The Works of Plato, Viz. His Fifty-Five Dialogues, and Twelve Epistles, Translated From the Greek; Nine of the Dialogues by the Late Floyer Sydenham, and the Remainder by Thomas Taylor: With Occasional Annotations on the Nine Dialogues Translated by Sydenham, and Copious Notes, by the Latter Translator.

TAYLOR, Thomas. [Plato].

$14,000.00

Item Number: 131256

London: Printed for Thomas Taylor, By R. Wilks, Chancery-Lane, 1804.

First edition of the first complete English translation of the works of Plato. Quarto, five volumes bound in full pebbled cloth retaining contemporary black morocco spine labels lettered in gilt, half-titles, engraved frontispiece to volume I. In the words of the Prometheus Trust, “Taylor’s Works of Plato, has two outstanding features which make it an essential component to the genuine philosophers library. Firstly, Taylor himself translates Plato’s Dialogues from within the ancient Greek Tradition. No English translator, before or since, has been so completely at one with the Greek philosophical and religious world view: Taylor fulfills, to the highest degree, the first requirement of the art of translation, that of making the original writer’s thought-patterns his own. Although Thomas Taylor lived in eighteenth and nineteenth century London, his spirit breathed the purer airs of an Athens of long ago, his soul worshipped in her temples, and his eyes beheld these things by the clearer light of her sun. To the student of the present day, he delivers the breadth and depth of Platonism remarkably free of the distortions which had darkened the millennium between the closure of the Academy in Athens and his own time. Secondly, Taylor adds to Plato’s Dialogues, many of the surviving commentaries of the later Platonists (e.g. Olympiodorus, Damascius, Hermias, and especially, Proclus), as footnotes and endnotes. In this way, Taylor transforms the presentation of Plato’s philosophy from that of mere faithful reproduction, as remarkable as that may be in itself, to one similar to that which students are likely to have received during the later period of Plato’s Academy. This Philosophy, writes Taylor, May be compared to a luminous pyramid, terminating in Deity, and having for its basis the rational soul of man and its spontaneous unperverted conceptions.it is the greatest good which man can participate: for it purifies us from the defilements of the passions and assimilates us to Divinity, it confers on us the proper felicity of our nature.” In near fine condition. Exceptionally 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).