Plato Discussion (Reactions to current assignment)

A WebBoard for students in Philosophy 421. Questions and comments posted here will be available to all students in the course.

The Last Days of Socrates

This is an extraordinary site, consisting of translations of Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, accompanied by Stephanus page references and hypertext commentary. There are illustrations and photographs of the locales mentioned in the dialogues and even audio dramatizations of parts of the Apology and Crito.

Brian Arkins, Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens

An overview of Athenian sexual morality, this essay provides some background information useful for assessing Plato's views.

Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton and Cairns

This is a searchable version of the Hamilton and Cairns edition of Plato’s dialogues, the text for this course.

Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon

As in the paper edition, you can find definitions and examples of usage of any ancient Greek term. However, this on-line version of the standard Greek lexicon supports searches for all instances of a word in Plato or any other ancient author.

SPIonic Greek font

A decent quality True Type Greek font. Character encoding mostly follows TLG format. Freeware.

WinGreek Greek, Hebrew, & Coptic fonts

Excellent quality fonts in both Adobe and True Type versions. The package includes programs for easier entry of characters in Word documents and for converting TLG Greek text to Windows format. Shareware.

The background is looking up from the bottom of the cave on Mt. Dikte, to which the men in the Laws are journeying. This cavern may have inspired some features of the Republic's Myth of the Cave.