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Plato's famous dialogue, the Phaedrus, was variously subtitled in antiquity: "On Beauty," "On Love," "On the Psyche." It is also concerned with the art of rhetoric, of thought and communication.

Pieper gives interpretation of the dialogue. Leaving the more recondite scholarly preoccupations aside, he concentrates on the content, bringing the actual situation in the dialogue – Athens and its intellectuals engaged in spirited debate – alive. Equally alive is the discussion of ideas, which are brought to bear on contemporary experience and made to prove the perennial validity of Socratic wisdom, and its power to excite the mind. The main thesis – that in poetry and in love man is "beside himself," that is, divinely inspired - is discussed with reference to modern poets, novelists, and modern psychology.

Animal fables are said to have originated with Aesop, a semilegendary Samian slave, but the earliest surviving record of the fables comes from the Latin poet Phaedrus, who introduced the new genre to Latin literature. This verse translation of The Fables is the first in English in more than two hundred years.

In addition to the familiar animal fables, about a quarter of the book includes such diverse material as prologues and epilogues, historical anecdotes, short stories, enlarged proverbs and sayings, comic episodes and folk wisdom, and many incidental glimpses of Greek and Roman life in the classical period.

The Fables also sheds light on the personal history of Phaedrus, who seems to have been an educated slave, eventually granted his freedom by the emperor Augustus. Phaedrus' style is lively, clean, and sparse, though not at the cost of all detail and elaboration. It serves well as a vehicle for his two avowed purposes—to entertain and to give wise counsel for the conduct of life. Like all fabulists, Phaedrus was a moralist, albeit on a modest and popular level.

An excellent introduction by P. F. Widdows provides information about Phaedrus, the history of The Fables, the metric style of the original and of this translation, and something of the place of these fables in Western folklore. The translation is done in a free version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, a form used by W. H. Auden and chosen here to match the popular tone of Phaedrus' Latin verse.

Stanley Rosen completed The Language of Love in the early 1970s, but the manuscript was put aside and only rediscovered in 2013, the year before his death. The Language of Love is an interpretation of the Phaedrus that was meant to follow and complete Rosen’s Symposium commentary. Only two articles have been previously published. Rosen’s frequent references to the central passages and second half of the Phaedrus were more important in pointing up the importance of his absent full interpretation of the dialogue.
     Here Rosen’s argue for the possibility of philosophy or the retrieval of human self-knowledge on the basis of a renewed argument for the partial intelligibility of ordinary experience or, in other words, for the Platonic Ideas. His book on the Symposium was an important contribution to the subsequent sea change in Plato scholarship that returned attention to the dialogue form and to the poetic side of philosophy even in its quarrel with philosophy. That change allowed us search for understanding in the light of the whole, a whole which is otherwise, as Rosen has shown elsewhere, fragmented by the scientism of analytical philosophy or the historicism of “Continental” philosophy.
     The Language of Love represents a missing key to Stanley Rosen’s work and, much more significantly, to the rediscovery of philosophy in our time. The title of the book is not merely a play on words. It points to the incommensurability between the constructed or historical nature of language or culture and the pre-discursive apprehension of things that is necessary if speech is to make sense and be understood, as opposed to being mere nonsense.
     Among many valuable insights along the way, Rosen unites the dialogue in two parts, treating both eros and rhetoric, showing the linkage between eros and writing, as between myth and analysis. He connects the comic attempt to subject eros to diaeresis in the Phaedrus with the attempt to understand non-being as an eidos in the Sophist. In both cases, the inadequacy of a technical understanding of philosophy returns us to the pre-technical world of ordinary experience.
     Rosen’s interpretation is an expression of the Socratic claim that we can’t speak beautifully without knowing the truth and that whatever truth we speak or write is a reflection of the silent invisibility of beauty as the unity of form. However, “Like every good teacher, it does not simply state that link for us to memorize. Instead, we must recollect it.”