This is the kind of book that gives great pleasure to a reviewer. Not only does it reward the act of taking time away from one's own reading agenda to evaluate an unknown and undiscovered text, but it warrants a strong recommendation that others do the same. This review will provide a summary of the refreshingly simple and provocativeargument of Zdravko Planinc's Plato Through Homer, and a short explanation as to why this small volume is worthy of our attention.

I must admit that at first glance, I was not so well inclined. Although the topic of the connections between Plato and Homer sounded good, the author was unknown to me, and the first impression from the Acknowledgments did not bode well (do we need to admit that this is where we academics begin looking for intellectual roadmaps and the human being behind the scholarship?). Beginning with a promising description of which kinds of translations and texts helped the author's interpretation (Harold Bloom, Seth Bernadete, Richmond Lattimore, the Loeb series, and the Perseus online reference library), the author goes on to acknowledge the kinds of conversations that promote an understanding of Plato and Homer (those with “students and colleagues, with business men and poets,” “less frequently with other scholars,” and best of all, with the “one you love”). This bespoke a certain ominous campiness, and the final paragraph, listing intellectual influences as diverse as Miles Davis, François Truffaut, and Martin Scorcese, and revealing a “misspent youth playing in a rock group,” as well as moments of profundity, including “moonrise at a borrowed cottage in the Kawarthas; a stone, a leaf, a door,” seemed to seal the evaluation. What was this book? Who was this person? Did I need to care (or know that the cottage was borrowed)?

These initial impressions, however, soon gave way to a real admiration for both the disarmingly simple argument of the text and the style with which it is made. The argument is as follows: In order to fully understand the meaning of some of Plato's most crucial dialogues—the Republic, the Laws, the Timaeus, the Phaedrus, and the Critias—we have to understand the ways in which Plato maps these dialogues onto one of the most canonical stories for the Greeks: Homer's Odyssey. In Planinc's terms, Plato “refigures” the dramatic events and insights of Odysseus's journey and homecoming into the dramatic arguments and conversations of these dialogues. The epic journey of wandering and homecoming is thus reenacted in the Platonic dialogues, not as an epic of war and homecoming but as a journey of the “greater hero,” Socrates, who finds his own homecoming in the Laws. (See also Planinc's earlier book, Plato's Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws.)

There are a number of themes that guide this refiguring process, themes common to both “journeys”: curiosity about other peoples and other ways of thinking, a search for a kind of inner balance and harmony, love of another and the erotics of recognition, and the possibility of failure and attendant destruction, of warlike virtues, and of an inadvertent love of honor destroying cities and souls.

Planinc thus interprets significant moments in Plato's dialogues through the lens of their equivalent events in the Odyssey. The provocative beginning of the Republic, wherein Socrates recounts the day's events to an unknown interlocutor by saying “I went down …” is mapped onto the descent of Odysseus into Hades, or in Planinc's terms, Plato “refigures” Odysseus's descent into that of Socrates. Similarly, the Demodocus's song of Ares and Aphrodite in the Odyssey is refigured in Timaeus's Pythagorean cosmology. And the struggles of Odysseus with his crewmen are refigured in Plato's account of Socrates' struggles with his interlocutors in the Phaedrus and Symposium.

Central to Planinc's argument is the strange symbol of the shaman, strange to Plato scholars certainly, though not to interpreters of literature or epics. Admittedly, I found this idea at first hard to swallow, but the point is simple enough: Both Odysseus and Socrates can be seen as shamanistic characters, who descend into the depths of the underworld and ascend into other heavenly or divine worlds by means of an axis that joins the heavens and the underworld. This method yields significant results, and some of the perennially obscure passages in these dialogues are illuminated. Especially good is his analysis of Teiresius's prophecy and Odysseus's return to Penelope, which he argues is refigured in Plato's myth of Er, in Book X of the Republic. Strange as it may seem, the argument works.

Both Plato and Homer have, of course, been interpreted and reinterpreted, used and abused, for centuries by all sorts of scholars. The fact that the beauty and mystery of their writings continues to enthrall us, and the fact that none of the scholarship can do justice to the delight in reading the original, should give us pause. What really continues to elude us in these works? How can we approach them best? How can we listen, as we are repeatedly invited to do, and not get them wrong?

Planinc makes his own argument with very little reference to other scholarship except in the footnotes. He approaches both texts on his own, with no discernible political or scholarly agenda. The scholars' views that he refers to, however, represent a broad range: Eva Brann, Wendy Doniger, Jacques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, Seth Bernardete, to name a few.

The field of Plato scholarship is often tasked with helping us read these enigmatic dialogues. Whether they are seen as a coherent whole, with carefully constructed commentary on political life or metaphysics, or virtue, or epistemology, or whether they are deconstructed by word or image, and seen more as reflections on themes that only poetry can encompass (art, image, imitation, eros), they call out for interpretation. Even so, typical interpretations attempt to explain away the mysterious aspects of the texts. In contrast, Planinc approaches the works of both Plato and Homer by means of the experience of reading them—awe, delight, confusion—and shows how by seeing each as commenting on the other, certain aspects are revealed as deeper and richer than previously thought. The reader is drawn into the argument, which is at times dense and impenetrable, and at other times scattered and disorganized, but the end result is a reawakened delight at the richness of both texts and the pleasures of simple reading. Both the substance and the technique of this small volume result in a renewed desire to read Plato and Homer, and to see them as not only political and philosophical texts but as interconnected works of literature.