Reflection on human creativity cannot begin with the consideration of a startling but isolated act for that act may be an empty aberration in the context of a person's life. Nor can the eccentricity of a whole life be the starting point for that life may be merely mad in the context of its society and culture. The paradigmatic creative life is one which, in one way or another, moves its whole culture with it. Philosophical reflection on creativity is especially worthy of our attention because the greatest philosophers have themselves been creative artists. The ones we remember best have not only written well (David Hume springs to mind), but they have brought new modes of intellectual life into being by inventing new genres of philosophical literature. I am thinking of Wittgenstein's aphorisms in meticulous decimal notation, of Spinoza's geometrical derivations, of the Cartesian meditation, and of even the Aristotelian "academic lecture." The radical example, of course, is Plato's invention of the philosophical dialogue, and with no further apology I propose to focus attention on his earliest attempt to write creatively about creativity. Plato's Ion is a tiny perfect model of many things. It represents one round in the quarrel between the artists and the philosophers, the quarrel which reaches its famous crisis in the "censorship" explored and advocated in the Republic. It also presents us with Socratic dialectic in its purely aporetic form. Ion, a member of a school whose occupation is to recite the Homeric epics, is confounded by Socrates' questions and eventually must abandon his claim to know what knowledge it is that the rhapsode commands. However, the dialogue is unusual among the early "aporetic dialogues" in that it concludes with a positive account of the rhapsode's art, which seems more than merely ironic. (The claim that the artist does not proceed by epistem~ or techn~ but by divine inspiration is explored in later dialogues, most notably, the Phaedrus.) Further, Socrates is portrayed in the Ion as more than a dialectician. He usurps Ion's profession by reciting marvellous passages from the Iliad and Odyssey and by then elucidating them. Moreover, he waxes eloquent in the middle section of the dialogue in a way that outdoes the rhapsode himself and establishes Socrates as one with special authority to speak on the subject of lyricism. This latter aspect of the dialogue is typical of Plato's portrait of Socrates. If a dialogue deals with eros, then Socrates is shown exemplifying (properly controlled) eroticism (Symposium); if it deals with courage, Socrates' courage