Recently, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato's writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato. This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars to investigate these new-old approaches.

Best known for his influential History of Greece, the historian and politician George Grote wrote this account of Plato's dialogues as a philosophical supplement to the History. First published in 1865 and written in dialogic form, Grote's account of Plato's works includes substantial footnotes and marginalia. This first volume focuses on Plato's early and transitional dialogues, all of which feature Socrates. It also includes a preface to the whole project which discusses the meaning and importance of philosophy itself, and extensive (...) introductory material on pre-Socratic philosophy, the life of Plato and history of the Platonic canon. With three volumes each running to over six hundred pages, Grote's scholarship is formidably comprehensive. The publication of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates confirmed him as one of the greatest authorities on Plato in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In this revolutionary new study, G.R. Ledger applies the statistical methods of stylometry to a number of ancient authors. By taking as the set of variables the occurrence of particular letters of the alphabet, Ledger comes far closer to being able to identify the works of particular authors than previous stylometric studies based on individual word counts. A preliminary analysis examines the work of several Greek authors of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and is followed by an extensive, detailed (...) examination of the Platonic corpus. From this, Ledger draws new conclusions about the authenticity of the dubious dialogues and the chronology of the entire corpus. (shrink)

Dr Brandwood's book presents a factual and critical account of the more important of the various attempts that have been made to establish the order of composition of Plato's dialogues by analysing his diction and prose style. Plato's literary activity covered fifty years and there is almost no direct evidence, either external or internal, to help in establishing the relative order of his writings. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were dependent on personal interpretation of the probable line (...) of development of Plato's thought and doctrines, but then a less subjective method was discovered, which relied instead on the observation of changes in Plato's prose style. Dr Brandwood examines the investigations of each scholar individually, checking the correctness of the methodology and the accuracy of the statistics, before arriving at fairly definite conclusions of his own, at least as far as the works of Plato's middle and old age are concerned. (shrink)

The German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Ast published this monumental lexicon in three volumes. A professor of classical literature at the University of Landshut and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Ast wrote widely on the history of philosophy. He edited a complete edition of Plato with Latin translation, identifying spurious interpolations and false attributions, using this as a basis for his Lexicon. The work is arranged alphabetically, Volume 1 covering Alpha to Epsilon. The entries give citations both from (...) Plato and from later works that extensively quote Plato. Though the Lexicon met with criticism for omissions of particles, prepositions and proper names, and the lack of systematic arrangement, it had a high reputation throughout the nineteenth century. It remains a milestone of Plato scholarship and is an indispensable resource for readers interested in the history of philology and methods in textual criticism. (shrink)