Nonfiction · about 380 BC
Charmides
Plato · translated by Benjamin Jowett
Socrates comes home from the fighting at Potidaea, goes to a wrestling-school to ask what has been happening in philosophy while he was away, and is told that the handsomest young man in Athens has grown up — Charmides, who is then produced, complaining of a headache. Socrates offers a charm for it, on the condition that the soul be treated along with the head, and the conversation turns to whether Charmides possesses temperance. The definitions come and fail one after another: quietness, modesty, minding one's own business, doing good, knowing oneself, and finally a science of itself — knowledge of what one knows and does not know — which Socrates takes apart with unusual care before admitting that they have got nowhere.
Plato set the dialogue in 432 BC. Charmides and his guardian Critias, the two respondents, both died in the oligarchic terror of 404, which every original reader would have known. This edition is Benjamin Jowett's English translation, with his introduction.
This Bibliomancer edition presents Jowett's introduction and the complete dialogue.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
-428–-348 · Ancient
Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was an Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, and the founder of the Academy, the school that gave the word its meaning. His dialogues — among them the Apology, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Timaeus and Laws — are the foundation of Western philosophy, and they have survived complete, which is true of almost no other ancient writer. The English here is Benjamin Jowett’s: the Master of Balliol whose translation of the Dialogues (1871) carried Plato to English readers for a century, and whose introductions are printed with it.
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