The Seventh Letter attributed to Plato is a veritable treasure chest of riches, but in recent decades it has been rejected or, more commonly, simply ignored by many of Plato’s readers. Fortunately, this new translation and commentary by James M. Redfield makes this neglected Platonic text accessible to everyone from novices to advanced scholars by presenting the Letter in a slim, affordable standalone book in the Hackett Publishing series. The book is a concise and elegant introduction that has the potential to bring the Letter definitively into the contemporary understanding of Plato.
The Seventh Letter is the longest and most significant of the 13 letters attributed to Plato in Thrasyllus’ canon. In it, an author writing in Plato’s voice tells the tale of his (?) ill-fated trips to Syracuse in Sicily during the rulerships of Dionysius the Elder and Younger in cooperation with the politician Dion, indirectly leading to Dion’s execution. Spanning just under 30 Stephanus pages, the dense narrative touches on key themes like Plato’s biography, connections between philosophy and political rule, the problem of faction, some complexities of moral psychology, the nature of the virtuous life, and technical ways in which a philosophical education grants non-propositional insight into truth that seem crucial for understanding the esoteric aspects of Platonic philosophy. The Letter goes well beyond Plato’s dialogues by implying that philosophical activity aims at noetic insight and not definitions, and furthermore it challenges central political claims Socrates makes and seems to endorse in the Republic. Many recent scholars, however, have resisted taking the Letter seriously as an authentic text for the two main reasons that its authorship is uncertain and the account of Platonic philosophy that emerges does not cohere with most reigning mainstream views of Plato developed after the analytic turn in the 20th century. These two problems are in fact interconnected, as authenticity verdicts have tended to rest on commentators’ pre-formed understanding of Platonic philosophy developed before, not after, reading the Letter. These problems are further complicated by the Letter’s strangeness and difficulty, as it is meandering and contains frequent unsignposted digressions into opaque subjects.
Because it is admittedly bizarre and does not say what most philosophy scholars expect or want, the Letter has not been made readily available in many English-language editions. Few monographs have appeared, and the two (arguably) most authoritative book-length studies—Edelstein (1966) and Burnyeat and Frede (2015)—were both intended in large part to deny the text’s authenticity. (Regardless of one’s view about the authorship question, however, these two masterful studies are absolutely essential for all scholars interested in Plato’s Letters.) Certainly, no accessible standalone volumes akin to Redfield’s Hackett edition have appeared; perhaps closest is the volume edited by Reid and Ralkowski (2019), which offers excellent, insightful, and generally sympathetic discussions but largely directs itself toward an advanced scholarly audience.
Hence, Redfield’s book is a highly welcome addition to the literature, and at least three audiences will be served well by it. By having the Letter in its own volume, teachers at all levels are finally able to situate the Letter within a semester’s study of Platonic texts rooted in standalone hard-copy editions. Those familiar with Plato but not the Letter will find this to be the superlative point of entry into the text’s many provocations. The book will also be indispensable for all scholars of the Letter, who will particularly welcome Redfield’s meticulously researched commentary.
The book has five sections: an introduction, translation, commentary, appendix including relevant sections of Plutarch’s Life of Dion, and bibliography. The eight-page introduction offers an overview of the text and brief history of its debated authorship. Although he holds that the Letter is indeed authentic, Redfield compellingly deflects the authorship question and writes that the Letter, “whatever it is, is authentically that. We have a text of uncertain authorship, not securely dated, but none the less worthy of study. If it is not by Plato, it might nevertheless tell some truth about him, his situation, and his work — and if it is by Plato, it is not necessarily completely truthful” (viii). By contrasting some of the Letter author’s assertions with those of historians like Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, and Cornelius Nepos, Redfield presents the Letter’s narrator as a character that is of genuine interest without necessarily being co-extensive with author.
Redfield and editor Schuyler Curriden structure this edition with awareness that the text is difficult but rewards close study. The Letter itself is presented in clear and faithful translation with Stephanus pagination indicated in the margins. The use of section divisions helps bring at least some order to the chaotic text, and the divisions roughly correspond to sub-sections in Redfield’s commentary.
The 61-page commentary is clearly intended in part to develop the Letter’s legitimacy case, but is most essentially a comparative study of the historical record. Redfield’s discussion begins with Plato’s youthful despair of politics (324b-326b) following the execution of the person the Letter author calls “my older friend Socrates, whom I would not be ashamed to call the most just man of the time” (324d-e). To situate this touching and stimulating biographical stretch of the Letter, Redfield addresses key events from classical Athens by considering relevant passages in Thucydides, Xenophon, Pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians, and Plato’s Apology.
Redfield next considers what is known about Plato’s three trips to Syracuse and Sicily’s political situation from the later historians, emphasizing points of similarity and difference to help make sense of the Letter author’s intentions and perspective. To account for the traditional Italian and Sicilian connections between early philosophy and political rule, Redfield considers the Pythagoreans, and particularly Archytas (who is mentioned several times in the letter: 338c-339d, 350d), along with Parmenides’ reported lawgiving in Elea. Concerning the Letter author’s political assertions, Redfield unpacks passages in the Republic and, especially, the Laws, making valuable use of the discussion of the moderate and just tyrant at Laws 709e-712a (which Redfield connects to Letter 335c-e; see 74). One of Redfield’s aims here is to deflate authenticity arguments that lean too heavily on interpretations of the Republic, since Socrates’ motivations in the Republic are opaque and the Laws presents an oft-missed connection between the Letter and the dialogues (see especially 76-78).
Redfield’s discussion of the Letter’s philosophical digression (340b-345b) draws primarily, as is common, on a comparative analysis with the Phaedrus and its critique of writing. This is where the Letter author writes most provocatively of Platonic philosophy, saying, “Nor is there now nor will there ever be any composition of my own about these things [i.e., those studied in philosophy]—because it cannot be put into words like other objects of study, but from long companionship concerned with the thing and from living with it, suddenly as when a fire leaping across kindles a light, it comes to be known in the soul and from that time maintains itself” (341c-d). Redfield argues that from the Letter and Phaedrus emerges a view entailing philosophy as proceeding from “passion” through “commitment,” “friendship,” and finally “activity” that culminates in a non-propositional “enlightenment” (87-88). To account for this enlightenment, Redfield concludes with a comparative study of Orphism, highlighting its initiatory practices.
While this book embodies the virtues found in the Hackett standalone Plato volumes that include accessibility and user-friendliness, it is worth noting that, perhaps regrettably, the book has no index. Also of note is that the book contains very little consideration of the Letter’s value to the contemporary understanding of Plato’s unwritten teachings, and this important discussion must be deferred until a later day. Overall, however, there is very little about which to fault this edition.
Redfield died on May 28, 2026, aged 91, little more than two months after the publication of his Seventh Letter edition. The book joins his 1975 and 2004 monographs and serves as a fitting capstone to his many decades of brilliant research on classical sources. Through it, Redfield’s scholarship surely will have an influential and productive afterlife, bringing the Letter to the wider audience it deserves.
Bibliography
Burnyeat, Myles and Michael Frede, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter, edited by Dominic Scott, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Edelstein, Ludwig, Plato’s Seventh Letter, Leiden: Brill, 1966.
Redfield, James M., Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Redfield, James M., The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Reid, Heather, and Mark Ralkowski (editors), Plato at Syracuse: Essays on Plato in Western Greece with a New Translation of the Seventh Letter by Jonah Redding, Sioux Falls, SD: Parnassos Press, 2019.