The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws. By Randall Baldwin Clark. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 192p. $55.00.

A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws. By Albert Keith Whitaker. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 254p. $39.00.

Plato's Laws, his longest and most comprehensive work on politics, is a conversation about the purposes and limits of legislation among three old men: an Athenian Stranger, Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. The three speak while ascending to the cave-shrine of Zeus where Kleinias hopes to receive the blessing of the god for his appointed task of drawing up a law code to govern a new colony. Until recently, the Laws was very little read, and there is still relatively little useful secondary literature on it, especially when compared to the ocean of scholarly treatments available on the far better known Republic.