrate the close connections between these disciplines. But in reconstructing the intellectual context of Dionysius' work, de Jonge prudently resists the temptations (traditionally irresistible to classicists) of Quellenforschung: "instead of assigning partic­ ular passages from Dionysius' works to specific 'sources', I will point to the possible connections between Dionysius' discourse and that of earlier and contemporary scholars of various backgrounds" (pp. 7-8). This restraint does not preclude good observations on specific influences: in particular, there is a powerful argument for the view that Dionysius had read, and been influenced by, Cicero (p. 15, pp. 215-16). A second methodological commitment is the adoption of an "external rather than an...