An Aristocrat After the Defeat
Plato was born around 428 BCE into a prominent Athenian family during the long war with Sparta, and he came of age as his city lost it. Two relatives, Critias and Charmides, joined the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens by terror after the surrender in 404. The restored democracy then tried and executed Socrates in 399 on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. Plato was roughly thirty, and both experiences, oligarchic violence and democratic judicial killing, marked everything he later wrote about politics.
He traveled after the execution, visiting Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean mathematics and a court that would later disappoint him badly. Around 387 he founded a school in a grove outside Athens sacred to the hero Academus, which gave the Academy its name. It was not a university in any modern sense but a community of study in mathematics, dialectic, and politics, and it survived in various forms for centuries, becoming the longest-running institution of higher learning in the ancient Mediterranean.
The Problem of Socrates
Almost everything he wrote takes the form of conversation, and he never speaks in his own voice. Socrates dominates the early dialogues, questioning craftsmen and politicians about courage, piety, and justice, and reducing their confident answers to rubble without offering replacements. In the middle and late works the character called Socrates begins presenting elaborate positive doctrines that the historical man probably never held, including the theory that the world we see is a shadow of unchanging Forms grasped only by reason.
Where the teacher ends and the student begins is the oldest problem in the study of Plato, and it has no agreed solution. Xenophon and Aristophanes give conflicting portraits of Socrates, and Aristotle, who worked in the Academy for twenty years, attributes the theory of Forms to Plato rather than to Socrates. Plato may also have taught things he declined to write down; the Seventh Letter, which claims as much, is of contested authenticity. The dialogues are literature as much as argument, and they resist being reduced to doctrine.
The City He Designed
The Republic builds a just city as a way of examining a just soul, and its details unsettle modern readers. Rulers are philosophers trained for decades; poets are censored or expelled because their stories corrupt the young; a foundational lie about metals in the blood keeps citizens in their classes; and among the guardians, marriage and children are managed by the state through rigged lotteries. Karl Popper attacked the book in the twentieth century as an ancestor of totalitarian thought, and defenders answer that it is a thought experiment, not a manifesto.
The same book proposes that women can be guardians on equal terms with men, an argument almost nobody in the ancient Mediterranean was willing to make. Plato's political ventures in Syracuse, where he tried to educate a tyrant's son, ended in humiliation and possibly captivity. What survived was the writing: read continuously in the Islamic world, recovered in the Latin West through translation, and so pervasive in later philosophy that Whitehead could describe the European tradition as a series of footnotes to it.
