On a short break between classes, I wandered over to one of the book cases in my classroom and pulled off the Loeb edition of Plato's Republic. As I scanned the opening words,
I went down yesterday to Piraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston...
I was transported to another time and place. No, it was not to ancient Athens or the port of Piraeus, but to high school during my senior year. Before getting to that, however, I should note that it was the word "Piraeus" itself that did the trick, or rather, my sudden remembrance that the word "Piraeus" was coming up.
In the last quarter of the school year in Latin II, I have for a long time taught a unit on ancient Greek language and culture that includes readings from Plato's Republic and another of his dialogues, Theaetetus. It had been longer than I realized and nearly longer than I could remember since I had last read Republic from the beginning, and so it was that as the first words started to form in brain as my eyes picked them from the page that I realized one of the upcoming words would be "Piraeus," which is the port city for Athens. Suddenly there rushed upon my memory the image of Socrates, the main character in the dialogue, and his friend Glaucon walking toward the city, but it was the image that the English translation by Jowett had first formed in my mind when I was in high school.
My senior English teacher, John Richardson, had brought Plato up in class, and I must have been intrigued enough to want to read the philosopher for myself. I remember the thrill of finding the Modern Library edition with the classic translation by Benjamin Jowett at Hawley-Cooke Booksellers across the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky. That copy resides in my classroom even now.
This slender volume was my introduction to philosophy and reading the great works on my own. We had not been assigned to read it, but I was interested and gave it a whirl. There I was, sitting in the living room of my home in southern Indiana, reading Plato, and it was a heady experience indeed. It was also above me in many places, and I cannot say I made it all the way through to the end. Yet it pierced me with an arrow of passion for philosophy that has continued to burn.
Jowett himself had this to say about the importance of translation in his own English rendering of Thucydides. It is a necessary thing, he argued, in order "once more [to] present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrance of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind."
It was that distant remembrance of youth that came flooding back to my mind today as I recalled Jowett's Republic, let loose by recalling one word, Piraeus. What words take you back to another time and place? What whole works serve you that way? When they evoke distant memories, they can usher a very bright spot into your day indeed.
