Plato

In 399 BCE an Athenian jury of five hundred citizens voted, by a small margin, that a seventy-year-old man who had spent his life asking questions in the marketplace was guilty of impiety and of corrupting the young. He was given hemlock. Among the young men who had followed him around was an aristocrat of about twenty-eight called Plato, a name the ancient biographers gloss as broad, for his shoulders or for his forehead.

Everything Plato wrote afterwards is downstream of that afternoon. The distrust of democracy, the insistence that most people mistake shadows for reality, the conviction that the good is something one has to be turned around to see - all of it comes from a young man watching a city put its best person to death by a show of hands, legally, in good order.

The aristocrat

He was born around 428–424 BCE into one of the most distinguished families in Athens, related on his mother’s side to Solon the lawgiver. Two of his relatives - his uncle Charmides and his mother’s cousin Critias - became members of the Thirty Tyrants, the oligarchy installed by Sparta after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in 404. Their eight months in power involved perhaps fifteen hundred executions.

This is worth holding onto, because it means Plato was not a man who had seen only democracy fail. He had seen the aristocratic alternative fail first, run by his own relatives, and worse. In the Seventh Letter - whose authenticity is disputed but whose account is plausible - he describes hoping the Thirty would bring justice, watching what they actually did, and concluding that the existing city was beyond saving. Then the restored democracy killed Socrates, and he concluded that the disease was general.

The family is unusually well documented for the period. His father Ariston claimed descent from Codrus, the last king of Athens; his mother Perictione traced her line to Dropides, a relative of Solon. Two of Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, are the men who argue with Socrates through nine books of the Republic, which means the most famous conversation in philosophy is staged inside his own family. His sister Potone was the mother of Speusippus, who would run the Academy after him.

The dating is not secure. Diogenes Laertius gives 428/427 BCE, and that figure is repeated everywhere; Debra Nails, who has reconstructed the family from the inscriptions and the prosopography, argues for 424/423. Either way, Plato was a child through the plague, a boy through the Sicilian disaster of 413, and of military age during the last convulsions of a war that had begun before he was born and that Athens lost when he was in his twenties. He never saw the city at its height. He saw the whole of its collapse.

He had intended a political career. He said he gave it up, and that the states of his day were all badly governed, and that the human race would have no rest from evils until either philosophers ruled or rulers philosophised.

there will be no cessation of evils for the sons of men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive sovereign power in the States, or those in power in the States by some dispensation of providence become true philosophers. Seventh Letter 326a-b, trans. J. Harward

After the execution he travelled - Megara, probably Egypt and Cyrene, and southern Italy, where he met the Pythagoreans, from whom he seems to have taken the mathematical mysticism and the doctrine of the soul’s transmigration.

Whether Plato’s real name was Aristocles

Almost every account of Plato repeats the story that he was born Aristocles and acquired Plato as a nickname. It comes from one place: Diogenes Laertius, Book III, section 4, citing Alexander Polyhistor, a compiler of the first century BCE. Diogenes was writing in the third century CE, roughly six hundred years after the fact.

The passage does not inspire confidence. It says Plato was named after his grandfather Aristocles, and then offers three separate explanations for the new name: that his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, gave it to him for his broad build; that it came from the breadth of his style; that it came from the breadth of his forehead. Three incompatible etymologies in one paragraph is the signature of a guess rather than a record.

Modern scholarship largely rejects the tradition. Platon is an ordinary Athenian name, independently attested, and there is no reason a man should not simply have been given it. Nothing contemporary calls him Aristocles. The same chapter of Diogenes also reports that Plato was about to enter a tragedy in a competition, heard Socrates speak, and burned his poems on the spot with a line of verse about needing the fire god, which is a good story and not evidence.

What survives from the story is a real fact underneath it: ancient biography of philosophers was a genre with conventions, and one of them was to explain a famous name. The name of the most famous philosopher in the world attracted the treatment it would have attracted for anyone.

What Plato’s Apology reports about the trial of Socrates

The trial took place in 399 BCE before a jury drawn by lot, five hundred citizens in the usual reconstruction, with three accusers: Meletus, who brought the indictment, backed by Anytus, a substantial democratic politician, and Lycon.

Socrates reads the affidavit out. In Jowett’s rendering it says he is a doer of evil who corrupts the youth, and who does not believe in the gods of the state but has other new divinities of his own. That is the whole charge: impiety, and corruption of the young. Nothing in it mentions politics, though Critias and Alcibiades had both been in his circle and the amnesty of 403 forbade prosecution for acts committed under the Thirty.

Before answering it, Socrates deals with what he calls the older accusation: the reputation, decades old, that he studies things in the heavens and below the earth and makes the weaker argument the stronger. He names its source without much delicacy. Aristophanes had put him on stage in the Clouds in 423, suspended in a basket, running a school of sophistical evasion. A comedy performed when Socrates was about forty-five was still in the jury’s head at seventy.

