The aim should be to find a way, while adhering to normal English word order and sentence construction, to say as precisely as possible, in ordinary English—where necessary, ordinary philosophical English—just what an educated contemporary of Plato’s would have taken the Greek being translated to be saying. It is neither necessary nor appropriate to produce ‘English’ encrusted with esoteric code-formations that no one could make good use of except by consulting the Greek text. Hence, we have to reject the ideal some recent translators of Greek philosophy into English have held aloft, to produce a version as ‘close’ to the Greek text in syntax, word order, and terminology as were the medieval Latin Aristotle translations of William of Moerbeke. For one thing, Latin grammar and normal sentence construction are vastly closer to the Greek than our contemporary English has any chance of being. And, in any case, the scholastic study of Aristotle that Moerbeke’s translations were intended to facilitate is nothing we should wish ourselves or our students to emulate in reading Plato (or, for that matter, Aristotle, either). When we English-speaking readers turn to Plato’s texts, we want to find a Plato who speaks in English—our English—and communicates to us as accurately as possible all the details of his thought and artistry. I know that these translations achieve this aim in varying degrees and no doubt none of them as fully as one might realistically wish. But I hope they will be found a durable basis on which both general readers and students can rely in carrying forward into the new millennium the twenty-four-hundred-year tradition of reading and studying these classics of Western philosophy.
John M. Cooper
July 1996
1
. ‘Plethon’ is a pseudonym George Gemistos adopted toward the end of his life—in Greek it has essentially the same meaning as ‘Gemistos’ itself does—apparently to mark, by its resemblance to Plato’s own name, his authoritative sponsorship of Platonist doctrines. See
George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes,
by C. M. Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); for the change of name, see pp. 186–88.
2
. Translations of
Phaedo
and
Meno,
made in Sicily, were also available from about 1160.
3
. Several ‘lives’ of Plato have survived from antiquity, of which the earliest, that by Diogenes Laertius (translated by R. D. Hicks, Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), dates perhaps from the third century
A.D.
4
. For the sake of completeness, we also print translations of the short poems (‘Epigrams’) that have come down to us from antiquity with Plato’s name attached.
5
. Since our manuscripts standardly present the thirty-six ‘tetralogical’ works in the order that ancient evidence indicates was Thrasyllus’, it is reasonable to think that their order for the spuria goes back to Thrasyllus’ edition too. We present these in the order of our oldest manuscript that contains them, the famous ninth- or tenth-century Paris manuscript of the complete works. (In some other manuscripts
Axiochus
is placed at the front of the list, instead of the back.)
6
. The only previous comparably complete translation (it does however omit one small work of disputed authorship, the
Halcyon,
included here, and the Epigrams as well) is
The Works of Plato,
edited by George Burges, in six volumes, for the Bohn Classical Library, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1861–70. This is a ‘literal’ translation, not easy to read or otherwise use.
7
.
The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters,
Bollingen Foundation (Princeton University Press, 1961).
8
. In its ten Plato volumes, the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, various dates) does include translations (with facing Greek text) of all thirty-six works in Thrasyllus’ tetralogies, but none of the ‘spuria’.
9
. In the table of contents works whose Platonic authorship has plausibly been questioned in antiquity or modern times are marked, either as ones which no one reasonably thinks are by Plato or as ones as to which there is no consensus that they are by him.
10
. For a somewhat speculative, rather alarmist, view of the extent of Thrasyllus’ editorial work, see H. Tarrant,
Thrasyllan Platonism
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
11
.
The Dialogues of Plato
(London: Macmillan, 1st ed. 1871, 3rd 1892; 4th ed., revised, by D. J. Allan and H. E. Dale, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953, four vols.). Allan and Dale claim explicitly that theirs is the approximate order of composition; Jowett left his own order unexplained, but it is not very different from Allan and Dale’s. Of Thrasyllus’ thirty-six ‘genuine’ works Jowett
1
prints twenty-seven dialogues (no
Letters
); Jowett
3
adds a twenty-eighth (
Second Alcibiades
), plus one of Thrasyllus’ eight ‘spurious’ works (
Eryxias
), both translated by his secretary Matthew Knight; Jowett
4
shrinks back to twenty-eight (adding
Greater Hippias,
translated by Allan and Dale themselves, but omitting
Second Alcibiades
as nongenuine). The earliest comprehensive English translation, that of Thomas Taylor (except that F. Sydenham is credited with the translation of nine dialogues) (London, 1804, five vols.) is organized on a fanciful ‘systematic’ basis, in which the dialogues judged by him to establish the ‘comprehensive’ Platonic views respectively in ethics and politics and in natural philosophy and metaphysics come first, followed by the various more ‘partial’ treatments of specific questions. The title page to each of Taylor’s five volumes claims to present ‘[Plato’s] Fifty-five Dialogues and Twelve Epistles’, a surprising way of referring to the thirty-five Thrasyllan ‘genuine’ dialogues that the collection actually contains (he omits the thirteenth
Letter
as obviously spurious): presumably he counts each book of
Republic
and
Laws
as a separate ‘dialogue’, in which case the total is indeed fifty-five.
12
. Modern editions of Plato in Greek (for example, that of J. Burnet in the Oxford Classical Texts series of Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1900–1907, in five volumes: a revised edition is underway) regularly present the Thrasyllan corpus in Thrasyllus’ order.
13
. For one influential version of this division, see G. Vlastos,
Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 46–47.
14
. For a survey of these investigations and references to recent and older stylometric studies of Plato, see Charles M. Young, ‘Plato and Computer Dating’ in
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
, XII, ed. C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 227–50.
