This volume presents the English translation of a selection of 15 essays out of the 82 comprised in the seven-volume commentary on Plato's Republic, edited by Mario Vegetti and published by Bibliopolis (Naples).

It must be noted that the necessarily limited selection of essays included in this volume is not based on any kind of qualitative judgment: in other words, these essays are not the ones that we regard as 'the best' among those contained in the volumes of the commentary. Instead our aim was that of presenting, within the bounds of possibility, a number of critical assessments of the most relevant aspects of the dialogue (politics, ethics, epistemology, ontology), in order to provide the readers with some samples of the interpretative style of the commentary together with some of the results that we think we have obtained in the interpretation of the Republic. This inevitable selection unfortunately led to the exclusion of those essays that were mainly concerned with the literary and psychological aspects of the dialogues, or with its Wirkungsgeschichte. Of course, we hope that the limited specimens presented in this volume will stimulate the readers to examine more extensively the collective work from which these essays derive.

Mario Vegetti is emeritus professor at the University of Pavia. He has published several works on Plato (including Quindici lezioni su Platone, Einaudi, Torino 2003), ancient ethics, Aristotle and Galen.

Franco Ferrari is professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Salerno. He has worked on Plato and the ancient Platonic tradition. Among his works are annotated translations of Plato's Parmenides (Milano, 2004) and Theaetetus (Milano, 2011). He is the author of I miti di Platone (Milano, 2006).

Tosca Lynch is a postdoc researcher at the Institut für Kulturgeschichte der Antike, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include ancient Greek music and Plato's ethico-political thought and aesthetics.