Trevor Saunders’s translation of the Laws was one of the outstanding achievements of classical scholarship in twentieth-century Britain. The Laws had long been seen as a difficult and forbidding work which had little to offer the general reader and was often ignored even by serious scholars. Saunders saw it as the primary task of the translator ‘to present and interpret his text to his modern readership’.1 He brought to this work an extraordinary gift for rendering difficult Greek texts into lively and idiomatic English while at the same time maintaining a very high level of accurate scholarship. In his hands the Laws emerged as a highly readable work, full of material that is of great interest to any student of Greek thought or of political and legal theory. His translation is unchallenged as a translation of the Laws for general readership and is unlikely ever to be superseded. Its appearance played a major part in an explosion of interest in the Laws which has led to the appearance of many books and scholarly articles in the last thirty years. He thus succeeded in doing what he himself called ‘the best service the translator can do for the Laws’ – ‘to ensure that it shall be read’.2
Saunders was an immensely learned scholar with an unrivalled knowledge not only of the Laws itself but also of its literary and historical background. He made much of this knowledge available in the introduction to his translation, the table of contents, the italicized summaries interspersed in the text, the notes and the appendices. He also contributed to our understanding of the Laws by the publication of many fine articles in learned journals. This work culminated in the publication of his magnum opus, Plato’s Penal Code. He was also a meticulous bibliographer. In 1976 he produced a very full Bibliography on Plato’s Laws, a revised version of which has recently been produced by Luc Brisson. Saunders’s unique contribution to the study of this dialogue was recognized by the International Plato Society, which honoured his memory with a Trevor Saunders memorial lecture at its triennial symposium in 2001.
For this edition minor revisions to the translation have been made by Saunders’s widow, Teresa, an accomplished classicist who had assisted him in much of his work. A number of slips and misprints have been corrected but otherwise changes have been made only in a very few passages where it was known that Saunders himself had had second thoughts. This does not, of course, mean that his translation should be seen as beyond criticism. Saunders himself was acutely aware that all translation involves a substantial element of interpretation. He sought to give the meaning of the text rather than to render it word for word into English, and he was not afraid to adopt controversial interpretations where he thought it necessary. There are, therefore, passages where other scholars would disagree with his translation but there are few, if any, where he could be accused of making a mistake.
The introduction Saunders wrote for the first edition is still a reliable account of the Laws. There is no reason to suppose that Saunders would have changed his view of the significance of the dialogue and its role in Plato’s political thought. However, in the light of recent scholarship he might well have wished to present his case in a rather different way. In his introduction and in the appendix on Plato’s letters Saunders was consciously opposing an interpretation of the Laws which saw it as the product of a late ‘pessimistic’ period in Plato’s thought. Some scholars believed that, when he wrote the Republic, Plato regarded the ideal state described in that dialogue as a practical proposition and even went so far as to suggest that Plato was hoping to bring this ideal into existence when he became involved in the affairs of Syracuse. The failure of that attempt led him to write the Laws with its proposals for ‘a second best city’. Saunders argued persuasively against this line of interpretation, maintaining that Plato did not change his political views in any major way between the Republic and the Laws and that the two dialogues may thus be seen as ‘opposite sides of the same coin’. This view is still eminently defensible. However, Saunders would now have to defend his position against scholars who argue that there is indeed a radical change in Plato’s political views between the Republic and the Laws but interpret this change in an altogether more positive way. In particular Christopher Bobonich in Utopia Recast has argued that the differences between the political proposals of the two dialogues develop out of changes in Plato’s view of moral psychology. This, it is claimed, led Plato to take a much more optimistic view of the moral and political capacities of ordinary people.
If he had been able to revise this volume himself Saunders would, no doubt, have wished also to take account of the strong tendency in recent scholarship to emphasize the form of Plato’s dialogues as much as the content. Whereas scholars used to treat the Laws in much the same way as they would a modern treatise on political theory there is now a greater recognition that the work has a very complex literary character. It is a dialogue involving three speakers, each with his own individual character, and the interplay between them is certainly important for the understanding of the work. Moreover, ideas are developed and revised in quite complex ways as the dialogue progresses. Andre Laks’s account of the Laws in the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought is an excellent example of this approach.
For the first edition Saunders also provided an unusually full bibliography including virtually all the publications which were likely to be of interest to an English-speaking reader. The growth in scholarship on the Laws in recent years has now made it impossible to achieve a similar level of completeness. The bibliography has therefore been limited to a small number of important and relatively accessible works. Readers needing fuller information should consult the Saunders-Brisson bibliography. The notes have been revised by deleting references to items that are now outdated and, where possible, substituting references to more up-to-date publications.
R. F. STALLEY
NOTES
1. T. J. Saunders, ‘The Penguinification of Plato’, in The Translator’s Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice, ed. W. Radice and B. Reynolds (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 152. In this essay, which originally appeared in Greece and Rome, 22 (1975), pp. 19–28, Saunders discusses the task of translating Plato and the principles underlying his own version of the Laws.
2. Saunders, ‘Penguinification of Plato’, p. 157.