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msand3's review against another edition
5.0
These dialogues are the foundation of Western thought: justice, virtue, sex, death, wisdom, folly….it’s all here. Plato’s Socrates is clever and confounding, ingenious and insufferable. Sometimes, he is sarcastic and smarmy to the point where you can’t stand him. At other times, he sounds as lacking in wisdom as he pretends to be. But then he will turn around and offer a startling perspective that will make you admire him. Although familiar with the content of many of these dialogues, I’m glad I waited until I was a little older (i.e. not in college) to read them in full, so as to have both a solid knowledge base of ideas that came after Plato (the later writers and works influenced by these dialogues), but also to have some life experiences under my belt, as these dialogues are more about drawing from practical living experiences than abstract thought experiments. My only minor quibble with the Bantam edition is providing an edited version of Gorgias, but I was able to find the complete dialogue elsewhere, so no big deal there. As it stands, these are great, readable translations of the most essential of Plato's dialogues.
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