Complete Works
PLATO
COMPLETE WORKS
PLATO
COMPLETE WORKS
Edited, with
Introduction and Notes, by
J
OHN
M. C
OOPER
Associate Editor
D. S. H
UTCHINSON
H
ACKETT
P
UBLISHING
C
OMPANY
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 1997 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
14 13 12 11 8 9 10 11
For further information, please address
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
P. O. Box 44937
Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937
Jacket design by Chris Hammill Paul
Text design by Dan Kirklin
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plato.
[Works. English. 1997]
Complete works/Plato;
edited, with introduction and notes, by
John M. Cooper;
associate editor, D. S. Hutchinson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87220-349-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, Ancient.
2. Socrates.
I. Cooper, John M. (John Madison).
II. Hutchinson, D. S.
III. Title.
B358.C3 1997
184—dc21
96-53280
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-349-5 (cloth)
ePub ISBN: 978-1-60384-671-4
CONTENTS
Theaetetus
M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat
Parmenides
Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan
Symposium
Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
Phaedrus
Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
Second Alcibiades*
Anthony Kenny
Rival Lovers*
Jeffrey Mitscherling
Charmides
Rosamond Kent Sprague
Euthydemus
Rosamond Kent Sprague
Protagoras
Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell
Lesser Hippias
Nicholas D. Smith
Clitophon†
Francisco J. Gonzalez
Republic
G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve
Epinomis*
Richard D. McKirahan, Jr.
Epigrams‡
J. M. Edmonds, rev. John M. Cooper
Names listed are those of the translators.
*It is generally agreed by scholars that Plato is not the author of this work.
†It is not generally agreed by scholars whether Plato is the author of this work.
‡As to Plato’s authorship of the individual Letters and Epigrams, consult the respective introductory notes.
Since they were written nearly twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato’s dialogues have found readers in every generation. Indeed, in the major centers of Greek intellectual culture, beginning in the first and second centuries of our era, Plato’s works gradually became the central texts for the study and practice of philosophy altogether: in later antiquity, a time when Greek philosophy was struggling to maintain itself against Christianity and other eastern ‘wisdoms’, Platonist philosophy
was
philosophy itself. Even after Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire, Platonism continued as the dominant philosophy in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean. As late as the fifteenth century, in the last years of the Byzantine empire, the example of George Gemistos Plethon shows how strong this traditional concentration on Plato could be among philosophically educated Greeks.
1
When Plethon, the leading Byzantine scholar and philosopher of the time, accompanied the Byzantine Emperor to Ferrara and Florence in 1438–39 for the unsuccessful Council of Union between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, he created a sensation among Italian humanists with his elevation of Plato as the first of philosophers—above the Latin scholastics’ hero, Aristotle. Plato’s works had been unavailable for study in the Latin west for close to a millennium, except for an incomplete Latin translation of
Timaeus,
2
but from the fifteenth century onwards, through the revived knowledge of Greek and from translations into Latin and then into the major modern European languages, Plato’s dialogues resumed their central place in European culture as a whole. They have held it without interruption ever since.
In presenting this new edition of Plato’s dialogues in English translation, we hope to help readers of the twenty-first century carry this tradition forward. In this introduction I explain our presentation of these works (Section I), discuss questions concerning the chronology of their composition (II), comment on the dialogue form in which Plato wrote (III), offer some advice on how to approach the reading and study of his works (IV), and describe the principles on which the translations in the volume have been prepared (V). But first, a few basic facts about Plato’s life and career.
Plato, a native Athenian, was born in 427
B.C.
and died at the age of eighty-one in 347.
3
He belonged, on both his mother’s and father’s side, to old and distinguished aristocratic families. At some point in his late teens or early twenties (we do not know when or under what circumstances), he began to frequent the circle around Socrates, the Athenian philosopher who appears as the central character in so many of his dialogues and whose trial and death he was to present so eloquently in his
Apology
and his
Phaedo.
In the dozen years or so following Socrates’ death in 399, Plato, then nearly thirty years old, may have spent considerable time away from Athens, for example, in Greek-inhabited southern Italy, where he seems to have met philosophers and scientists belonging to the indigenous “Pythagorean” philosophical school, some of whose ideas were taken up in several of his own dialogues, most notably, perhaps, in the
Phaedo.
In about 388 he visited Syracuse, in Sicily—the first of three visits to the court of the “tyrants” Dionysius I and II during his thirty-odd-year-long engagement in Syracusan politics. This involvement is reported on at length in the Platonic
Letters,
included in this edition. At some point, presumably in the ’eighties, Plato opened a school of higher education in the sacred grove of Academus, in the Attic countryside near Athens, apparently offering formal instruction in mathematical, philosophical, and political studies. He seems to have spent the rest of his life (except for the visits to Syracuse) teaching, researching, and writing there. Under his leadership, the Academy became a major center of research and intellectual exchange, gathering to itself philosophers and mathematicians from all over the Greek world. Among its members was Aristotle, who came as a student in about 367 at the age of eighteen and remained there as teacher, researcher, and writer himself, right up to the time of Plato’s death twenty years later.
