Robin Waterfield took a first in Classics at Manchester University in 1974, and was a research student in ancient philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1974-78. From 1978 until 1982 he worked as a university lecturer, at Newcastle University and then for three years at St Andrews, until Mrs Thatcher’s government decided there were too many lecturers in ‘unimportant’ subjects such as Classics, and he was made redundant, with no jobs even to apply for. He crept into Penguin Books through a side door (they were publishing his first book at the time) and became a copy-editor for a couple of years, before leaving in 1984 to pursue a career as a writer (sustained for a while by continuing to work as a freelance copy-editor). He was tempted back to Penguin in 1988 to commission for the newly acquired Arkana list (and subsequently business books and health books too), but the pull of writing again proved too strong, and he left early in 1991, while remaining as a consultant to Penguin until the very end of 1999, for Penguin Classics and for Arkana. He has also been advisory editor to Puffin Gamebooks, a biographical copy-writer, and a blurb-writer. But he has always spent most of his time writing, and if he’s not writing a book, he’ll be writing a lecture or a review. He was an invited lecturer at Williams College, Massachusetts, in January and February 2000, Writer in Residence at the University of Sussex in the academic year 2001-2, and has taught academic writing skills (i.e. essay-writing) at several universities in London and south-east England. He was a member of the Royal Literary Fund’s Higher Education Panel, whose purpose was to address the crisis in writing and literacy skills currently afflicting British universities. He has given public lectures both here and in the States, has appeared on radio a number of times (chiefly in the context of publicizing a book), and has written over 100 book reviews for academic journals. Apart from 30 retellings of other people’s books (for children, audio tapes and the EFL market), and about the same number of miscellaneous articles and introductions, his main publications are as follows:

A. TRANSLATIONS

Plato: Philebus (translation, introduction, notes), Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1982 (reissued with updates, 2006)

Plato: Theaetetus (translation, introduction, notes), Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1987 (reissued with updated bibliography, 2004)

Plato: Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Euthydemus (translations, introductions, notes) in Plato: Early Socratic Dialogues (ed. Trevor Saunders), Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1987

Ps.-Iamblichus: The Theology of Arithmetic (translation, introduction, notes; foreword by Keith Critchlow), Phanes Press, 1988

‘Anatolius: On the Decad’, Kairos Newsletter 1988, pp. 20-37 (translation, notes); reprinted with minor corrections in Alexandria3 (1995), pp. 180-94
 
Xenophon: Conversations of  Socrates (translations of Apology, Memorabilia, Symposium and Oeconomicus, with introductions and notes; partly a revision of earlier versions by Hugh Tredennick), Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1990

Plutarch: Essays (translations; introductions and notes by Ian Kidd), Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1992

Epicurus: Letter on Happiness (translation and biography; introduction by John McDade, S.J.), Rider Books, 1993 (U.S. ed. Chronicle Books, 1996)

Plato: Republic (translation, introduction, notes), Oxford University Press, 1993 (World’s Classics, 1994; Book of the Month Club, February 1994; Folio Society, 2003)

Plato: Symposium (translation, introduction, notes), Oxford University Press (World’s Classics), 1994

Plato: Gorgias (translation, introduction, notes), Oxford University Press (World’s Classics), 1994

Plato: Statesman (translation; introduction and notes by Julia Annas), Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), 1995; (repr. in Geraint Parry and Ian Harris (eds), The Cambridge Reader in Western Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Aristotle: Physics (translation; introduction and notes by David Bostock), Oxford University Press (World’s Classics), 1996

Xenophon: Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (translations of Agesilaus, Hiero, Ways and Means, On Horsemanship, On Hunting and Hipparchicus; introductions and notes by Paul Cartledge), Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1997 (reissued with updates, 2006)

Herodotus: The Histories (translation; introduction and notes by Carolyn Dewald), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 1998 (History Book Club, Book of the Month Club, Reader’s Subscription, BCA)

Plutarch: Greek Lives (translations; introductions and notes by Philip Stadter), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 1998

Plutarch: Roman Lives (translations; introductions and notes by Philip Stadter), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 1999

The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (translations, introductions, notes), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2000

Euripides: Orestes and Other Plays (Ion, Orestes, Phoenician Women, Suppliant Women; translations; introduction by Edith Hall; notes by James Morwood), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2001

Plato: Phaedrus (translation, introduction, notes), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2002 

Euripides: Heracles and Other Plays (Alcestis, Heracles, Children of Heracles, Cyclops; translations; introduction by Edith Hall; notes by James Morwood), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2003

Five myths from Plato’s dialogues (translations, notes), in C. Partenie (ed.), Plato: Selected Myths, Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2004

Plato: Meno and Other Dialogues (translations, introduction, notes), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2005

Xenophon: The Expedition of Cyrus (translation; introduction and notes by Tim Rood), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2005

Plato: Timaeus and Critias (translation; introduction and notes by Andrew Gregory), Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), forthcoming 2008

 

B. NON-FICTION BOOKS

Before Eureka: The Presocratics and Their Science, The Bristol Press, 1989 (U.S. ed., St Martin’s Press, 1989)

Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran, Allen Lane, 1998 (Penguin, 1999; U.S. ed., St Martin’s Press, 1998; TSP Book Club; Italian ed., Guanda, 2000; Spanish ed., Editorial Complutense, 2000; French ed., Editions Fides-Bellarmin, 2000; Italian bookclub ed., TEA, 2005)

Plato: Gorgias, Analysis and Commentary, Project Archelogos [e-publication], 2001

Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis, Macmillan, 2002 (Pan paperback, 2004; US ed., Brunner-Routledge, 2003; Russian ed., Toymania, 2006)

Athens, A History: From Ancient Ideal to Modern City, Macmillan/Basic Books 2004 (BCA Ancient & Medieval History Guild/The History Guild/TSP; Greek ed., Enalios, 2007)

Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia and the End of the Golden Age (Faber & Faber/Harvard University Press, 2006; Greek ed., Psichogios, 2007)

The Trial of Athens: Socrates, Alcibiades and Moral Crisis (Faber & Faber/Norton/ McLelland and Stewart, forthcoming 2009)

 

C. CHILDREN’S ADVENTURE GAMEBOOKS

Rebel Planet, Puffin Books (Puffin Fighting Fantasy Gamebook 18), 1985 (French ed., Gallimard 1986; U.S. ed., Dell 1986; computer game, Adventure Soft 1986; Japanese ed., Shakai Shiso Sha 1987; Danish ed., Borgen 1987; Portuguese ed., Verbo 1991; Brazilian Portuguese ed., Marques-Saraiva, 1992; Czech ed., Perseus 1997)

Masks of Mayhem, Puffin Books (Puffin Fighting Fantasy Gamebook 23), 1986 (French ed., Gallimard 1987; Japanese ed., Shakai Shiso Sha 1988; Danish ed., Borgen 1988; German ed., Thienemann 1989; Hungarian ed., Taketa 1992; Portuguese ed., Verbo 1993; Hebrew ed., Opus 1993; Czech ed., Perseus, 1999)

Phantoms of Fear, Puffin Books (Puffin Fighting Fantasy Gamebook 28), 1987 (French ed., Gallimard 1988; Danish ed., Borgen 1989; Japanese ed., Shakai Shiso Sha 1989)

The Money Spider, with Wilfred Davies, Penguin Books (Penguin Plus), 1988 (Polish ed., eMPi2 1996)

The Water Spider, with Wilfred Davies, Penguin Books (Penguin Plus), 1988 (Polish ed., eMPi2 1996)

Deathmoor, Puffin Books (Puffin Fighting Fantasy Gamebook 55), 1994 (French ed., Gallimard 1996; Portuguese ed., Verbo, 2003)

 

D. ACADEMIC ARTICLES

‘On the Text of Some Passages of Plato’s Philebus’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 5 (1980), pp. 57-64

‘The Place of the Philebus in Plato’s Dialogues’, Phronesis 25 (1980), pp. 270-305

‘Double Standards in Euripides’ Troades’, Maia 34 (1982), pp. 139-42

‘An Inconsistency in Plato’s Philebus?’, Apeiron 18 (1984), pp. 46-9

‘Plato, Philebus 52c1-d1: Text and Meaning’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 129 (1986), pp. 358-60

‘Aristotle, Metaphysics 1019a4’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987), p. 195

‘Emendations of [Iamblichus], Theologoumena Arithmeticae (de Falco)’, Classical Quarterly 38 (1988), pp. 215-27

‘Deforming Plato’, Classical Association Audio Cassette Tape no. 99; synopsis in Proceedings of the Classical Association, 1988, pp. 35-6

‘Truth and the Elenchus in Plato’, in Pamela Huby and Gordon Neal (eds), The Criterion of Truth: Essays Written in Honour of George Kerferd (Liverpool University Press, 1989), pp. 39-56

‘The Quiet Revolution’, Gnosis 25 (1992), pp. 21-9

‘Seating Arrangements in Plato’s Symposium’, Alexandria 2 (1993), pp. 311-12

‘The Pathology of ps.-Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine’, in Lewis Ayres (ed.), The Passionate Intellect: Essays on the Transformation of Classical Traditions Presented to Professor I.G. Kidd (Rutgers University Studies in the Classical Humanities vol. 7, Transaction Publishers, 1995), pp. 249-58

‘The Evidence for Astrology in Classical Greece’, Culture and Cosmos 3 (1999), pp. 3-15

‘Translating Plato’s Republic’, Polis 18 (2001), pp. 117-24

‘Xenophon’s Socratic Mission’, in Christopher Tuplin (ed.), Xenophon and His World (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004 = Historia Einzelschriften 172), pp. 79-113

‘Anatolian Retreat’, History Today 56 (2006), 70-1

‘The Return of Xenophon’, The Philosophers’ Magazine 37 (2007), 27-9

 

E. ANTHOLOGIES

The Voice of Kahlil Gibran: An Anthology, Penguin Books (Arkana), 1995 (TSP Bookclub, 1998)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Classic Stories in Verse, Puffin Books (Puffin Classics), 1996