Then the story of the oracle. Chaerephon, an impetuous friend, had gone to Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the Pythia said no man was. Socrates says he set out to refute this by finding someone wiser, and questioned the politicians, then the poets, then the craftsmen. The politicians thought they knew and did not. The poets could not explain their own work. The craftsmen genuinely knew their trades and inferred from that that they knew everything else.

What he concludes is the sentence that later became a slogan, and the slogan is not what he says. He does not say that he knows that he knows nothing. He says something narrower and more defensible:

he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. Apology 21d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

The claim is about a second-order state, not a total scepticism. Socrates goes on in the same speech to assert several things with confidence: that it is worse to do wrong than to suffer it, that no harm can come to a good man, that he has a divine sign which stops him but never instructs him.

He describes his function as that of a gadfly attached to a large and sluggish horse. He refuses to propose exile, or silence, because a life without examination would not be worth living. And he offers the jury no pity: no weeping children, no appeals, which was standard practice and its absence was noticed.

The vote is close. Socrates remarks that a shift of thirty votes would have acquitted him, which puts the count at roughly two hundred and eighty to two hundred and twenty. Athenian procedure then required both sides to propose a penalty. Meletus proposed death. Socrates proposed free meals at public expense, as though he were an Olympic victor, then offered a fine of one mina, which was almost nothing, and was talked up to thirty by friends who guaranteed it. Plato is named as one of the guarantors.

He is named twice in the Apology and once more in the Phaedo, where the list of those present on the last day includes the note that Plato, if the narrator is not mistaken, was ill. Three mentions in the whole corpus, and one of them is an absence.

Jowett, in his own introduction, gives the fairest verdict available on what the Apology is: it breathes the spirit of Socrates, but has been cast anew in the mould of Plato. It is a defence speech written by a partisan, published years later, for readers who had voted.

Syracuse

Three times he went to Sicily to try the theory in practice, and three times it went badly.

The first visit, around 387, was to the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse. It ended with Plato somehow sold into slavery - the sources say Dionysius arranged it - and ransomed by a friend at Aegina.

Dionysius I died in 367 and his son took over. Dion, the young man’s uncle and Plato’s friend and student, summoned Plato to educate the new tyrant into a philosopher-king. Plato went, at sixty. Dionysius II proved to be vain and jealous, exiled Dion within months, and kept Plato at court under something close to house arrest.

Plato went a third time, around 361, and it was worse: he was held, was in real danger, and was extracted through the intervention of the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum. Dion later seized Syracuse by force and was assassinated by another of Plato’s associates.

The failure is more specific than the summary suggests. Dionysius I had ruled Syracuse for thirty-eight years and made it the strongest power in the Greek west. Dion was his brother-in-law and the uncle of his heir, and had been reading Plato for twenty years. Archytas of Tarentum, who got Plato out in 361, was a mathematician of the first rank who had been elected general of his city seven times, and is the closest thing the ancient world produced to an actual philosopher-ruler. The man Plato had in hand was not the tyrant. It was the friend of the tyrant.

Dion took Syracuse by force in 357 with a small mercenary army, lost the city’s confidence within three years by governing in the manner he had been taught, and was murdered in 354 by Callippus, an Athenian who had come with him from the Academy. The Seventh Letter, if it is Plato’s, was written to Dion’s supporters after that murder, and reads as the self-defence of a man asked why his teaching had produced a coup.

So the founder of the philosopher-king idea attempted it, three times, and produced one enslavement, one house arrest and one murder. He was seventy. He wrote the Laws afterwards - a second-best city, run by codified law rather than by a wise ruler, designed for people as they are.

Whether Plato was sold into slavery, and whether the Seventh Letter is his

Two of the most quoted facts about Plato’s life rest on evidence that specialists will not vouch for, and in both cases the uncertainty is the more interesting thing.

The slavery. Diogenes Laertius reports that after quarrelling with Dionysius I, Plato was handed over to a Spartan envoy named Pollis, taken to Aegina and sold in the market. Anniceris of Cyrene happened to be present and ransomed him for twenty minae, though other sources in the same paragraph say thirty. Diogenes adds that Plato’s friends tried to repay the money, Anniceris refused it, and the sum was used instead to buy the plot of land in the Academy.

Every element of that story is late. Diogenes wrote some six centuries afterwards. The ransom figure is already disputed in his own source. Plutarch and Diodorus give versions that do not agree with it or with each other. And the tale performs an obvious moral function: the philosopher priced in a slave market, indifferent, bought back by a stranger who understands what he is worth.

