"PLATO: COMPLETE WORKS" INTRODUCTION.

“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 Christian- ity and other eastern ‘wisdoms’, Platonist philosophy was philosophy itself. Even after Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire, Platonism contin- ued as the dominant philosophy in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterra- nean. 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 edu- cated Greeks.1 When Plethon, the leading Byzantine scholar and philoso- pher 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 incom- plete 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 composi- tion (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),”