Is there any reason at all to ever read the apocryphal dialogues and works?

They're enjoyable, may have been written by him, and in some cases are influential.


like Alcibiades I?


The editor in that book says that some of those dialogues can help you understand what other people thought of plato's philosophy around that time period

Some of them are very good.
Some of them may not actually be apocryphal.

Im currently reading it. Some of them are confusing, like some parts of "the Sophist", some of them are really enjoyable.

Historical interest, context, and the simple fact that many of them are /short/.

Although relatively unimportant, the /shortness/ of the spurious works in the Platonic and Aristotelian canons is a fair argument in favor of the interested reader having a look at them, after the longer, more important stuff. Like the presocratic accounts themselves, the spurious/dubious works are part of a larger accretion from antiquity which may be read at one's convenience/ and at a relative minimum of time.

t. guy who has actually seriously drilled into this question and found his own answer (see the purple cells).


 Idk Menexenus is short and also "canonical" but I still kinda felt it was a waste of time beyond checking it off the list


The Laws is his longest work, yet it is overshadowed by The Republic and hardly ever discussed.



With regard to Plato specifically: yes, that's a comment borne out by my page count table.

It is my understanding that /Laws/ is associated with the later Platonic works, and is last among the Thrasyllian tetraologies (a traditional grouping of Plato's works). So it's not unreasonable to suppose on the one hand that many readers simply don't get to it given its ordering, and on the other hand the relative philosophical importance of the ideas, if that holds (I don't know, I haven't read Laws).


I maintain as a general position, that if the work is dumb (and SHORT in your own view), that there is still value in your having read it at least one time. Because in so doing, you now have an informed opinion with which to dismiss the work and if ever challenged on it, you can say to a pseud, with full confidence in yourself: "yes I have so read that thing and it's still dumb because xyz." Knowledge-based negative opinions are also great to have in the lifetime toolkit. Long works are where you want to be more careful as our time is finite.


>Wasn't it mostly him going back and rectifying the more questionable points of the republic?
No, not at all. It's an amazing standalone work on the validity of certain laws and political thought at the time.

It's well constructed, like The Republic, but not as allegorical or theological.


This might be controversial but to get a decent background in Greek literature it's necessary to read everything ascribed to Plato at some point. Also read the full works of Homer, Hesiod, Xenophon, Aristotle, Epicurus, Thucydydes, Herodotos, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Antiphon, Lysias, Aristophanes and Hecataeus. Only then can you move on to more recent literature. I'm not trolling. I've seen way too many cases of people trying to read books published in the last 15 years without having any background in Hellenic cosmology and miserably failing, as is to be expected.



>He missed Demosthenes
Back to the Greeks with you


>Antiphon, Lysias, and Hecataeus
I understand the others, but why these?

What books in the past 15 years require an understanding of Hellenic cosmology?