I. The ‘Canon’ of Thrasyllus
These
Complete Works
make available a single collection of all the works that have come down to us from antiquity under Plato’s name. We include all the texts published in the early first century
A.D.
in what became the definitive edition of Plato’s works, that by Thrasyllus, an astrologer and Platonist philosopher from the Greek city of Alexandria, in Egypt.
4
From Thrasyllus’ edition derive all our medieval manuscripts of Plato—and so almost all our own knowledge of his texts. Apparently following earlier precedent, Thrasyllus arranged the works of Plato (thirty-five dialogues, plus a set of thirteen ‘Letters’ as a thirty-sixth entry) in nine ‘tetralogies’—groups of four works each—reminiscent of the ancient tragedies, which were presented in trilogies (such as the well-known
Oresteia
of Aeschylus) followed by a fourth, so-called satyr play, preserving a link to the origins of tragedy in rituals honoring the god Dionysus. In addition to these, he included in an appendix a group of ‘spurious’ works, presumably ones that had been circulating under Plato’s name, but that he judged were later accretions. We follow Thrasyllus in our own presentation: first the nine tetralogies, then the remaining works that he designated as spurious.
5
With one exception, earlier translations into English of Plato’s collected works have actually been only selections from this traditional material:
6
usually they have omitted all the Thrasyllan ‘spurious’ works, plus a certain number of others that were included in his tetralogies, since the editors of the collections judged them not in fact Plato’s work. In their widely used collection,
7
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns include none of the ‘spuria’ and only twenty-nine of the thirty-six other works.
8
From Thrasyllus’ tetralogies they omit
Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus,
Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon,
and
Minos.
Even if these dialogues are not by Plato himself (and at least
Clitophon
and
Alcibiades
could very well be), they are all valuable works, casting interesting light on Socrates and the Socratic legacy. They also deserve attention as important documents in the history of Platonism: it is worthy of note that teachers of Platonist philosophy in later antiquity standardly organized their instruction through lectures on ten ‘major’ dialogues, beginning with
Alcibiades
—omitted by Hamilton and Cairns, presumably as not by Plato. The dialogues classified by Thrasyllus as spurious also deserve attention, even though in their case there are strong reasons for denying Plato’s authorship; and the
Definitions
are a valuable record of work being done in Plato’s Academy in his lifetime and the immediately following decades.
9
(For further details see the respective introductory notes to each of the translations.)
Especially given the often inevitably subjective character of judgments about authenticity, it is inappropriate to allow a modern editor’s judgment to determine what is included in a comprehensive collection of Plato’s work. The only viable policy is the one followed here, to include the whole corpus of materials handed down from antiquity. At the same time, it should be frankly emphasized that this corpus—both the works it includes as genuine and the text itself of the works—derives from the judgment of one ancient scholar, Thrasyllus. His edition of Plato’s work, prepared nearly four hundred years after Plato’s death, was derived from no doubt differing texts of the dialogues (and
Letters
) in libraries and perhaps in private hands, not at all from anything like a modern author’s ‘autograph’. No doubt also, both in its arrangement and in decisions taken as to the genuineness of items and the text to be inscribed, it may have reflected the editor’s own understanding of Plato’s philosophy (perhaps a tendentious one) and his views on how it ought to be organized for teaching purposes.
10
So, since the present editor has exercised his own judgment only to the extent of deciding to follow the edition of Thrasyllus, we are thrown back on Thrasyllus’ judgment in the works included and in their order and arrangement. Since Thrasyllus included all the genuine works of Plato that any surviving ancient author refers to, plus some disputed ones, we apparently have the good fortune to possess intact all of Plato’s published writings.
Thrasyllus’ order appears to be determined by no single criterion but by several sometimes conflicting ones, though his arrangement may represent some more or less unified idea about the order in which the dialogues should be read and taught. For example, the first four works (
Euthyphro,
Apology, Crito, Phaedo
) manifestly follow internal evidence establishing a chronological order for the events related in them—the ‘Last Days of Socrates’. The conversation in
Euthyphro
is marked as taking place shortly before Socrates’ trial; his speech at his trial is then given in the
Apology,
while
Crito
presents a visit to Socrates in prison, three days before his execution, which is the culminating event of the
Phaedo.
Somewhat similar internal linkages explain the groups
Republic-Timaeus-Critias
and
Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman
(although the conversation in
Theaetetus
seems to present itself as taking place earlier on the same day as that of
Euthyphro
—a key to grouping that Thrasyllus quite reasonably opted to ignore). But topical and other, more superficial connections play a role as well.
Clitophon
is placed before
Republic,
and
Minos
before
Laws
to serve as brief introductions to the central themes of these two major works, justice and legislation respectively, and the two
Alcibiades
dialogues are grouped together, as are the
Greater
and
Lesser Hippias.
Even the presumed order of composition seems responsible for the last tetralogy’s bringing the series to a conclusion with
Laws
and its appendix
Epinomis
(followed by
Letters
): we have evidence that
Laws
was left unpublished at Plato’s death, presumably because he had not finished working on it.
