 The subject calls for care. If perennially footnoted by later philosophers Plato has also been perennially thumbnailed. Clichés accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of Plato’s aesthetics—not in the search for some surprising theory unlike anything that has been said, but so that background shading and details may emerge, for a result that perhaps resembles the commonplaces about his thought as a human face resembles the cartoon reduction of it.