Plato’s Dialogues.

PLATO; TRANSLATED BY FLOYER SYDENHAM,.

$15,000.00

Item Number: 140464

London: W. Sandby, 1767-1779.

First edition set contains all eleven parts, although without all the individual dated titles. Part one is signed on the dedication page by the translator Floyer Sydenham as usual, and includes a sheet laid in with manuscript instructions to the binder. Quarto, three volumes, bound in contemporary full calf, armorial bookplate. Dated title pages in volumes one and two, each of eleven parts with undated flytitle and dedication leaf, Lesser Hippias and Dissertation both with additional dated part title, ad leaves at beginning of volume one and after The Banquet, as well “proposal” leaf, errata slip in volume three (a few poorly inked lines written over nearly in manuscript). Folding diagram in Philebilus, engraved plate in Meno. Rare, first editions of this important work are scarce.

"That Plato should be the first of all the ancient philosophers to be translated and broadcast by the printing press was inevitable. Plato’s central conception of a universe of ideas, Perfect Types, of which material objects are imperfect forms, and his ethical code based on action according to human nature, developed by education, which represents the authority of the State, fitted in as well with the philosophical, religious and political thought of western Europe in the 15th century, striving to free itself from the shackles of scholasticism, as it did with those of the Byzantine Greeks, by whom Plato was repopularized in the western world The dialogues are pervaded by two dominant impulses: a love of truth and a passion for human improvement" (PMM 27).