The Other Socrates - The Barnes & Noble Review: To capture all the fugitive texts of the ancient world, some of which survived the Dark Ages in just a single moldering copy in some monastic library, and turn them into affordable, clear, sturdy, accurate books, is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship -- and one of the most democratic.
In many of these dialogues, as Plato recreates them, Socrates does not even have a lesson to teach. His goal was simply to make his interlocutors recognize that their own common-sense ideas, on subjects like virtue and piety and beauty and politics, were hopelessly confused.