This is a review of Nicholas Denyer's commentary on Plato's "Protagoras" for the Cambridge green and yellow series. This edition consists of a short bibliography, an 11 page introduction, 50 pages of Greek text, 140 pages of commentary, and an index. This is an essential work for anyone interested in engaging seriously with the "Protagoras" either as an expression of Platonic philosophy or as a literary artifact of the 4th century BCE. Among Plato's dialogues, the "Protagoras" is notable for the varied cast of characters that Plato has gathered together at the house of the Athenian aristocrat Callias in order to have an intense intellectual conversation. Alcibiades, Hippias of Elis, Prodicus of Ceos, and a coterie of young aristocrats who will play a leading role in the Oligarchic regimes which will rule Athens in the latter part of the fifth century all have prominent roles in the conversation dramatized by Plato in this dialogue. The protagonists of this dialogue, however, are Socrates and Protagoras. Their debate on the teachability of virtue, the meaning of Simonides' "Scopas Ode", and a number of other issues is one of the most contentious, exciting, and entertaining conversations in Plato's oeuvre.
The commentator does an excellent job both illuminating the philosophical arguments raised by the interlocutors over the course of the dialogue and also clarifying the wide range of historical and literary references that pervade the text. The commentator is especially good at selecting individual words, phrases, and sentences and then showing how they interact with points made earlier in the dialogue or anticipate points that will be made later in the text. He also frequently cites parallels from the full range of Plato's works in order to demonstrate how points raised in this dialogue relate to Plato's larger philosophical program and how the literary aspects of the texts correspond (or do not correspond) to Plato's usual stylistic choices as an author. In my view, the most useful feature of the commentary is the extensive historical, literary, and biographical background information the author provides on the characters and setting of the dialogue. Plato grounds the "Protagoras" in a very specific historical and social context, and one misses a great deal of meaning in the text by reading the dialogue without knowing the historical and political subtexts at play in Plato's presentation. In short, this commentary substantially enriches one's understanding of the "Protagoras".
There are, in my view, several serious drawbacks to this commentary, however. The commentary offers valuable insights into individual sentences and passages, but in terms of drawing things together and discussing the overarching themes and aims of the dialogue, this book is not especially helpful. Usually these issues would be discussed in the introduction, but the commentator has chosen to use the introduction only to make "general remarks that could not conveniently be digested into the piecemeal format of the commentary" (vii). The effect of this piecemeal approach to the text is that it becomes very difficult, using this edition, to see how the individual parts of the dialogue cohere into a larger whole. Indeed, I imagine that this book will be very opaque unless one already knows a fair amount about Plato, the "Protagoras", and his other dialogues before reading it. There is a vast amount of scholarship that has been written on the "Protagoras" and Plato that might have been cited and discussed in order to remedy this problem, but the commentator includes only a very small selection in his bibliography and only rarely discusses scholarship at all in the commentary. This book is also therefore not a really useful gateway to locating additional readings and resources on the "Protagoras".
Perhaps the most important issue to a potential buyer of this book is the extent to which it provides help for grammatical and lexical difficulties. Having read the dialogue using this commentary, I would say that on the whole the help it provides is really only sufficient for someone in at least their fourth year of studying Greek. Grammatical difficulties are discussed very infrequently, and the commentary itself is so dense and complex that it is very difficult to find what grammatical help there is. There were a number of instances where I was puzzled by a very tricky bit of Greek, turned back to the commentary, and found no help forthcoming. This edition is therefore probably not suitable for a student reading Plato in Greek for the first (or maybe even the second or third) time. The editions of the "Symposium", "Phaedo", or "Phaedrus" published in the same series are much better options in this respect.
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