Great Dialogues of Plato

"Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato," wrote Emerson, and few who have spent time with these texts would disagree. The dialogues gathered in this landmark volume represent the very foundation of Western philosophical thought. Questions that preoccupied Plato's Socrates, what is beauty? what is justice? what is love? can the soul survive death?, are the same questions that have animated every serious thinker in the centuries since, and they remain urgently alive today. This edition brings together seven of Plato's most celebrated works in a translation by W. H. D. Rouse, one of the foremost classical scholars of the twentieth century and the acclaimed translator of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Rouse's gift for rendering ancient Greek into vivid, flowing English gives modern readers unimpeded access to the full force of Plato's thought. As Time magazine noted, in Rouse's pages "Socrates' strength of mind, his dedication to philosophical truth, are borne in on the modern reader with something of the power that impressed and disturbed the ancient Greeks." For anyone serious about understanding the roots of Western civilization and the enduring questions of the human condition, this is an indispensable volume.