The Son of Apollo: Themes of Plato - Softcover

Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0918024617 ISBN 13: 9780918024619

Publisher: Ox Bow Pr, 1989

Synopsis

"There have been many books about Plato, and one turns from them feeling that one had better have been reading the dialogues themselves. There has always been, however, the daunting hope that a book might be written that would do for Plato what great criticism has in the past done for other great poets--convey the quality that was in the work itself and clarify our understanding of it. The character of that not impossible critic of Plato has always been clearly indicated. He would have to be a philosopher, one whose passion and gift as well as whose business it was to survey, like Plato himself, all time and all existence, and those eternal issues which time repeatedly reveals and experience repeatedly generates. He would have to be a Hellenist, not simply in the sense of knowing his Greek, but of loving and living imaginatively in the Greek tradition, of the fresh Athenian glory of sculpture, poetry and drama. He would have to be a poet, for else he would fail to discern that Plato was one. He would have to be wise, for Plato's writings are the poetry of wisdom, and his themes are those on which a young knight speaks brightly, but also thinly: education, the perfect city, love and death. "Mr. Woodbridge, as revealed in this singularly beautiful book, fulfills nearly all the specification of a Platonist's dream. Her is Plato not so much analyzed as rendered, and for any one who would like to have Plato as he is or see life in terns of the Platonic mood, there are now two indispensible required readings, the dialogues of Plato and 'The Son of Apollo.'" ---from Irwin Edman's review of the first edition of 'The Son of Apollo.'

About this edition

• Publisher: Ox Bow Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0918024617
• ISBN 13: 9780918024619
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272