Plato

Life

Plato was born in Athens around 428 BC into an aristocratic family with connections to the city’s political elite. As a young man he became a follower of Socrates, and the execution of Socrates by the restored democracy in 399 BC shaped the rest of his life. He left Athens for a period afterward and is reported to have traveled in Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean philosophers and made the first of several ill-fated attempts to influence the rulers of Syracuse.

Around 387 BC he founded the Academy in Athens, a school that continued in one form or another for centuries and that gave its name to the word “academic.” Aristotle studied there for twenty years. Plato taught and wrote at the Academy for the rest of his life and died in Athens around 348 BC.

Everything Plato wrote for publication survives, which is rare for an ancient author. The works are almost all dialogues, most of them with Socrates as the main speaker, and they range from short conversations about a single virtue to the long constructions of the Republic and the Laws. Scholars divide them loosely into early, middle and late periods, though the dating is uncertain and contested.

Literary significance

Plato is the first philosopher in the Western tradition whose complete works we can read, and most of the subjects philosophy has since pursued, including knowledge, justice, the soul, the nature of reality, love, education and the ideal state, are treated at length in his dialogues. The twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that European philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato is quoted so often because it is close to true.

He is also a major literary figure. The dialogues are dramatic works, with characters, settings and humor, and the picture of Socrates they give is one of the most vivid portraits of a person in ancient literature. Plato’s suspicion of poetry, stated at length in the Republic, has the irony of coming from one of the best prose writers of the Greek language.

Where to start

The Republic is the central work and the one most people mean when they talk about Plato, but it is long. The Apology, a short account of Socrates’ defense at his trial, is the usual first step and is also in this library.