Medieval writers knew Plato through translations into Latin, not directly from Greek texts, but from Arabic versions, themselves translated from Greek texts disseminated to Arabic scholars from the Byzantine world. The earliest authoritative translation of Plato to be disseminated in Western Europe was the three-volume Renaissance edition of the scholar Henri Estienne (in Latin, Stephanus), published in Geneva in 1578. It juxtaposed pages of the Greek text of Plato with a Latin translation. From it derives the initially off-putting notation for referring to passages in Plato’s works. The numbers, which are printed in the margins in all decent editions, are known as ‘Stephanus numbers’. They are page numbers from this edition, followed by letters from a – e referring to sections of the page. The system makes it easy to locate passages without being confined to one or another modern edition or translation. In the present volume I refer to passages in the Republic by prefacing the Stephanus number with the number of the Book in question, from I to X, since Republic is somewhat arbitrarily divided into ten chapters or ‘books’.
Translations of Plato into English were slower to arrive. The first well-known translation from the Greek was that of Thomas Taylor and Floyer Sydenham, published in London in 1804. This was the edition that would have been known to Coleridge and the Romantics. Unfortunately, James Mill (John Stuart’s father) said of Thomas Taylor that ‘he has not translated Plato; he has travestied him, in the most cruel and abominable manner. He has not elucidated, but covered him over with impenetrable darkness’.
The Victorian interest in Plato produced a translation by Davis and Vaughan, in 1858, and the classic edition by Benjamin Jowett, still one of the most widely disseminated English versions of the dialogues, first published by Oxford University Press in 1871. However, classical scholars are hard to please in these matters, and the exacting scholar A. E. Housman is reported to have described Jowett’s as ‘the best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek’. Other scholars have not been daunted by the risk of such a reception, and Jowett was followed by Desmond Lee, Francis Cornford, Paul Shorey, I. A. Richards (into basic English), A. D. Lindsay, Allan Bloom, and many others down to the present day. The World’s Classics edition by Robin Waterfield that I have used is clear and straightforward, and has excellent notes.