Greek Meets Greek Scholar

GREAT DIALOGUES OF PLATO (525 pp.) --Translated by W.H.D. Rouse--New American Library (50-c-).

William Henry Denham Rouse was a Calcutta-born Englishman who became the most learned teacher of Greek and Latin in his time. For a quarter of a century he headed the Perse School in Cambridge, where he made certain that each boy left with a conversational competence in the languages of Homer and Cicero. When he died in 1950 at 86, he left behind him first-rate, down-to-earth translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad that virtually returned Homer's classics to the common man. Total sales in the U.S. alone: 1,000,000 copies.

Also left behind, but then unpublished, was his last work, a translation of still another of the world's great books. The Great Dialogues of Plato have now been made available to U.S. readers in a paperback edition, tailored neatly for the pocket as well as the pocketbook. Classicists may continue to give their allegiance to the translation of Greek Scholar Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), but the plain reader will find that Rouse has given him a great legacy of philosophy in language that hews to simple clarity.

"Socrates himself." wrote Rouse in an introduction, "described his object as that of a midwife, to bring other men's thoughts to birth." Socrates never wrote, but after his death a brilliant pupil named Plato wrote down his master's oral comments and arguments. In Rouse's pages Socrates' strength of mind, his dedication to philosophical truth, are borne in on the modern reader with something of the power that impressed and disturbed the ancient Greeks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.