Plato’s dialogues tend to be read against a predominantly Athenian backdrop. After all, his central protagonist, Socrates, is rarely depicted venturing outside Athens, and Plato’s rendering of the trial and death of his teacher is widely understood as a searing indictment of contemporary Athenian political practice. Yet foreign characters and references abound in Plato’s work—from the Chalcedonian sophist Thrasymachus in the Republic; to the Egyptian myth of Theuth in the Phaedrus; to the Cretan setting of the Laws, where, much like the setup to a joke, a Cretan, a Spartan, and an Athenian “Stranger” are walking toward a cave sacred to Zeus, the god of foreigners.

What would it mean to take these references seriously? This is the endeavor undertaken by Rebecca LeMoine in her admirable book, Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity. The project proves to be extremely fertile: once one starts looking, Plato’s corpus teems everywhere with foreign people, places, and things. When we examine them carefully—Plato’s Caves suggests—we recover a more complete understanding of Plato’s views on cultural diversity.

Plato, according to LeMoine, is an advocate of cultural diversity. This is because encounters with different cultures have the effect of what LeMoine calls a “liberating sting.” If Socrates once defended his philosophical project as the work of a gadfly stinging awake the drowsy horse of Athenian society, foreigners can find themselves filling a similar role. Much like a philosophical encounter with Socrates, interactions with foreigners can help expose the internal contradictions in one’s system of beliefs, which often reflects the beliefs that are taken for granted in one’s culture.

Plato’s Caves stresses that reconstructing Plato’s defense of cultural diversity is all the more timely because extant portraits of a xenophobic Plato—including Karl Popper’s infamous depiction of the original architect of “the closed society”—are ripe for appropriation by white nationalists and Eurocentric movements. Plato’s views, furthermore, constitute a novel supplement to existing arguments for cultural diversity. Taking her cue from Plato’s critique of democracy as a regime especially vulnerable to tyranny, LeMoine suggests that democratic citizens today can look to cultural diversity as a resource that can help temper democracy’s “knee-jerk reaction” to infringements on individual freedoms, which often leads democracies to undermine their own values (p. 243). The provocation of foreign cultures, for Plato, cultivates in citizens a “better disposition or attitude toward knowledge.” A disposition grounded in epistemic humility—one that better equips citizens to “pause and reflect”—is what Plato’s Caves identifies with Socratic wisdom (pp. 245–46).

One way of summing up the many contributions of this book is to describe it as a rich and suggestive effort to draw out the role of culture in Plato’s political thought. A guiding metaphor that frames the book is borrowed from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The cave, on LeMoine’s reading, represents the polis, and being steeped unreflectively in one’s own culture is akin to the predicament of the prisoner in the allegory. Plato’s Caves devotes a chapter to making a convincing—if at times belabored—case for reading the Allegory of the Cave, not only as an illustration of Plato’s epistemology and metaphysics, but also as a study of political culture and upbringing. This lesson could just as easily be applied to what theorists ordinarily take to be the scope of Plato’s philosophy and its political relevance. If Plato has, in recent years, been a valuable source of insight on topics in politics ranging from citizenship to democracy, Plato’s Caves reminds us that we also yet have much to learn from him as a theorist of culture.

LeMoine is an especially engaging guide to the multicultural world evoked in four Platonic dialogues: the Republic, Menexenus, Laws, and Phaedrus. We learn, for instance, about the fascinating political history of the festival at Piraeus that forms the backdrop to the Republic, the detail that Thrasymachus was a diplomat who prominently spoke out against Athenian imperialism, and the finer aspects of Athenian foreign policy and changes in its citizenship laws in fifth century BCE. Chasing down the significance of these passing details makes for a rewarding journey, even if the connections that LeMoine extracts from them are not always entirely convincing.

Necessarily baked into the project of applying such scrutiny to Plato’s foreign references is a methodological commitment to reading in “dramatic context” (p. 32). On the approach adopted throughout Plato’s Caves, every choice on Plato’s part to allude to a foreign place or saying, or to cast a non-Athenian character as the mouthpiece for a particular view, has to be taken as both deliberate and significant. One consequence of this approach is that Plato’s Caves often ends up focusing on how surface claims in Plato’s text are complicated by their context—be it the foreign status of a character voicing a xenophobic claim, or the foreign setting in which a trio of city planners are discussing the merits of closing their city to outside influences.

More often than not, such tensions end up yielding an ironic reading of some of the central arguments of the dialogue in question. Recalling the famously ironic lenses through which Leo Strauss and his disciplines read Plato, LeMoine recasts the Republic, for instance, not as a blueprint for an ideal city but as a “thought experiment designed to help [Socrates’s] interlocutors understand the nature of their souls” (p. 94). The interpretations in Plato’s Caves accordingly invite some familiar risks—like that of going too far in disavowing the claims of the arguments in favor of stressing the ironic effect. They can also lead to some repetitive conclusions—such as the importance of self-knowledge and criticism, qualities so often valorized in “zetetic” portraits of Plato’s philosophy.

There are other ways in which the project seems to be constrained by the limits built into its approach. Although the book seems to suggest that foreigners in Plato’s dialogues consistently play the part of catalysts to critical reflection on one’s culture, it is not always clear how they go about doing so. At times, Plato’s Caves treats Plato’s foreign characters as products of their places of origin, even if they have spent long periods of their lives in Athens. But it also grants that certain foreigners can perform “assimilated” roles, as when the metics Cephalus and Polemarchus appear in the Republic to propose definitions of justice that reflect traditional Athenian values (pp. 99–101). Such complications also point to a more fundamental question at the heart of the study. One of the justifications for placing so much weight on passing allusions to foreignness in Plato’s work is that, when we reconstruct the significance they would have held for his immediate audiences, we can better understand his intent. It does not necessarily follow, however, that Plato always intended for the salience of these details to lie in the fact of their foreignness.

Nonetheless in pushing the project to its limits, Plato’s Caves offers us a remarkably coherent and compelling vision of what a Platonic theory of cultural diversity would entail. We might think of LeMoine’s book as doing the provocative work of the gadfly celebrated in its pages, prompting us to remember that there is still much in the thought of this seemingly familiar philosopher that remains to be better understood.