Socrates and Friends collects and translates -- together for the first time -- all the ancient letters attributed to the Socratics broadly conceived: Socrates himself; his immediate circle, including Xenophon and Plato; the Cynic Diogenes ("the mad Socrates") and his student Crates; and Plato's Academic students Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Chion. These letters, set from the end of the fifth century to late in the fourth, reflect two fundamental and neglected features of philosophy: the centrality of communal life and its political impact. They do so with liveliness, cogency, drama, and even suspense absent from ancient philosophy as we usually know it. The letter collections constituting this corpus each tells a story -- sometimes with an evident narrative arc, sometimes more impressionistically -- and together they illustrate the amazing promise that early Greek philosophy held out: that it could help one become happy and make the world a better place. Almost none of these letters are authentic, written by the putative author. What the late date of these letters loses in historical authority, however, it gains in significance for the tradition of Socratic philosophy. It shows that in the post-classical era, despite the extraordinary technical developments among the Stoics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, and Skeptics, an earlier mode of philosophy retained its attraction. That is the Socratic mode, whereby the study of philosophy is the study of how to live -- both with yourself and in your political environment. It is not an easy way to live, in that it requires the rejection of much that makes life comfortable: luxuries, conceits, habits. It also requires one to deal with tyrants, often face to face, sometimes sword to sword. Philosophy, from the perspective of these letters, hardly means keeping one's head in the clouds or retreating to one's inner citadel. From these distinctive collections, written as early as the mid-fourth century and as late as the next half-millennium, we experience the attempt to reimagine and reenergize this conception of philosophy, one that seems best formulated through literary conversations.
