Customer Reviews (1)

Theon of Smyrna
This is a great book for people interested in plato, pythagorianism, and the effects of pythogoras on the works of plato. It's probably less interesting for achademics because it's focused on a aspect of plato's workwich are not generally concidered to be of great importantce in achademiccircels. This is unfortunate because this work, allong with a few others,clearly shows that to understand plato's meaning it is quite essential tobe aware of the importance Plato placed on these mathmatical theories andhow they relate to his philosophy. Anyway, beautifull book and a good,clear translation. I'd also recommend: T.Taylors 'the theoreticalarithmatic of the pythagorians', Nicomachus of gerasa's 'introduction toarithmatic', 'the pythaogrian source book'(compilation), and mostimportantly E.McClain's "pythagorian Plato". This last book,propably the best book I've ever read, is much easier to understand afterhaving read (and studied) theon. It's to bad the achademic word chose toignore this aspect of greek philosophy, I think it would have greatlyincreased our understanding of ancient philosophy and the history ofwestern thought in general. This is of course no reason not to persue thesubject ourselves, so for those of you who are inclined to do so, this bookis a great start. Obviously it's not easy reading and you can clearly seethe translators trouble in translating some of the the mathmaticalpassages. It's a great book simply because it exists (in english). It isone of a handfull of books on this subject to have survived to our time andone of the very very few that someone as actually taken the trouble totranslate. My thank to the translator and publisher for making it availableto the (non-greek-speaking) public! ... Read more