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Harold Tarrant is Professor of Classics, University of Newcastle (Australia) and the author of many books, including Plato’s First Interpreters (2000) and Recollecting Plato’s Meno (2005), both published by Duckworth.

Dirk Baltzly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Monash University (Australia) and co-editor (with Harold Tarrant) of Pleasure and Power, Virtues and Vices: essays in ancient moral philosophy (2001).

Reading Plato in Antiquity


Edited by H Tarrant and D Baltzly

‘This volume contains good scholarship on a vast, complex and philosophically significant field.’ The Classical Review

‘This volume presents fifteen essays on how Plato’s writings were interpreted mainly between 100 B.C. and A.D. 600’ New Testament Abstracts

This important collection of original essays is the first to concentrate at length on how the ancients responded to the challenge of reading and interpreting Plato, primarily between 100 BC and AD 600. It incorporates the fruits of recent research into late antique philosophy, in particular its approach to hermeneutical problems. While a number of prominent figures, including Apuleius, Galen, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus, receive detailed attention, several essays concentrate on the important figure of Proclus, in whom Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato reaches it most impressive, most surprising and most challenging form.

The essays appear in chronological of their focal interpreters, giving a sense of the development of Platonist exegesis in this period. Reflecting their devotion to a common theme, the essays have been carefully edited and are presented with a composite bibliography and indices.

Contributors: Hayden Ausland, University of Montana; Luc Brisson, CNRS Paris; Tim Buckley, University of Sydney; John Cleary, NUIM Maynooth, Eire; John Dillon, Trinity College Dublin; John Finamore, University of Iowa; Lloyd Gerson, University of Toronto; Marije Martijn, University of Leiden; Ken Parry, Macquarie University; John Phillips, UT-Chattanooga; Julius Rocca, Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington; Richard Sorabji, Wolfson College, Oxford; Atsushi Sumi, Hanazono University, Kyoto.