Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  SOCRATES

  The most important ancient texts are the early dialogues of Plato and Xenophon’s Socratic works. They are available in good translations, of which I would recommend the following: Trevor Saunders (ed.), Plato: Early Socratic Dialogues (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987); Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, Plato: The Last Days of Socrates (London: Penguin, 1993); Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield, Xenophon: Conversations of Socrates (London: Penguin, 1990); Robin Waterfield, Plato: Meno and Other Dialogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Each of these volumes contains introductions and notes, as well as the translations. Many relevant texts are translated in Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith (eds), The Trial and Execution of Socrates: Sources and Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); William Calder (ed.), The Unknown Socrates (Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2002); and John Ferguson (ed.), Socrates: A Source Book (London: Macmillan, 1970).

  ALCIBIADES

  The most important ancient texts are Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades, translated by Robin Waterfield, with introduction and notes by Philip Stadter, in Plutarch: Greek Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Plato, Alcibiades I, translated by Douglas Hutchinson, in John Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997); Plato, Symposium, translated, with introduction and notes, by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Among the orators (available as above), pseudo-Andocides 4, Isocrates 16, and Lysias 14 and 15 are the most relevant. Finally, there is Cornelius Nepos’s brief Life, available in Gareth Schmeling’s translation, in Cornelius Nepos: Lives of Famous Men (Lawrence, Kan.: Coronado, 1971).

  POLITICAL THEORY

  Many of the texts already mentioned are relevant, but others too. Translations of Greek tragedies may readily be found in the familiar Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics series. The most relevant Platonic dialogues are Gorgias, translated, with introduction and notes, by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Republic, translated, with introduction and notes, by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Statesman, translated by Robin Waterfield, with introduction and notes by Julia Annas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Laws, translated, with introduction and notes, by Trevor Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). For Aristotle’s Politics I prefer Trevor Saunders’s revision of Thomas Sinclair’s original (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). The ‘Old Oligarch’ is best studied with the help of Robin Osborne (ed.), The Old Oligarch: Pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians (2nd edn, London: London Association of Classical Teachers, 2004). Many early texts can be also found in Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  SOPHISTS

  There are several good translations of all the fifth-century sophists, or at least their most important fragments and testimonia: John Dillon and Tania Gergel, The Greek Sophists (London: Penguin, 2003); Rosamond Kent Sprague (ed.), The Older Sophists (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972); Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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