Imaginative Platonic Dialogue on Partygate wins Classics Writing Prize

Trinity undergraduate Finn Jarvis has won the ‘Covid and the Classics’ competition with his imaginative rendition of a Platonic dialogue about Boris Johnson’s alleged lockdown-breaking parties.

The competition run by the classics magazine Antigone challenged entrants to bring back to life a Greek or Roman writer and respond to any aspect of the global misery, chaos and surrealism brought on by the Covid pandemic.

Finn Jarvis’s entry, an excerpt from a previously lost Platonic dialogue, the Boris, was named the ‘worthy winner,’ with judges noting that it ‘managed to fuse Athenian philosophical debate with British political farce.’

Finn says of his winning entry: ‘The task was to imitate closely an author's style while suggesting how they might have approached the pandemic; so I thought a dose of Socratic irony, in the style of Plato's early dialogues, would be perfectly suited to the muddled evasions evinced by 'partygate'. I also drew on the Theaetetus, where Socrates compares himself at some length to a midwife of ideas, to make an analogy only a little more contrived: Socrates, the lateral flow device of ideas. The final Platonic touches were a gratuitous reference to Homer, and of course a liberal scattering of uncomprehending agreement from Socrates' victim, the witless Boris.’

Finn Jarvis is a final year undergraduate studying Classics. You can read his full prize-winning entry on the competition winners page.