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i n t r o d u c t i o n Plato’s dialogues occupy a unique place within the European and North American intellectual traditions. These texts, more than any others, are regarded as essential to understanding what it is that human beings are doing when they do philosophy. My own introduction to the study of philosophy at the university level began with the Apology. So it is and was for most of us who studied and study philosophy within postsecondary educational institutions. Many people who are not professional academics or university students also look to Plato when they want to read philosophy. We turn to Plato for many reasons. Much of the appeal of these texts surely resides in the glorious figure of Socrates, whose wit and wickedness, humility and persistence draw us in with a kind of marveling breathlessness. In Socrates we see someone who opens our eyes to the profoundly serious nature of the philosophical enterprise. He is, after all, as Plato puts before us so vividly, a man who died for doing philosophy. The questions he pursues with his interlocutors are, many of them, dangerous questions: In a democracy, how can a city be well run when it is run by a group of people who do not appear competent to rule? How do we know that the actions we justify by claiming to do them in the name of the gods are in fact godly? Should we educate our young people to succeed in the eyes of their fellows or to be decent human beings? We read Plato and take Plato seriously because in his works we see the power and importance of the ideas philosophy raises and the questions philosophy asks. What makes us see the power and importance of philosophy in Plato’s texts is that they are not just philosophical argumentation—they are works of literary art. They are, as people have noted, dramas with fully fleshed-out characters embedded in a rich, complex world, with plots and conflicts, with humor, with evocative and subtle and sophisticated poetic language. To read Plato is to feel the challenge to the intellect as one tries to grasp the arguments , to strive toward the abstract universal truth. It is also to feel the life of those ideas, of those truths, as they are worked out in concrete, particular human situations in the drama. To read Plato is also to come to see how these ideas and truths are not just Plato’s ideas and truths: they are the ideas and truths of Plato’s world and of Plato’s own heritage and traditions. The philosophical arguments are not separate from the poetic art, which is itself not separate from Plato’s culture. xiii xiv introduction Plato’s texts are larded with quotations from the poets, especially from the Homeric poems. Plato appeals regularly to the material of his own intellectual and artistic world, material well known and familiar to him and to his earliest readers. The characters in his dialogues are almost all real people who lived and breathed and walked the streets of Athens in the fifth century B.C.E. They are people about whom everyone—at least everyone in Athens —knew something. Gorgias came to Athens to teach. Agathon was a successful tragic poet. Alcibiades was—Alcibiades. The dialogues have, by and large, concrete settings with histories, meanings, and associations. The Republic takes place in the house of Cephalus in Peiraieus, where most of the Athenian metics lived because Peiraieus was developed in the fifth century to be Athens’s port and center of trade.The Crito takes place in the Athenian jail near the agora, close to the law courts where Socrates was condemned. The dialogues take place at particular times, often with specific religious or political associations and significance. The Symposium takes place immediately following Agathon’s first victory in the dramatic competitions at the Lenaea in 416 B.C.E., which is also the year in which the Athenians decided to send their great fleet, under the command of Alcibiades, Lamachus, and Nicias, to Sicily, with disastrous results.The Republic takes place at the time of the first celebration of the festival of the Thracian god Bendis in Peiraieus, probably around 411, evoking the associations of Peiraieus with non-Athenians and reminding the reader of Athenian openness to innovation, even in religion. Opening up one of the dialogues, then, is opening up a door on Athens, on...

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