Footnotes to Plato — Footnotes to Plato

Scholarship on ancient philosophy leaves a trail. Every article that cites Republic 509d or Nicomachean Ethics 1097b marks a passage as worth arguing about. Collected across 135 years of journals, those marks form a map of what the field has attended to — and what it has passed over.

This tool draws that map at the level of the individual passage, and links each mark back to the article that made it.

90,502

citations placed to a passage

works of Plato & Aristotle

journals

1887–2022

years covered

What you can ask it#

Which passages of a work carry the argument? Nicomachean Ethics Book VI and the ergon argument at 1097b draw far more citation traffic than the surrounding text. The passage map shows that shape for any work in the corpus.
How did attention to a work move over time? Plot Republic against Laws, or the whole Platonic corpus against the Aristotelian, across 135 years.
Do philosophers and classicists read the same passages? They demonstrably do not. The two fields' journals emphasise different parts of the same text, and the comparison makes that visible.
Who cited this passage? Every cell drills through to the citing articles, with DOI links out to JSTOR.

What it cannot tell you#

This is the part worth reading before the charts.

Coverage

Ten journals is not "the scholarship." The corpus is journal articles only — no monographs, no edited volumes, no commentaries, and no Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. It skews Anglophone. A great deal of the most influential work on Plato and Aristotle has appeared in books, and none of that is here.

What the tool measures precisely is citation traffic in these ten journals. Treat it as a large sample of the field's attention, not a census of it.

Placement, not accuracy

Of roughly 141,000 detected citations, 90,502 could be placed to a specific work and passage. The rest could not — usually because page numbers collide between works, not because the citations are bad. A short bar below may mean "rarely cited" or it may mean "we could not place it." The difference is always shown, never hidden.

How much of the picture we actually have#

Everything else on this site depends on this chart, so it comes first. Each bar is a work; solid length is what we could place with confidence. The tail that fades to nothing is citation traffic we detected but could not attribute — real attention that belongs somewhere, but which we decline to assign.

Reading this chart. Works are split into two tiers. For the trustworthy tier, at least 80% of detected citations resolve to a passage, and bar lengths can be compared directly. For the uncertain tier, fewer do — so a short solid bar means the placement failed, not that the work is little studied. Meno, Crito and Apology sit in the second tier because Stephanus page numbers in their range collide with other dialogues, not because they are neglected. Colour follows the reference edition a citation uses — Stephanus or Bekker — which is how the scholarship addresses these texts, and is not a claim about authorship.

Explore#

Works over time

Plot attention to any work or group across 135 years. Compare Republic with Laws, Plato with Aristotle, or philosophy journals with classics journals.

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Passages

Inside a single work: which pages, sections and lines the literature returns to. Drill through any passage to the articles that cite it.

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Methods

How citations were extracted, resolved, and audited — including everything that went wrong and what was done about it.

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Citing and contributing#

If you use this in published work, please cite it — see how to cite. The derived data is published for download so that results can be checked or reused.

Publish or edit a journal you would like to see included? Write to me. I cannot add titles unilaterally — the corpus came through a JSTOR Text Analysis Support agreement, and expanding it means going back to JSTOR and the publisher — but I would like to know which journals scholars want represented, and an approach from an editor carries considerably more weight than one from me.