Selected Dialogues of Plato
Chapter One
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 just of English prose style, but of English prose styles, and that gives him a great advantage in rendering the language of a master of variation like Plato. In a work like the Symposium, to take a notable example, Plato puts on display his version of the idiosyncratic speaking styles of a group containing two dramatists of genius, plus a less original third who was ranked in antiquity as the greatest tragic poet after Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; of the remaining four speakers, one, the drunken Alcibiades, was reckoned by his cont ... read full excerpt from: Selected Dialogues of Plato ebook
