To deploy Plato may seem one of the more desperate strategies for saving the planet. Classical Athens had no inkling of environmental catastrophe, and Plato hated democracy. But Melissa Lane succeeds wonderfully not only in separating the useful in Plato from the useless, but also in demonstrating that the useful contains a surprising amount of what we need if we are to survive. [She] emphasises the importance to us all of 'legacy'. Do we want our epitaph to be that we did nothing? The point applies with particular force, I suggest, to those engaged in what some regard as ingenious irrelevance, the humanities. Lane demonstrates that the humanities, so far from being negligible, can play a vital role in averting environmental catastrophe. (Richard Seaford, Times Literary Supplemen 05/2012)