Four Texts on Socrates: Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes' Clouds (0801485746) - Reviews and Prices
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Four Texts on Socrates: Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes' Clouds (0801485746) - Customer Reviews, Information, Ratings, and Prices
Four Texts on Socrates: Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes' Clouds (0801485746) - Reviews and Prices
Widely adopted for classroom use, this book offers translations of four major works of ancient Greek literature which treat the life and thought of Socrates, focusing particularly on his trial and defense (the platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito) and on the charges against Socrates (Aristophanes' comedy Clouds). This is the only collection of the three Platonic dialogues that also includes Clouds, a work that is fundamental for understanding the thought of Socrates in relation to the Athenian political community and to Greek poetry.
Thomas G. West's introduction provides an overview of the principal themes and arguments of the four works. There are extensive explanatory notes to the translations. For this new edition, Thomas West has revised the introduction and updated the annotated bibliography, which includes the best of the secondary literature on Socrates and on the texts included in this book.
In their translations, the Wests capture successfully the simplicity and vigor of straightforward Greek diction. They strive for as high a degree of accuracy as possible, subordinating concerns for elegance and smoothness to the goal of producing the most faithful and most reliable English versions of these texts.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
a question:
I am very interested in reading Plato in a way that is as close to the original. Unfortunately I don't read ancient gtreek. So I have a question: here is the translation provided in this book of a famous passage: "For there is no human being who will preserve his life if he genuinely opposes either you or any other multitude and prevents many unjust and unlawful things from happening in the city" here is the translation from Benjamin Jowett
"no man who goes to war with you or any... more info
Good Translation, Great Dialogues:
Having compared this translation with 4 or 5 other translations and with the Greek, I was most pleased with the Plato and less pleased with the Aristophanes. The Plato texts are accurate and readable, and the prose is even and flowing. They portray the final conversations with Socrates before his execution. The texts are rich with topics for conversation and hold many curiosities when compared with the other Socratic dialogues. The Aristophanes was accurate, but at times I felt it was censored... more info
Disastrous, nauseating, incompetent translations. How does work this bad get published?:
Before marking 'not useful' please look up the word 'useful' in the dictionary, people! Never in my life have I been so outraged by what I have read as by the drivel spouted by Dr. West in this book (in his Translator's Note), and by the use of `unponderingly' and "the Thinkery" (among other things) in his translation of The Clouds. I also read his translation of Plato's Apology of Socrates, and found it grossly inferior to Jowett. Four Texts on Socrates is not a book to be tossed aside lightly:... more info
A Great Help for Teachers:
This is an outstanding translation of these Greek texts. These are texts that many of us regularly teach in introductory classes, and it is a great help to have such a reliable translation: the translation is clear and accessible, but maintains an unusually strict adherence to the form of the original Greek. This makes it useful for advanced study as well. The running footnotes to the text are especially helpful for giving students the relevant points of historical and legal context for understanding... more info
