Glimpsed darkly even through translation’s glass, Plato is a great literary artist. Yet he also made notoriously negative remarks about the value of writing. Similarly, although he believed that at least one of the purposes—if not the main purpose—of philosophy is to enable one to live a good life, by composing dialogues rather than treatises or hortatory letters he omitted to tell his readers directly any useful truths to live by. This book includes Plato’s four dialogues known Crito, Ion, Menexenus, and Courage.