The Laws, like its better-known sibling the Republic, is a long and winding journey through the intertwined fields of ethics and political philosophy in an effort to examine the regulations best suited to optimising a polis and its citizens. M. provides an enormously valuable resource for the Greekless reader eager to dig into this challenging dialogue. Though she identifies philosophers as her main audience, M.'s work will be quite useful to those approaching the text from other disciplines as well. This is primarily because M. shows herself to be a deeply sensitive reader and critic, interested both in what Plato says and how he says it.
After a very brief overview and a thorough outline of the dialogue, M. offers an accessible and fluid translation of Laws 1 and 2. She departs a bit from what is there in the Greek, presumably in service of readability, perhaps more often than she might have done. This is a minor quibble since the book's chief contribution is its thoughtful, wide-ranging commentary (she provides about five pages of discussion for each page of text). She gives readers a peek into the language of the text by including transliterated Greek terminology in the lemmata and throughout the commentary. Cross-indexing also helps readers track important themes as they recur throughout the work. The lemmatic structure of M.'s commentary and her attention to lexical detail make this work useful to a more diverse audience than R. Mayhew's admirable treatment of Laws 10 (2008).
Writing a commentary on Plato, particularly on such a lengthy and complex work, is a spectacularly daunting task and M. is to be congratulated for producing a truly helpful resource for the first two books that will serve as an able guide for students and more advanced readers from other periods or disciplines. The Clarendon Plato Series would do well to commission similar volumes for the remaining nine books of the Laws on which there are no recent commentaries in English (Schöpsdau [1994–2011] Nomoi (Gesetze) is an impressive, three-volume commentary in German). This is particularly important now, as this dialogue is attracting enormous interest from scholars.Footnote 1 Unfortunately, a piecemeal approach will fall short of meeting the need for a full-scale update to E.B. England's 1921 commentary on Plato's longest work for an Anglophone audience.
