Fragments of papyrus

The papyrus fragments adorning the book cover are relics from a second or third century A.D. copy of the original Republic manuscript. Bill Scott and I came upon the fragments because of a faulty forty-year-old memory of mine. While a soldier in England in 1944, I visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford and there saw in a magnificent display case what I thought was a page from an original Plato manuscript. When it came time, forty years later, to consider a cover for our book, I proposed to Bill that we investigate the possibility of using a reproduction of this longremembered relic.

We turned to Baker Library's research librarians for help in the undertaking. They quickly corrected my faulty memory; nothing, they said, remains in Plato's original hand. Happily, the matter did not stop there. Phil Cronenwett, Curator of Manuscripts at Baker, assembled information on a number of ancient copies of Plato's works. One, a set of papyrus fragments bearing the number 1808 in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, belongs to the Egypt Exploration Society of London and is housed in the Papyrology Rooms of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Since the fragments (from Book VIII of The Republic) are strikingly beautiful in their physical form and state of preservation, we decided to seek permission to reproduce them.

It happened that I was to be in England during the fall of 1984 as director of the government department's Foreign Study Program at the London School of Economics. A visit to the Ashmolean was thus made easy, particularly since Phil Cronenwett put me in touch with Nigel Wilson, Professor of Greek at Lincoln College, Oxford, who escorted me and my wife to the Papyrology Room of the Museum. There we saw the glowing papyrus original in a finely wrought glass case. One of the curators made a transparency and sent it to me in London. I then sent it to our publisher in New York, proposing the venerable papyrus as a fitting symbol of our purpose: to convey, with the greatest possible fidelity and clarity, Plato's text to modern English readers.