Laches

Laches is an early dialogue of Plato, mainly discussing the question "what is courage?" The dialogue is set sometime after the Battle of Delium in 424 BCE: two respected Athenian generals, Laches and Nicias, together with Lysimachus and his son Melesias, discuss whom to hire to teach young men martial arts for fighting as hoplites. Socrates is invited into the discussion and immediately shifts the question from "whether we need to hire someone to teach martial arts" to a more fundamental level: is courage a kind of knowledge, a kind of fearlessness, or merely endurance? In the dialogue, Laches holds that courage is endurance of the soul, while Nicias maintains that courage is knowledge of what is and is not fearful; Socrates questions them one by one and points out that each view has its flaws, and the discussion ultimately reaches no definite conclusion. The book is short but clearly presents the typical manner of Plato's early dialogues, namely exposing difficulties in definitions through Socratic questioning and prompting readers to reflect on the foundations of everyday conceptions of virtue. This Commercial Press edition provides the Greek text with a Chinese translation, translated from Volume III of Burnet's Oxford Classical Text edition of Plato's Complete Works, and includes a glossary of names, notes, and an index, facilitating sentence-by-sentence comparative study.