speeches about virtue on many occasions before many people. One thing above all defines the Platonic Meno: his resistance to learning through searching. This is what makes Meno enduringly interesting to us and a touchstone of sorts. He is the exemplar of the facile, knowledgegreedy anti-learner-an avid collector of shiny opinions, who in spite of his stubbornness is willing to be led by Socrates, at least up to a point. In judging Meno, we should bear in mind that there is undoubtedly a bit of Meno in all of us, an all-too-human tendency to resist learning and to fall back on presumed knowledge and well-worn opinions, often inherited from various teachers. The dialogue probably takes place in 402 BCE, three years before Socrates's trial and execution. At the time, Meno would have been a very young man-eighteen or nineteen. We are not told why he is in town. In light of his family's friendly ties to Athens, he may have been sent by his fellow Aleuadae, the leading clan in Larissa (the capital of Thessaly), to persuade democratic Athens to give military aid to the Thessalian aristocrats, whose hegemony had recently been threatened by the tyrant Lycophron. Meno is no doubt staying with his guest-friend Anytus, who appears later in the dialogue and who only three years later became one of Socrates's accusers at his trial for impiety and corrupting the young. It's not clear where the conversation is taking place. It might be in a gymnasium. That would fit Socrates's repeated efforts to get luxurious Meno to exert himself and break a mental sweat. In addition to being rich in themes, the Meno is a good example of the Platonic dialogue as drama-that is, a work in which speeches are also deeds. Things happen in the Meno, as they do in all the dialogues, and the reader must attend carefully to these happenings, as well as to the content and flow of the argument. Meno's opening question about how virtue is acquired is the drama's first deed, as Meno tries to acquire some pearl of wisdom from the famous Socrates without having to pay for it. In what might be called act 1 of Plato's drama (70A-79E), Meno, at Socrates's insistence, makes several attempts to say what virtue is, "As one would expect from the team of Brann, Kalkavage and Salem, their edition of Plato's Meno is a fine one. The translation meets their stated goal of remaining 'as faithful as possible to the Greek, while using lively, colloquial English.' Their notes are consistently helpful and will be particularly useful to those readers willing to explore the nuances of Plato's extraordinary prose. Their introduction is clear and compact, and it highlights the most philosophically important themes of the dialogue. One particularly useful feature of this edition is the manner in which it displays the diagrams Socrates draws in order to illustrate his famous 'square within a square.' Instead of relegating them to the notes, it integrates them into the text of the dialogue itself. Readers are able to follow along, and 'watch' Socrates actually construct them." —David Roochnik, Boston University
