a better Plato edition?

Sometimes, the publisher’s craft is enough to breathe new life into an old text. For instance, there is the wonderful book The Landmark Thucydides, whose maps and dates make it infinitely easier to read the great history of the Peloponnesian War.

Though I haven’t tried it yet, I also suspect an electronic reader would make giant books such as those of Gibbon or Proust much more appealing, since there is a certain minor but enduring physical discomfort in holding one of these heavy volumes on your lap for months at a time. But with an electronic reader, it would be a pleasure.

In the case of Plato, I would propose a more reader-friendly edition with a number of new features.

*First, an attempt at a timeline of all the dialogues. And here I’m not talking about periodizations such as “the Middle Dialogues,” but rather an attempt to reconstruct the order in which they all take place in Socrates’s life, with Phaedo obviously coming at the very end, and I suppose Parmenides at the beginning.

What made me think of this was when I recently reached the end of the Theaetetus for the first time in many years, and was stunned by the forgotten final lines, which say roughly “but now I must go to the court to face the indictment of Meletus.” In story terms, I tended to think of the Meno as coming immediately before the Euthyphro, but I guess Socrates had time for at least one more long conversation after offending Anytus during the conversation with Meno.

*A complete glossary of all the characters who appear in the dialogues, along with a compilation of all that is known about them both from the dialogues and from other sources.

*A few statistical charts and other lists: dialogues containing the most jokes, dialogues where “by the dog” is said most frequently, and so forth.

These sorts of encyclopedic efforts are common for other literary universes, from Harry Potter to Sherlock Holmes. Seeing the great success of Thucydides when augmented with maps and dates makes me think that something even better could be done for Plato.