Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to

with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode made by hand

Byzantine manuscripts.

Walk into any decent bookshop in the English-speaking world and you'll find Plato's dialogues on the shelves. Maybe even a collection of all his dialogues, really written by Plato, but only transmitted under his name.

Strictly speaking, of course, Plato didn't write the rest of the book either for the simple

reason that he didn't know English.

Happily, you can also get Plato in ancient Greek, for instance in the Oxford Classical Texts series, where it takes up five volumes.

But here's the thing. Plato didn't write those Greek texts either, at least not exactly.

Most readers, even most professional historians of philosophy,

don't give this much thought, and proceed as if the printed version was ordered

straight from Plato's Academy. In fact, though, the modern edition is simply scholar's best guess at what he

may originally have written. You'll be relieved to learn that the text of Plato's dialogues is actually

relatively secure, but like all other ancient works, they are

moving targets and will never be fully established beyond all doubt. The individual words and

sentences in that edition have in some cases been a matter of intense philological debate.

Nor are modern editors hiding this fact.

At the bottom of each page, they've supplied a dense collection of footnotes bristling with Latin abbreviations and bits of Greek, which are alternative versions called variants of what Plato may have written.

To understand what lies behind those footnotes is to

appreciate more fully the astounding fact that we are able to read Plato at all,

never mind one and a half thousand pages worth of him, a good two and a half millennia after he lived.

It means tracing the long and hazardous journey those writings traveled, surviving more or

...