Plato: Letters to my Son - Tapa blanda

Impeccably smooth, 'Letters to my Son' is a kind of dream biography that flows like a summer's day. --Charis Cheevers

'Letters to my Son' is inspired by an obscure and apocryphal fragment in Diogenes Laertius purporting to be Plato's will, in which the great philosopher bequeaths his possessions to his son Adimantes. Burton runs with this idea, 'channelling' Plato dictating letters to this mysterious son from his deathbed. Plato never married, and moreover was likely a homosexual who overtly eschewed family life. Therefore, this intriguing literary device leaves the reader guessing as to the boy s true relationship to the much older man ... The union of genuine philosophical exposition with the format of an instructive letter recalls Seneca's Letters to Lucilius. Burton excels at this Stoic style: to the point, witty, and easy to read. --The Spectator

An eagle's old age is better than the youth of a sparrow. Greek proverb If ever I have achieved anything that might outlive me, it was not for the support and encouragement of my ageing uncles or anyone else in my family, but because I had the courage - they might say the temerity - to resist and defy them whenever they tried to return me to the hackneyed path that I had chosen to leave, and that, in the end, led to their perdition. The hardest thing in life is not to have a vision, for even my uncles once had a vision, but to live it out, to make the hard choices, for the greater good, whatever the costs might seem.