In 2024 the question moved, slightly, for the first time in a long while. A project at the University of Pisa directed by Graziano Ranocchia used infrared, ultraviolet and tomographic imaging on a carbonised Herculaneum roll containing Philodemus of Gadara’s History of the Academy, and recovered roughly a thousand new words, about a third of the text. Two claims came out of it. Plato was buried in a private garden beside the shrine to the Muses inside the Academy grounds, which is more specific than anything previously known. And he was sold into slavery not on the Sicilian trip at all, but after Sparta took Aegina, which would place it around 404 or possibly 399.

The proper caution applies. Philodemus was writing in the first century BCE about events three hundred years earlier, and readings recovered from a burnt scroll are provisional until other scholars have seen the images. But it is the first genuinely new evidence about Plato’s life in centuries, and it makes the traditional version less likely rather than more.

The letter. Thirteen letters were transmitted with the Platonic corpus. Almost all of them are now judged forgeries by almost everyone. The Seventh is the exception, and it matters out of all proportion, because it is the only first-person narrative of Plato’s life in existence. The Thirty, the death of Socrates, the withdrawal from politics, the three Sicilian journeys, the reasoning behind the philosopher-king: strip the Seventh Letter out and every one of those becomes an inference.

The case for authenticity is circumstantial density. The letter knows Syracusan politics in detail, names people correctly, and reads like someone defending decisions rather than inventing them. The case against was put at length by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede in a seminar in Oxford in 2001, published in 2015 as The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter. Frede argued from the ordinary ancient practice of manufacturing letters by famous dead men; Burnyeat argued that the philosophical digression at 341b to 345c, on why the deepest things cannot be written, does not fit what the dialogues actually say about knowledge. Their conclusion was a forgery of the later second century BCE.

The reviews divided, and the field has not converged. Which leaves the standard biography of Plato resting on a hostile comedy, a compiler of the third century CE, a burnt scroll and a letter that may not be his.

The Academy

Around 387 he bought land in a grove sacred to the hero Academus, just outside the walls of Athens, and founded what is usually called the first university in the West. It ran, in some form, for three centuries, until Sulla destroyed the grounds in 86 BCE.

It was not a school of rhetoric. Mathematics was central - the tradition that let no one ignorant of geometry enter here was carved above the door is late and probably invented, but it is accurate about the curriculum. Research was done there on mathematics, astronomy and biology as well as on political theory; several cities asked Academy members to draft their constitutions.

The site was a public gymnasium about a mile northwest of the Dipylon Gate, planted with olives, already old when Plato bought the adjoining land. What he founded was not a chartered institution with a syllabus but an association that met on his property, and unlike the sophists he appears to have charged nothing, which is one of the reasons the sophists disliked him.

The mathematics was not decorative. Theaetetus, who has a dialogue named after him, worked on irrational magnitudes and on the five regular solids. Eudoxus of Cnidus, who brought his own students with him, produced the theory of proportion that survives as Book V of Euclid, the method of exhaustion that anticipates integration, and the first geometrical model of planetary motion. The claim that mathematics was the entrance requirement is unverifiable, but the claim that the Academy was where fourth-century Greek mathematics happened is not.

As for the inscription over the door, the earliest source for it is a commentator of late antiquity, roughly nine hundred years after the school opened, and no one nearer the event mentions it.

The succession went to Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, in 347, then to Xenocrates in 339, then Polemo, then Crates. Around 266 the school changed character entirely: under Arcesilaus, and later Carneades, the Academy became sceptical, teaching the suspension of judgement and arguing both sides of every question. For roughly two centuries the institution founded by the philosopher of the Forms was the headquarters of the view that nothing can be known. Philo of Larissa fled to Rome in 88 BCE as the Mithridatic war approached; Sulla ravaged the grove in 86; and the site was never rebuilt.

Platonism in Athens revived around 410 CE as a Neoplatonic school claiming the same descent, with Plutarch of Athens, then Syrianus, then Proclus, who ran it at its height, and finally Damascius. In 529 Justinian closed it. Several of its philosophers went east to the court of Khosrow I at Ctesiphon and, finding it not to their taste, came back.

Aristotle arrived at seventeen and stayed twenty years, until Plato’s death. The most consequential intellectual disagreement in Western history happened inside one institution, over two decades, between a teacher and a student who evidently respected each other and could not be reconciled.

The dialogues

Plato never speaks in his own voice. Every work is a conversation, usually with Socrates asking the questions, and Plato is never a character - he is mentioned three times in the whole corpus, once to note that he was absent from Socrates’ death because he was ill.

This is a deliberate form and it does specific work. A dialogue can hold a position without endorsing it. It can show a person being argued out of something and remaining unconvinced. It can end in aporia - deadlock - which many of the early dialogues do: the question of what courage is, or piety, or friendship, is examined for thirty pages and not answered.

