Plato writes narrated (as distinct from dramatic) dialogues in his ‘middle’ period. Some are narrated throughout, others are introduced and sometimes interrupted by a dramatic frame dialogue, highlighting the fictiveness of the conversation being represented. In one group, Socrates himself narrates conversations he had with boys or teenagers or young men: Charmides, Lysis, Euthydemus. Here Plato pursues themes appropriate to the genre of ‘erotic’ dialogue, where narration can exhibit the comedy of interactions between his characters. Sometimes another speaker recounts a conversation in which Socrates participated: Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides (Theaetetus is an abortive further example; Protagoras, narrated by Socrates himself, has many affinities with Symposium). These three dialogues employ distancing mechanisms coupled with ostentatious but self-defeating claims of veracity and reliability, indicating remoteness from what Socrates himself in fact taught. Finally, I take up the suggestion that Plato sticks with the mode of narrated dialogue in Republic because he has by now developed theoretical scruples about the ethical propriety of direct dramatic representation.

This volume offers perspectives on examples of key ingredients in Plato’s writing: particularly of argument, allegory, images, and myth, of intertextuality, and of paradox, but also his characterization of speakers he portrays in dialogue, now through narration, now direct dramatic presentation, and his assumed readerships. All the essays included were prompted by perception of something problematic: either in a passage within a dialogue itself, or in the way scholarship had tackled or failed to tackle a topic. First come three approaching the corpus as a whole, three different vantage points. The next group of three focus on arguments and disputants within the overall argumentative structure of three very different dialogues: Gorgias, Cratylus, and Parmenides. A third group contains two studies of celebrated imaginative fictions – the Noble Lie and the Cave – that perform key but unstraightforward roles in the philosophical strategy of the Republic. The final six chapters discuss the Laws. They explore further literary and philosophical dimensions of Plato’s writing in the last and longest of his dialogues, nowadays yielding up more philosophical rewards than was once the case.

Two intimately related topics are explored here. First is a focus on the different addresses Plato conceives of in writing the Laws. The limitations in understanding of his ‘naïve’ audiences are what are most strongly emphasized: in the first instance the elderly and insular interlocutors Cleinias and Megillus, but by implication the citizens of the community Cleinias is imagined as helping to construct, and first time readers of the dialogue itself. Those limitations will be registered by more ‘practised’ readers. For that more practised readership, some more challenging passages of writing are supplied, with sufficiently indicative reminiscences of more intellectually demanding treatments of subject matter and styles of argument familiar elsewhere in the dialogues. Second is the dominant religious framework within which the Laws mostly operates, which acts as prime vehicle for its philosophical limitation. I illustrate this principally by examination of a passage in Book 4 which includes a myth about the primeval god Cronos, but also by discussion of the strenuously argued cosmic theology of Book 10.

Aristotle complained that though the original intention of the Laws was to institute a form of political system ‘more common’ to cities (presumably ‘more capable of being shared in’ by political communities generally), the social and political system Plato actually worked out in the dialogue turned out in the end not very different from the ideal articulated in the Republic. This chapter agrees with Aristotle’s identification of two projects in the Laws. But it argues that Plato makes it clear that the dialogue needs to develop (in relatively idealizing mode) a scheme for producing a citizenry educated for virtue as its primary aim, but that as a subordinate task it must also provide a constitutional framework that has sound empirical and historical credentials and a system of law providing for coercion as well as persuasion. There is just not much supply of persons eager to be as good as possible as fast as possible, and for the ‘tough eggs’ among them an elaborate penal system has to be devised. How Plato delivers on these two projects is then explored in some detail. The chapter concludes by sketching in summary the way both are fitted into a single plan.

The two great Victorian Platonists – George Grote and Benjamin Jowett – are often perceived as championing diametrically opposed perspectives on Plato: utilitarian vs. idealist. This chapter argues that no less important is what they had in common: an ‘atomist’ hermeneutics, in fierce reaction against attempts to make a system out of the dialogues; and a combination of scrupulous attention to the texts as historical documents with insistence that giving Plato his place in the history of philosophy and ‘in the scale of human improvement’ was no less the historian’s obligation. Finally, both men were active in the public sphere, looking for similar ‘modern applications’ of what was best in Plato’s political thought, particularly in the sphere of education.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book 1 of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue (644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion, I comment on what light is thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we have been promised.

