"... in these writings, unique at once in the history of literature and the history of philosophy, [the reader] meets thought whose medium is not dogma but drama, drama among whose chief excitements are the subtle suspenses of thought... .The 'philosophy' of Plato is clearly not philosophy of the schools; his drama is profounder in theme and more comprehensive in range than the constricted little toys of the stage. For those who have not learned with Plato that philosophy is the love of wisdom rather than the pronouncement of truth, there is considerable mystification in a thinker whose thoughts are all suggestions, whose suggestions are often playful, and who will not, despite the attempt of more than one serious critic, be crammed into a neat and lifeless system. The reader is haunted, too, by the perturbed sense that, though these dialogues are full of endless charm as poetic and ironic drama, they are clearly something more than the byplay of a gifted writer. The further one reads the more deeply does one come into the presence of the profoundest and most serious issues of human existence. What on its winning surface is the spirited conversation between Socrates and a group of attractive young Athenian aristocrats, closely read, stirs one profoundly to a consideration of the nature of good and evil, of reality, of the paramount mystery of the human soul."

  —from the Introduction by Irwin Edman