The usual division is into three periods. The early dialogues are short, end in deadlock, and probably reflect the historical Socrates: a man who asks what a word means, demonstrates that his interlocutor cannot say, and disclaims any knowledge himself. The middle dialogues - Symposium, Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus - are where Socrates begins advancing positive doctrines, and those doctrines are Plato’s. The late dialogues are drier, more technical, and often self-critical.

The division is a reconstruction, and nothing in the corpus is dated. In 1867 Lewis Campbell took the Laws, which everyone agreed was written last, and grouped the other dialogues by how much vocabulary and idiom they shared with it. Wincenty Lutosławski gave the method a name in 1897, stylometry, and pushed it to five hundred stylistic markers across some fifty-eight thousand fragments. Leonard Brandwood’s survey of 1990 remains the standard account of what a century of this work produced.

What it produced is one solid result and a great deal of argument. The late group is secure: Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws hang together and come last. The boundary between early and middle is not secure at all, and the Timaeus has been pulled out of the late group and put back into it on philosophical grounds more than once. There is also a limit no amount of counting removes: stylometry dates the composition of the prose, not the arrival of the ideas, and a writer can hold a view for years before setting it down.

The dialogues are also dramatic fictions with dramatic dates, and Plato chose them carefully. The Republic is set in the Piraeus in a year when Athens was still winning. The Symposium is set at a victory party in 416, with Alcibiades on the point of the expedition that destroyed the city. The reader is meant to know what happens next.

How Plato’s text survived, and why he is cited by numbers like 514a

Nothing survives in Plato’s hand, or from within a century of it in any complete form. About ninety-five papyrus fragments are catalogued, the oldest four from the early third century BCE, which is close enough to his death to show that the text was being copied almost at once.

The arrangement of the corpus is a Roman inheritance. Thrasyllus, court astrologer to the emperor Tiberius, grouped the thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters into nine tetralogies, sets of four, and that order is still the one manuscripts follow. Several of the works in it are certainly not by Plato.

The oldest complete witness is a book that can be dated to the month. Bodleian MS E. D. Clarke 39, the Clarke Plato, was copied in Constantinople in November 895 by a scribe called John the Calligrapher for Arethas, later bishop of Caesarea, who annotated it himself. It carries the first six tetralogies. Edward Daniel Clarke bought it on Patmos in 1801 and brought it to Oxford. The rest of the corpus depends on Paris BnF gr. 1807, of about 900, and on the Venice Marcianus of about 950. The gap between the author and the oldest complete copy of his work is roughly twelve hundred and forty years.

Printing arrived in the reverse order to the languages. Marsilio Ficino’s complete Latin translation was printed in Florence in 1484; the Greek text waited for the Aldine press in Venice in 1513.

Then, in 1578, Henri Estienne, whose name latinises as Stephanus, published a three-volume Greek and Latin Plato in Geneva, with Jean de Serres’s translation on the facing side, and marked lettered divisions a to e down the margin of each page. Every subsequent edition reproduced the page numbers and the letters. That is what 514a is: page 514 of Estienne’s second volume, section a. It is why an English reader with Jowett, a German reader with Schleiermacher and a Greek reader with the Oxford Classical Text can be pointed at the same sentence, and it is the reason this article cites him that way and not by chapter.

What Socrates taught, and what Plato put in his mouth

Socrates wrote nothing. Everything known about him comes through four people, and each of them wants something.

Aristophanes put him in the Clouds in 423, hanging in a basket, running a school where students learn to argue the unjust case. Socrates was about forty-five, and the play is the earliest surviving portrait: a natural philosopher and a teacher of tricks. Xenophon, a soldier who knew him, wrote a Memorabilia, an Apology and a Symposium presenting a conventionally pious, useful, rather dull Socrates who gives sound advice on estate management. Plato wrote a man who ends conversations by proving that nobody present can say what they were talking about. Aristotle never met him, having been born fifteen years after the execution, and reports what the Academy believed.

Aristotle’s report is the single most important piece of external evidence, because it is the only one that discriminates. In the Metaphysics at 987b he says that Socrates busied himself with ethics and was the first to look for universal definitions, and at 1078b that Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions exist separately, and that the separating was done by others. If Aristotle is right, the Theory of Forms is not Socrates. It is Plato, and it is the exact point at which the two come apart.

That sentence is the foundation of the modern reconstruction. Gregory Vlastos, in Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991), built out from it a list of contrasts between the Socrates of the short early dialogues and the Socrates of the Republic and the Phaedo. The first has no metaphysics, no theory of knowledge, no interest in mathematics, no doctrine of an immortal soul carrying prenatal knowledge, and disclaims wisdom. The second has all of them, argues at length, and is not refuted by anyone. On the Vlastos reading, the historical man is roughly recoverable from about a dozen early works.