The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. I draw attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. Section 1 shows that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian Visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia alternative to that advanced by the Athenian’s interlocutors, which Plato could hope to be taken seriously as such. The second section focuses on the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear ascribed to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. Plato can expect recognition by the reader that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. The third section argues that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon’s Lycurgus.

Discussion of the confrontation between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias has mostly focused on its first two phases: Callicles’ statement of his views and Socrates’ attempted refutations (481–500), and Socrates’ subsequent attempt to substitute his own conception of the good life (501–9). Much less attention has been paid to the final phase (509–22). But Plato stages here the most sustained debate in the dialogue between alternative answers – with their consequences – to what has proved to be its central question: is committing injustice or falling victim to it the greatest evil? This chapter examines the key moves in this debate, in which Callicles is again tempted by Socrates to participate, after previously refusing to continue. I argue that Plato’s aim here is to show just why and how Socrates might successfully initiate and sustain intellectual engagement with an intelligent young politician hoping to rise within the Athenian democracy, such as Callicles is portrayed as being. He fails to persuade him. But this is not, as sometimes supposed, a failure of intellectual communication. It is a matter of what Plato wants us to understand as different fundamental commitments.

The Laws makes clear its commitment to a form of Socratic paradox: no one who is unjust is so voluntarily. I show first how its protagonist – the Athenian Visitor – maintains this position, without resorting to the Socratic thesis that knowingly acting against one's beliefs about what is best is some sort of impossibility, and indeed recognizing the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. My main concern, however, is with the Athenian's treatment – near the outset of the penology of Book 9 – of what is presented as a serious threat posed by the paradox to any viable theory of criminal behaviour and its punishment; or as he puts it, to the distinction drawn 'in every city and by every legialator there has ever been between two sorts of wrongdoing (adikêmata), voluntary and involuntary'. The Athenian's strategy for resisting the threat (as most commentators note) relies on distinguishing between volutarily harming someone, which requires compensation and often purification, and involuntary commission of injustice, which merits punishment, reconceptualized however as treatment for psychic disease. How far this distinction is successful in defusing the problem is then explored.

The character of Cratylus in the Cratylus is puzzling. Initially he is portrayed as a teasingly mysterious figure, and he is silent for most of it. But he adopts a quite different demeanour when he joins the conversation towards its end. Now he functions as a mostly reasonable and altogether cooperative respondent, even if he takes rigid and extreme positions. I argue that Plato uses Cratylus first to sketch linguistic naturalism in the dogmatic and dialectically unelaborated form in which it was presented by its original author. Then after Socrates has made of it a full scale philosophical theory on his own account, he puts Cratylus to another use: as a proponent of a version of that original naturalist position which is now developed as the germ of a rival full-scale theory in miniature, incorporating semantic, epistemological, and ontological components, and constructed from paradoxical stances generated by a range of previous and contemporary philosophers, including notably Antisthenes: a construction of Plato’s own. Hence for Plato Cratylus’ fascination: in the end his strange doctrine forces engagement with an interconnected set of deeply serious philosophical issues.

In this opening chapter, I attempt to situate Plato’s philosophizing and literary production in its historical context. The evidence external to the dialogues that such an enterprise can rely on is either scrappy or suspect, or both. So what I offer here is a series of snapshots. They follow a chronological sequence, from Plato’s relationship with Socrates and the Athens that executed him; through his momentous first visit to Italy and Sicily and its impact on his thinking about politics and philosophy; to the founding of the Academy, Plato’s rivalry with Isocrates, and the birth of the theory of Forms; and ending with the worlds of the late dialogues.

The ‘noble lie’ is crucial within the political philosophy of the Republic, as the ideology of the charter myth needed to motivate the citizens of the Republic’s good city in general, and the rulers in particular, to care above all for its well-being. I look first at the way lying figured in the Greeks’ imaginary and their political discourse, particularly that of the Athenian democracy; then at ethical dimensions of Socrates’ notion of ‘useful lie’, and his distinction between deception by speech and deception in the soul. What makes the ‘noble lie’ useful is its ability (if believed) to instil in citizens love for their community (not merely calculation that promotion of its well-being is in their own self-interest), through representation of their human identity as membership of a single family, with their core affections and obligations directed to their mother country. It is that sense of basic identity and commensurate obligation, not dialectically based grasp of eternal truth, which will persuade philosophers to take their part in ruling the city. Finally, I tackle the issue – its difficulty highlighted by Socrates himself – of how belief in the narrative is to be secured.