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.