The strongest objection is Charles Kahn’s, in Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (1996). Kahn argued that the early dialogues are not snapshots of a stage in Plato’s development but literary compositions by an author who already held his mature views and was withholding them, leading the reader forward. If that is right, there is no early Plato to subtract from, the developmental story collapses, and the historical Socrates is out of reach for good.

The honest position is that no one knows. What can be said is narrower and still substantial: something happened in Athens in the second half of the fifth century involving a man who asked people to define what they claimed to know, and who was killed for it, and every account of him was written by someone with a case to make.

The argument

The Forms

The problem Plato is solving is genuine and is still with us. Knowledge, he assumes, must be of something stable, since nothing that refuses to hold still can be known at all. But everything we perceive is changing, decaying, and different from every angle. So either there is no knowledge, or there is something else to know.

His answer: for each kind of thing there is a Form - unchanging, non-physical, fully real - and the objects we encounter are imperfect participants in it. Beautiful things come and go; Beauty itself does not. Two apples become one when eaten; Two does not.

The Forms explain several things at once. Why we can call many different objects beautiful and mean something by it. Why mathematics is true regardless of what any physical object does. Why we recognise that no drawn circle is quite a circle - which implies we have some acquaintance with the real one. That last argument leads Plato to anamnesis: learning is recollection, the soul knew the Forms before birth, and teaching is the drawing-out of what is already there. In the Meno he has an untutored slave boy led through a geometrical proof by questions alone, to demonstrate it.

And above all the Forms is the Form of the Good - which Socrates in the Republic explicitly declines to define, offering instead an image: as the sun makes things visible and makes them grow, the Good makes things knowable and makes them be.

The cave

Republic Book VII, and the most famous image in philosophy.

Prisoners have been chained since childhood in a cave, facing a wall, unable to turn their heads. Behind them a fire burns, and between the fire and the prisoners is a walkway along which people carry objects, casting shadows on the wall. The prisoners have never seen anything else. They name the shadows, compete at predicting which will come next, and honour whoever is best at it.

One is freed and forced to turn around. The fire hurts his eyes and the objects seem less real than the shadows he knew. Dragged up the steep path into the sunlight, he is blinded, and can only look at reflections in water at first, then at things, then at the stars at night, and finally at the sun itself.

Then he goes back down. His eyes, accustomed to the light, cannot make out the shadows; he is worse at the shadow-game than the men who never left. They conclude that going up ruins the sight, and that anyone attempting to free them and lead them up should be killed.

Three claims sit inside it. Education is not the insertion of knowledge into an empty soul but the turning of the whole soul toward what is real: in Jowett’s words, the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being. The ascent is painful and unwelcome and no one undertakes it voluntarily. And the person who has made it is obliged to go back down, and will be resented for it.

The last sentence of the allegory is Socrates saying the prisoners would kill him. Plato is writing about his teacher, twenty-five years dead.

The city and the soul

The Republic asks whether it is better to be just or merely to seem just - Glaucon sharpens it with the ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible, and asks why anyone with that ring would stay honest.

Socrates answers by building a city, on the grounds that justice will be easier to see written large. The city has three classes: producers, auxiliaries and guardians. And the soul, he argues, has the same three parts: appetite, spirit and reason. Justice in both is each part doing its own work and not another’s.

The proposals that follow are the reason the Republic is still argued about. Rulers must be philosophers, or nothing changes. The guardian class holds no private property and no private family: children are raised communally and no one knows their own parents. Women are guardians on the same terms as men, trained alike and exercising alike - which in fourth-century Athens is startling enough that some readers have taken it as a joke and most now do not. Marriages are arranged by rigged lottery to breed the best stock. And the population is to be told a gennaion pseudos, a noble lie: that the gods mixed gold, silver and bronze into different people at birth.

Then the poets are expelled, on two grounds: they imitate appearances and are therefore three removes from reality, and they show heroes weeping and gods behaving badly, which trains the wrong part of the soul.

Karl Popper, writing in 1945 with the totalitarian states in view, called all this the first blueprint for a closed society. The charge is overstated as history and hard to dismiss as reading. What is certain is that Plato is not describing a democracy and does not want one: in Book VIII democracy is ranked second-worst, above only tyranny, and is said to produce tyranny by its own excess of freedom.

The self-criticism

The most remarkable thing Plato ever did was attack his own theory.

In the Parmenides, a young Socrates presents the Forms to the elderly Parmenides, who dismantles them. If particulars participate in a Form, do they get the whole Form or a part? Either answer fails. And if a large thing and Largeness itself resemble each other, does that not require a further Form to explain the resemblance - and another above that, without end? This is the Third Man Argument, and Aristotle later used it as his own objection.

