Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation [Paperback]

Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style.

Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life.

Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all time."Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato."
--Ralph Waldo EmersonDr. Hayden Pellicciais associate professor and chair of classics at Cornell University.

Plato(c. 428 B.C. -- 347 B.C.) was a student of Socrates. He founded the Academy in Athens, the prototype of the modern university, whose most famous member was Aristotle.Introduction

Having the task behind me, I can propose with some seriousness what I did not begin to guess when it still lay ahead of me: namely, that revising someone else's translations of works of Plato is not much less demanding than translating them afresh. That raises the question, Why stick with Jowett's old versions at all--why not simply produce new ones? I have consulted many of the translations produced since Jowett's, many of them up to date in every possible sense, and Jowett's, in my judgment, remain superior, in the most important respects, to them all. Jowett has a better command not jl³.