Nonfiction · about 380 BC
Lysis
Plato · translated by Benjamin Jowett
Socrates, on his way from the Academy to the Lyceum, is pulled into a new wrestling-school where the boys are keeping the festival, and finds Hippothales making a fool of himself over a boy named Lysis — writing poems about him and reciting them to his friends. Socrates offers to demonstrate how one ought to talk to someone one is in love with, and the demonstration turns into an inquiry into friendship itself: whether like is friend to like or opposite to opposite, whether the good can need a friend at all, and whether every affection is for the sake of some further thing. It ends with Socrates observing that they have all just claimed to be friends without being able to say what a friend is.
Plato's dialogue is among the shortest of the early group. 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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