Socrates cannot answer. Plato wrote both sides. He did not abandon the theory, but the later dialogues are noticeably more cautious about it, and what he thought he had solved is not clear.

And writing

At the end of the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the Egyptian god Theuth offering the invention of writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory. Thamus refuses the description: it will produce forgetfulness, because people will rely on external marks instead of their own recollection, and it will give students the appearance of wisdom without the reality.

this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. Phaedrus 275a, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Writing, Socrates says, is like painting: its figures seem alive, but ask them a question and they maintain a solemn silence. A written text cannot tell who should read it, cannot defend itself when attacked, and always needs its parent’s help.

writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. Phaedrus 275d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Plato wrote this down. It is the deepest joke in the corpus and possibly not a joke at all. The Seventh Letter says outright that there is no writing of his on the highest matters and never will be - and the dialogue form itself, which stages living conversation and refuses to state a doctrine directly, looks very much like an attempt to write in a way that does not commit the offence.

What Plato’s theory of Forms claims, and the arguments for it

The Greek words are eidos and idea, both of which ordinarily mean the look or shape of a thing. Plato’s usage is a technical extension of everyday speech, and both English renderings mislead. Form suggests a shape, which a Form does not have. Idea suggests something in a mind, which a Form emphatically is not: the whole point is that Beauty would be exactly what it is if no one had ever thought about it.

Four distinct arguments run through the dialogues, and they are usually collapsed into one.

One over many. Many separate things are called beautiful, and the word is not being used four hundred different ways. In the Republic at 596a the move is stated as a working rule: wherever a group of things share a name, a single Form is posited for the group.

The compresence of opposites. This is the strongest of them. The same finger is large beside one finger and small beside another. The same action, returning a borrowed weapon, is just and unjust depending on who is asking for it back. At Phaedo 74a-c and Republic 479a-b the conclusion is drawn: sensible things are both F and not-F, so whatever is F without qualification is not among them.

The imperfection argument. Phaedo 74d-75b. Two sticks are called equal, and we can see that they fall short of being exactly equal. To judge something deficient requires having the standard already, and the standard is not any of the sticks.

The argument from knowledge. Republic 476e-480a. Knowledge is of what is; ignorance of what is not; and opinion, which sits between them, has as its object the things that both are and are not. If knowledge of anything is possible, there are objects that simply are.

The Phaedo then gives the theory its causal job. At 100c-d Socrates offers what he calls a safe and simple answer, one he admits sounds naive: a beautiful thing is beautiful by the presence of Beauty. He keeps it because it does not fall over, and he distrusts the cleverer answers because they do.

The awkward question, which Plato asks himself, is how far down the Forms go. In the Parmenides at 130b-e the young Socrates is confident there are Forms of Likeness, One, Many, Justice, Beauty and Good; hesitant about Man, Fire and Water; and refuses outright to allow Forms of hair, mud and dirt, saying he is afraid of falling into a bottomless pit of nonsense. Parmenides tells him this is because he is young and still cares what people think, and that philosophy will take hold of him and he will not despise any of them. Plato wrote that reproach against his own position and never answered it.

Where Plato attacks his own theory: the Parmenides and the third man

The Parmenides stages a meeting that probably could not have happened: a Socrates of about twenty, an Eleatic Parmenides of about sixty-five, and Zeno between them. Plato needed the oldest authority in Greek philosophy to be the one who takes the theory apart, and arranged the dates to get him.

The demolition occupies 130a to 135c and comes in stages.

The extent of the Forms, 130b-e, described above: Socrates cannot say which things have them.

The participation dilemma, 131a-e. If a thing participates in a Form, does it get all of the Form or part of it? If all, then one Form is entirely present in many separate places at once. If part, then the Form is divisible, and a large thing is large by having a portion of Largeness that is smaller than Largeness itself. Parmenides walks him through the absurdity with equality and smallness as well.

The third man, 132a-b. This is the famous one.

Then another idea of greatness now comes into view over and above absolute greatness, and the individuals which partake of it; and then another, over and above all these, by virtue of which they will all be great, and so each idea instead of being one will be infinitely multiplied. Parmenides 132a-b, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Socrates tries two escapes and loses both. That the Forms might be thoughts only, refused at 132b-c, because a thought must be of something. That things might resemble Forms as copies resemble an original, refused at 132c-133a, because resemblance runs both ways and starts the regress again.

The greatest difficulty, 133b-134e, is worse than the regress and is much less quoted. If Forms are what they are in relation to one another, and things in this world are what they are in relation to one another, then the two orders do not touch. We cannot know the Forms. And a god who has perfect knowledge of the Forms has no knowledge of us.

Then Parmenides changes tack. At 135b-c he tells Socrates that anyone who refuses to admit Forms will destroy the possibility of saying anything at all, and that the real trouble is that he has tried to define things before being trained. The theory survives its own demolition because the alternative is silence.

