Plato (c. 427–347)
Born of aristocratic parents in around 427 in Athens, Plato wrote poetry in his youth
before turning to philosophy, notably when he encountered Socrates. In the Republic,
written about 375 but set in earlier times, the main respondents of Socrates, Glaucon
and Adeimantus, are the elder brothers of Plato, who must have sat at the feet of
Socrates and learned his philosophy in a similar way. After Socrates’ trial and death
in 399, he turned aside from the political career he had contemplated and travelled
extensively. He visited the court of the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse and met
the ruler’s brother-in-law Dion, with whom he struck up a friendship. In his seventh
letter, written to friends of Dion after his death, Plato records that his experience in
Athens had convinced him that good government was only possible if philosophers
acquire political authority or if by some miracle those in power become philosophers
(326b). Plato returned to Athens and began teaching in a gymnasium that had a shrine
to a hero named Academus, hence the school was called the Academy. It seems that
he hoped the Academy might be a nursery for philosopher kings, and the school
attracted the pupils from other parts of Greece, notably Aristotle from Stagira in the
Chersonese. When Dionysius I died in 367, Dion invited Plato back to Syracuse to
train the new young ruler Dionysius II, who was not, however, a responsive pupil.
Plato is the first thinker in western philosophy from whom we have an extant
philosophical framework, though the surviving Platonic dialogues (some thirty in
number) featuring Socrates as the main speaker (in all but one or two late works)
are not a systematic exposition of his philosophy as it was taught in the Academy.
There is some evidence, if Plato is, indeed, the author of the letters that have been
attributed to him (there is dispute about this among scholars), that he deliberately
refrained from committing his more advanced thoughts to paper. The dialogues
seem rather to have been designed for popular consumption, to be fully intelligible
to the general reader throughout, without the use of technical language. As to the
recreation of the character of Socrates long after the historical figure had died, Plato
is hereby affirming the soundness of his methods and seriousness of his mission as
an educator of mankind and midwife to truth: the Platonic Socrates is an imaginative
extension of the real figure and a dramatic embodiment of the philosophic spirit in
action, a model of the kind of man who believes (and acts on the belief) that virtue
is knowledge.
The dialogues are therefore exemplary, but they are also meant to be enticing.
In the Symposium,for example, Plato clearly wishes to cast the kind of spell over his
readers that Alcibiades says Socrates habitually cast over those with whom he
conversed. In the realistic presentation of an actual drinking party we see ‘the feast
of reason and the flow of soul’. The fully human setting, conjured up by Plato’s literary
art, is what has given the Socratic method its irresistible appeal. Moreover, however
196 THE GREEKS