Plato

Hi there, and welcome to 8 Minute Lives. In 399 BC, in Athens, a roughly seventy-year-old man drank a cup of poison hemlock, surrounded by his friends. His crime, according to the jury of his fellow citizens, was corrupting the young and disrespecting the gods. His name was Socrates, and among the young men influenced by him was a young aristocrat from a famous family. That young man was so shaken by what Athens did to his teacher that he spent the rest of his life trying to answer a single question: how do you build a world where the best man in the city isn't killed by it? His name was Plato. And his answer to that question shaped Western thought for the next twenty-four centuries. Plato was born around 429 BC into one of the grandest families in Athens. His relatives traced their lineage back to ancient kings, and everything about his birth pointed toward a career in politics. That was simply what men of his class did. But he was born into a city coming apart at the seams. Athens was locked in a long, grinding war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, and by the time Plato was a teenager, the golden age of Athenian democracy was curdling into plague, defeat, and paranoia. Then, in 404 BC, Athens finally lost the war, and Sparta-backed oligarchs known as the Thirty Tyrants took power. Here's where it gets personal. Two of the leading tyrants, Critias and Charmides, were Plato's relatives. They invited the young man to join them. For a moment, the door to power stood open. But the Thirty turned out to be murderous, executing citizens and seizing property, and Plato watched his own family disgrace itself. When democracy was restored a year later, he might have hoped for something better. Instead, the restored democracy put Socrates on trial. To understand why this broke something in Plato, you need to understand what Socrates meant to him. Socrates was a stonemason's son who wandered around Athens barefoot, buttonholing generals and politicians and asking them deceptively simple questions. What is courage? What is justice? Do you actually know what you're talking about? He wrote nothing down. He claimed to know nothing himself. And he had a gift for exposing, in public, that the most confident men in Athens couldn't defend their own beliefs. Young aristocrats like Plato found this intoxicating. The Athenian establishment found it infuriating. After the humiliation of losing the war, the city wanted scapegoats, and the annoying old man with the questions made a convenient one. Plato was probably not there at the trial. He watched Socrates refuse to grovel, refuse to flee into exile, and calmly accept the death sentence rather than abandon his principles. Plato later wrote that this episode convinced him that humanity's troubles would never end until philosophers held political power, or those who held power became genuine philosophers. That idea, strange as it sounds, became his life's project. After Socrates died, Plato is said to have left Athens. He traveled for years, possibly to Egypt, and certainly to southern Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean thinkers. That belief sank in deep. And around 387 BC, back in Athens, he founded a school in a grove sacred to a hero named Academus, just outside the city walls. We call it the Academy, and it's often treated as an early ancestor of the modern university. Students came from across the Greek world to study mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, and to argue with one another under the olive trees. Tradition says an inscription over the entrance read, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter." The Academy would survive, in various forms, for nearly nine hundred years. Think about that. Rome rose and fell in less time. It was here that Plato wrote the works that made him immortal, and he wrote them in a form nobody expected: dialogues. Little dramas, really, in which Socrates, brought back to life on the page, debates friends and rivals about love, courage, death, and the soul. They're funny, combative, and genuinely gripping. And running through them is Plato's boldest idea, the theory of Forms: the claim that the physical world we see is a kind of shadow, an imperfect copy of a higher reality of perfect, eternal ideas. Every beautiful thing fades, but Beauty itself does not. He captured this in the most famous image in philosophy, the allegory of the cave: prisoners chained in darkness, watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality, until one escapes into the sunlight. The philosopher, Plato says, is the escaped prisoner, and his duty is to go back down into the cave and free the others, even if they hate him for it. Even if, like Socrates, they kill him for it. His masterpiece, the Republic, sketches an ideal city ruled by philosopher-kings, rulers trained for decades in mathematics and philosophy, forbidden from owning wealth, governing out of wisdom rather than ambition. It's a beautiful, unsettling vision. And remarkably, Plato got the chance to test it. Across the sea in Sicily lay Syracuse, ruled by a tyrant named Dionysius. Plato had visited during his early travels and befriended the tyrant's brother-in-law, an earnest young man named Dion. Ancient sources tell a story that Plato so offended the elder Dionysius that he was handed over to be sold as a slave, and only rescued when a friend bought his freedom. The tale may be embellished, but it captures how badly that first visit went. Decades later, when Dionysius died and his son took the throne, Dion wrote to Plato with an extraordinary invitation: come to Syracuse and turn the young ruler into a philosopher-king. Plato was around sixty. He knew the odds. He went anyway, because refusing would have made his whole philosophy look like empty talk. It was a disaster. The young Dionysius wanted the prestige of philosophy without the discipline, court factions turned him against Dion, and Plato found himself trapped in palace intrigue, at times a virtual prisoner. He visited Syracuse more than once and failed to realize his political aims. Eventually Dion seized power in Syracuse and was assassinated. The one real-world experiment in philosopher-kingship ended in blood. Plato returned to Athens and to the Academy, where he taught until his death around 347 BC, at about eighty-one years old. One tradition says he died peacefully at a banquet. Among his students was a doctor's son from the north named Aristotle, who would challenge nearly everything his teacher taught, which is perhaps the finest tribute a school built on questioning could receive. So what did Plato leave behind? Practically everything. The university. The written tradition of philosophy. The idea that beyond the messy visible world lie truths that reason can reach. His politics failed completely; no philosopher-king ever ruled. But the twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. He couldn't save Socrates. He couldn't fix Syracuse. So he built something out of the one material Athens couldn't put on trial: ideas. Twenty-four centuries later, we're still living with his influence. Thanks for listening to 8 Minute Lives. See you next time.