Aristotle took the regress, named it, and used it against the Academy in the Metaphysics at 990b and 1039a. In 1954 Gregory Vlastos isolated what makes it work: the argument requires both that a Form is itself an instance of what it stands for, so Largeness is large, and that nothing is identical with the Form it participates in. Each premise is plausible on its own and together they generate the regress, and Plato never states them side by side. Vlastos read the Parmenides as a record of genuine perplexity rather than a puzzle whose answer was being kept back.

What Plato did afterwards is suggestive rather than conclusive. The late dialogues change the vocabulary. The Sophist at 251a-259d talks about kinds combining with one another instead of particulars imitating originals, and shows that Not-Being can be understood as difference. Whether that answers Parmenides or changes the subject is still argued.

The allegory of the cave, at Republic 514a to 520a

The cave is the third of three linked images, and almost every misreading comes from taking it on its own. Socrates builds it on two others in the preceding pages, and it is meant to complete them.

The sun, 506d-509c. Glaucon asks what the Good is, and Socrates refuses to say, offering instead its offspring. The sun is not sight and not the eye, but the thing that makes seeing possible and also makes what is seen grow. The Good is what makes objects knowable and also gives them their being. Then the sentence that later Platonism built a religion on: the Good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power, at 509b. Glaucon laughs at the extravagance and Socrates says he asked for it.

The divided line, 509d-511e. A line cut into two unequal parts, and each part cut again in the same ratio, giving four states of mind: eikasia, taking images and reflections for the things themselves; pistis, confidence about visible objects; dianoia, the reasoning of the mathematician, who argues rigorously but from hypotheses he does not examine and with diagrams he cannot do without; and noesis, understanding that works back up to a first principle that is not a hypothesis. The line’s real target is the third segment. Plato is saying that mathematics, the most exact thing anyone had, is still not the top.

The cave, 514a-517a, is the line turned into a picture, with an education and a politics added.

The setup: prisoners chained since childhood facing a wall, a fire behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners a low wall like the screen of a puppet theatre, over which people carry statues and figures of animals. Some of the carriers talk. The prisoners hear the echo and attribute it to the shadows.

At 516c-d Socrates adds the detail that makes the image about politics. In the cave there are honours and prizes for whoever is best at identifying the shadows and predicting which will come next. The prisoners are not stupid. They are experts, and their expertise is real within the only frame they have.

The release, 515c-516b, is physically unpleasant at every step: the neck hurts, the fire dazzles, the real objects look less convincing than the shadows, and the climb is steep. Outside he can manage shadows first, then reflections in water, then the objects, then the night sky, and only at the end the sun.

The return, 516e-517a, is the part Plato cares about. He goes back, cannot see in the dark, is worse at the shadow-game than men who never left, and is taken as proof that going up ruins the eyes. The last thing said about them is that if they could lay hands on anyone trying to release them and lead them up, they would kill him.

Socrates then interprets it himself at 517b, which is unusual for him: the prison is the visible world, the fire is the sun, the climb is the soul’s ascent to the intelligible. And at 518b-d he draws the conclusion about teaching, against professional educators who say they can put knowledge into a soul like sight into blind eyes:

the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good. Republic 518c, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Two things usually get lost. The first is that at 519d-520c the return is compulsory. The founders will oblige the philosophers to go back down and govern, on the grounds that the city was not built for the happiness of any one class, and that the best-governed state is the one whose rulers are most reluctant to rule. The second is that the cave is not a general metaphor for illusion or media or ideology. It is an argument that there is a kind of knowledge most people do not have, that acquiring it is painful and unpopular, and that those who have it should be in charge. Whether that follows is the whole quarrel of the next two thousand years.

Recollection, and the slave boy in Plato’s Meno

The Meno opens with a demand and gets nowhere for ten pages. Meno wants to know whether virtue can be taught; Socrates says he cannot answer that without knowing what virtue is; Meno produces definitions and each one collapses. By 79e-80b Meno complains that Socrates is like the flat torpedo fish, which numbs whatever touches it, and that he himself used to speak fluently about virtue and now cannot say a word.

Then he asks the question that made the dialogue famous.

And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? Meno 80d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Socrates restates it as a clean dilemma, which is how it is usually cited: a man cannot enquire into what he knows, since he has no need; nor into what he does not know, since he would not know what to look for.

