In Plato's "Letters", Ariel Helfer provides to readers, for the first time, a highly literal translation of the Letters, complete with extensive notes on historical context and issues of manuscript transmission. His analysis presents a necessary perspective for readers who wish to study Plato's Letters as a work of Platonic philosophy. Centuries of debate over the provenance and significance of Plato's Letters have led to the common view that the Letters is a motley collection of jewels and scraps from within and without Plato's literary estate. In a series of original essays, Helfer describes how the Letters was written as a single work, composed with a unity of purpose and a coherent teaching, marked throughout by Plato's artfulness and insight and intended to occupy an important place in the Platonic corpus. Viewed in this light, the Letters is like an unusual epistolary novel, a manner of semifictional and semiautobiographical literary-philosophic experiment, in which Plato sought to provide his most demanding readers with guidance in thinking more deeply about the meaning of his own career as a philosopher, writer, and political advisor. Plato's "Letters" not only defends what Helfer calls the "literary unity thesis" by reviewing the scholarly history pertaining to the Platonic letters but also brings out the political philosophic lessons revealed in the Letters. As a result, Plato's "Letters" recovers and rehabilitates what has been until now a minority view concerning the Letters, according to which this misunderstood Platonic text will be of tremendous new importance for the study of Platonic political philosophy.

OF ALL philosophers, it is Plato who most persuasively invites the readerby the fertility of his thought and the magic of his style. Not only do his writings contain the germs of most of the problems that philosophers still discuss, but his. prophetic vision has often discerned, beyond the wilderness of disputation, a promised land. Nevertheless Plato was not a mere system-maker; he preferred rather to cast his thought in the form of vigorous dialogues in which the reader may perceive the condieting currents of thought. Hence the perennial freshness and vitality of his philosophy; it lives as drama lives, and is always contemporary. The translation of Plato's dialogues by Benjamin Jowett, late Master of Balliol College and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, has long been recognized as an English classic. A general introduction provides a survey of the elements in Plato's philosophy and of his peculiar genius, with some indication of his importance for the modern world. Generous selections from = number of the more important dialogues, some extensive, others brief, give a fair conception of the philosopher's many-sided interests; special introduction summaries of omitted portions, and notes, help the reader to understand the relation of the selections. A list of further reading guides is also included for those who may wish to extend their knowledge of Plato.

This forty-volume collection comprises all the issues of an early and influential classical periodical, first published between 1810 and 1829.