azspot asked: On *Plato's Republic*, which translation do you prefer? Do you read in it in the original Greek (my ultimate goal, able to muddle my way through GNT, though I have attacked Plato in small fragments… …if it were not for that "job" thing… :()?

I haven’t tackled the Republic in its entirety, no. Truthfully, the language still gives me fits … no matter how much time I spend with it. I’ve looked more closely at other, shorter dialogues — the Lesser Hippias, for example, which I used extensively in a book chapter I wrote over the summer and which I wrote a bit about a couple of months ago — and I hope to return to the Republic, in the Greek, before too long.

In the meantime — and when I teach it, both to graduate and undergraduate students — I use Allan Bloom’s translation. I like the way that he renders so much of the language in a bit more modern parlance and I really appreciate the (lengthy) interpretive essay included in the edition to which I’ve linked just above. I know that most of my students won’t read it — at least not when they’re still struggling to get through the assigned reading for each class session — but it’s a great resource when the time comes for them to write argumentative essays of their own (and, of course, it’s a great resource for anyone who’s tackling the Republic on his/her own, not as part of a class where lectures might take the place of an intepretive essay).