15
. Xenophon’s Socratic writings include his own
Apology,
a
Symposium,
and four books of
Memoirs of Socrates
(often referred to by its Latin title,
Memorabilia
); these are translated by H. Tredennick and R. Waterfield (Penguin Books, 1990), and are available in Greek and English in the Loeb Classical Library series (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, various dates).
16
. That is, the ones he did write: there are reasonable doubts as to the Platonic origins of several of the dialogues included in the tetralogies, and a few are generally held not to be his work.
17
. According to Cicero (
Letters to Atticus
XIII xix 4), Aristotle appeared as the main speaker in his own dialogues.
18
. At least one other Academic of Aristotle’s generation, Plato’s nephew and successor as head of the school, Speusippus, also wrote dialogues, along with philosophical works of other genres. We know nothing substantial about them.
19
. Epicurus also seems to have written at least one dialogue, and there is evidence of dialogues written by some Peripatetics.
20
.
Letter VII
(341c–d, 344c–e) speaks rather similarly about philosophical writings, emphasizing the impossibility of
writing down
the content of any state of mind that might constitute true knowledge of philosophical truth.
Letter II
(314b–c) limits itself to a very different, much less interesting, complaint about such writing—and recommends a remedy that actually contradicts the main idea here: it will inevitably fall into the wrong hands, so that any sensible philosopher will have his pupils commit his oral teaching to memory instead of writing down on paper the words to be memorized! In both
Letters
the author (whether Plato or someone impersonating him) gives these considerations as Plato’s reasons for never having written a philosophical treatise.
21
. I should emphasize that I am speaking here simply of Plato’s handling of the dialogue form. Another author (perhaps Berkeley in his
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
is one of these) might use the form simply for expository convenience, making it clear that he is using one of the speakers to present his own ideas and arguments and using the others as a means of countering certain sorts of resistance to them.
Marginal references
In order to facilitate comparison between this edition and others, in Greek or in translation, we print in the margins of the translations the ‘Stephanus numbers’ that are commonly used in scholarly references to the works of Plato. In this ebook, the numbers are embedded in the text, enclosed in square brackets. These numbers and letters indicate the corresponding page and section on that page of the relevant volume of the Greek text of Plato as edited (Paris, 1578) by the French scholar Henri Estienne (in Latin, Stephanus). (These are omitted in the case of
Halcyon
and
Epigrams
because Stephanus did not include those works in his edition.)
Footnotes
It has been our intention to provide in footnotes all the basic information the general reader might need in order to follow the discussion in the texts. This includes the identification of persons, places, events, etc., in Greek history and culture, insofar as these are not explained sufficiently in the context where the references to them occur. We have also identified the sources of all Plato’s quotations from other authors, so far as those are known; any that are not identified should be presumed to be from now unidentifiable authors or works. In general, we have not attempted to provide any guidance or commentary as regards issues of philosophical interpretation, apart from that contained in the introductory notes to the individual works. But we have sometimes given alternative translations, where some point of philosophical significance may be at issue and the Greek is ambiguous or otherwise subject to differing construals. In all cases the editor bears ultimate responsibility for the footnotes to the translations: usually these incorporate material that was in the footnotes in the original place of publication or was provided by those responsible for translations here published for the first time, but the editor has decided when a footnote is needed, and when not, and he has borne the responsibility of editing and otherwise preparing the footnotes as they appear here, including providing most of the alternative translations himself. Responsibility for any errors or omissions in the footnotes rests with the editor.
Greek text
In general the Greek text translated is that of John Burnet, in
Platonis Opera
, Oxford Classical Texts, five volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900–1907). Where the translation of a given work is based on a different text from Burnet’s, this is recorded in a note at the beginning of the work in question. For each work, every effort has been made to register in footnotes all variances in the translation from the basic Greek text, Burnet’s or another. Such departures, as indicated in the notes, often select alternative readings contained in the manuscripts, or else follow emendations proposed by other editors or in scholarly articles: we do not record the details, beyond saying that a given reading is found in “some manuscripts,” or else that a given emendation “is accepted,” or the like. Those who wish to know the details may usually find them in the
apparatus
criticus
of a critical edition of the dialogue in question. In a few places the translator has opted for a new conjectural treatment in the text translated; there we simply record the conjectured reading without further elaboration.
Translations
Many of the translations in this book have been published before, either by Hackett Publishing Company or by another publisher (details are given in the Acknowledgments). In all cases the version appearing here reflects revisions, of varying quantity and significance, made by the translators on the advice of the editor. While no general effort has been made to ensure consistency in the translation of recurrent words or phrases across the vast extent of Plato’s works (that would intrude too greatly on the prerogatives and the individual judgment of the translators to whose scholarly expertise we are indebted for these
Complete Works
), we have adopted a policy of keeping to a single spelling for each of the proper nouns and adjectives that occur in the book.
Editorial responsibilities
As editor, John M. Cooper has had editorial oversight over the preparation for publication of all the translations in this volume, as well as for the introductions and notes. He is the author of all the introductory notes except those noted just below, signing them
J.M.C.
In addition to advising the editor generally, D. S. Hutchinson’s special responsibilities as associate editor concerned a set of fifteen works—the ones marked as spurious by the first-century-
A.D.
editor Thrasyllus, plus eight further dialogues whose Platonic authorship has been at least doubted in modern times:
Definitions, On Justice, On Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus,
Eryxias, Axiochus, Halcyon, Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Rival
Lovers, Theages, Clitophon,
and
Minos
. He recruited the translators (translating two of the works,
Definitions
and
Alcibiades
, himself) and worked closely with them in the preparation and revision of their versions. He wrote the introductory notes to these fifteen works, signing them
D.S.H.