Dodds on Plato

This chapter assesses E.R. Dodds’s commentary on the Gorgias. Dodds’s edition of the Gorgias was the third commentary he published, and in some ways the most traditional. In his work on the Gorgias, he followed more closely a well-established channel of scholarship on a central author. Yet the book contains much that is characteristic of Dodds’s work, and in many passages one recognizes his distinctive voice. When Dodds was writing about the Gorgias, he had to deal with Plato as a critic of human politics and society, and he kept in view the author’s development into a reformer and a legislator who laid down the principles on which society must be based and the means by which morals and correct beliefs must be imposed upon mankind.