22 - I Know, Because the Caged Bird Sings: Plato's Theaetetus

I'm really enjoying this podcast, thank you for creating it. This episode hit on something I have given some thought to prior to discovering this podcast  I think that knowledge is something you can choose to seek.  Belief in a thing, is something you either have or you do not. You can't choose to believe in something. The two are related but not the same thing. So I guess the next question might be, if I have knowledge, do I believe it?  I think so. If I don't, it's just a suspect fact in my mind. 

Reading this for the first time, and wow there is so much more going on than what you managed to cover in the episode it is quite a bewildering amount of stuff going on.

Got two questions:

1.How much should I care about the literary aspects of the dialogue during my first read, as against just reading the arguments? There are many things I have picked up that seem interesting when relating the contents of the arguments to the overall contexts - what I mean for example is how there quite clearly seems a meta question at play about how Protagoras is being presented and understood - Socrates having to constantly impersonate him and saying "if only he was actually here to correct us" and stuff like that, even though they have access to the book, which plays into Socrates' critique of writing in other dialogues but also the fact that this dialogue is framed as a book in the story! Or questions about how well Socrates is really playing the role of a midwife when he clearly is driving the whole thing (so it reads to me anyway, he clearly isn't barren of ideas), how the initial argument about identifying wisdom and knowledge relates to the passing separation that Protagoras makes between the two, the tension between the opening frame about Theaetetus and the praising of his civic virtue and the ideal philosopher in the digression etc. I could go on. I do feel I am getting swamped in these ideas though to the detriment of the main argumentative throughline. How did you handle this on your first read Peter?

2. Much shorter question. I am a bit confused about the chronology here. I believe the discussion between Socrates and Theaetetus was had before the day of Socrates' trial, where he shortly drank the poison after. That is like 1-2 days left before he died? On the other hand, the opening frame mentions Euclides saying he talked with Socrates about the discussion, took notes and wrote out the book which is to be read, and whenever he went to Athens had it checked with Socrates to double check about this or that point and when he got home he would correct it. The way this reads to me in my translation makes it seem like an occasional thing - whenever he found himself in Athens he would ask, then correct the version at home, and this happened more than once. Unless I am missing something, this doesn't seem to really fit with the fact that Socrates' death is basically imminent.