Abstract

This commentary makes Plato’s Philebus accessible to second-year Greek readers and for scholars who read Greek only infrequently. We aim to help readers who wish to study the text more closely than translations permit. We hope readers new to Plato will be at ease with him by the time they complete the dialogue, but each page is self-contained: readers interested in only one passage need not worry that they have missed earlier remarks. Each page of the commentary contains about eight numbered lines of Greek, grammar notes, and glossary. The grammar notes are numbered in correspondence with the text and identify sentence constructions, verb conjugations, and forms of nouns and adjectives that may impede readers. Each word identified in the grammar notes also offers in italics a translation that aims at intelligible—if not idiomatic—English that mirrors the grammatical construction of the Greek as far as possible. The glossary at the bottom of the page is an alphabetized list of words and idioms that appear 16 times or fewer in the text. There is a complete glossary at the back of the book.