Scholarly literature on Socrates and the Socratics is growing constantly and steadily. The number of editions, translations, monographs, collections and articles is increasing from year to year,1 contributing to a boost of knowledge about Socrates and his pupils as well as to new ways of interpreting such knowledge. Well established hermeneutical paradigms spanning from Olof Gigon’s ‘skeptic’ approach to Gregory Vlastos’ account of the ‘two Socrateses’ have been challenged and reassessed, often with the explicit aim to discover new means to deal with the texts of the first-generation Socratics.
One of the most recent and fruitful approaches concerns the way these sources are handled. Giannantoni’s collection, however successful in providing access to the frag-ments of the ‘minor’ Socratics, remained a work for specialists. It was hardly used by non-classicists mainly because the texts were neither translated nor thoroughly com-mented. Now, after two decades, things have changed radically: editions and translations, mostly drawing and selecting material from the Reliquiae (in some cases even integrating them) have appeared or are due to appear in different languages.