His answer at 81a-d is not an argument but a report of what he has heard from priests, priestesses and inspired poets. The soul is immortal, has been born many times, and has seen everything there is. Nothing is therefore learned; it is recovered.

for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. Meno 81d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

The demonstration follows at 82b-85b. Socrates borrows one of Meno’s household slaves, establishes that the boy speaks Greek and has never been taught geometry, and draws a square two feet on a side, area four. How long is the side of a square with twice that area? The boy says four feet. Socrates draws it: sixteen, four times too big. The boy says three. Nine, still wrong. Now the boy is stuck, and Socrates stops to make the point that the whole passage exists for:

But do you suppose that he would ever have enquired into or learned what he fancied that he knew, though he was really ignorant of it, until he had fallen into perplexity under the idea that he did not know, and had desired to know? Meno 84c, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Then he draws the diagonal, and the boy sees that the square built on it has the right area.

What the demonstration establishes is contested, and Socrates himself is careful. At 86b he says he would not insist on the details of the story; what he will fight for is that believing enquiry to be possible makes people better and braver than believing it is not. The proof of recollection is not the point. The refusal of idleness is.

Two objections are permanent. Socrates does not simply ask; he draws, and the diagonal he draws is the answer. And a native capacity to reason is a much cheaper explanation than a prenatal soul that once inspected the Forms.

Both are fair, and neither disposes of the underlying question, which has outlived the metaphysics attached to it: how a mind gets to a truth nobody handed it. Augustine took it up as divine illumination, Leibniz as innate ideas, and Chomsky as an argument from the poverty of the stimulus. The Meno is where the question is first put.

One detail is rarely mentioned and should be. The boy is a slave, and the argument needs him to be one. He has to be unschooled for the demonstration to work, and the household of a wealthy Thessalian supplies an unschooled adult who can be summoned. Plato uses the institution in the course of proving that reason belongs to everyone, and appears not to notice.

The tripartite soul, and the chariot in Plato’s Phaedrus

The claim that a person can be genuinely divided against himself is so familiar now that it is hard to see it as a discovery. Plato argues for it, and the argument is in Republic 435c-441c.

It starts from a principle: the same thing cannot do or undergo opposites in the same respect at the same time. A thirsty man who refuses a drink is being pulled two ways at once, so something in him is not the appetite. That gives two parts, reason and appetite. A third is harder, and Socrates produces a story for it.

Leontius, son of Aglaion, walking up from the Piraeus, sees corpses at the execution ground. He wants to look and is disgusted with himself for wanting to. He struggles, covers his eyes, then gives in, runs up and shouts at his own eyes to take their fill of the fair sight. His anger is at his desire, which means it is not his desire, and it is not reason either, because reason does not shout. That is thymos, spirit: pride, indignation, shame, the sense of one’s own standing. In a well-raised person it takes reason’s side automatically, before reason has finished arguing.

So: logistikon, thymoeides, epithymetikon. Justice, at 441d-e, is each part doing its own work and not another’s, in the soul exactly as in the city.

The Phaedrus gives the same three parts as an image and a myth. At 246a the soul is a charioteer with a pair of winged horses; the gods have two good horses, everyone else has one noble and one not, and the driving gives a great deal of trouble. At 246d-248c the souls process to the rim of heaven to see what is outside it, the Forms; the bad horse pulls down, most souls get only glimpses, and the wing breaks and they fall into bodies, ranked by how much they managed to see. At 253d-254e the two horses are described in detail and the struggle happens at the sight of a beautiful person, with the good horse held by shame and the bad one bolting until the charioteer hauls it back with blood in its mouth.

The two accounts do not quite fit. The Republic’s parts are functions of a living soul; the Phaedrus’s are figures in a myth about what happened before birth. The Timaeus, at 69c-72d, adds anatomy: reason in the head, spirit in the chest above the diaphragm, appetite below it, with the liver given a role in receiving messages from reason that appetite would not otherwise hear.

What the argument bought is larger than the picture. Before Plato, being of two minds is described in Greek literature and never explained. After him it has a structure, and every later partition of the self, including the one built in Vienna, is working in the room he opened.

What platonic love means, against what Plato’s Symposium says

The Symposium is set at a drinking party in 416 BCE, the night after Agathon won first prize at the Lenaia with his first tragedy. It reaches the reader at several removes: Apollodorus is telling someone what Aristodemus told him, years later, about a night neither of them can fully vouch for.

The company agrees to make speeches in praise of Eros instead of drinking hard, since most of them are still ill from the night before. Six speeches follow, and they are not interchangeable. Phaedrus praises love as a spur to honour. Pausanias, at 180c-185c, divides Eros in two, the common and the heavenly, and constructs an elaborate defence of one particular Athenian arrangement between older men and youths. Eryximachus the doctor makes love a cosmic principle of balance. Aristophanes, at 189d-193d, tells the story everyone remembers: original human beings were round, with four arms and four legs and two faces, in three sexes; Zeus cut them in half for their insolence; and every person since has been looking for their other half. Agathon makes a display speech. Then Socrates.

Socrates says he will tell the truth instead, and reports what he was taught by Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea. Love is not a god and not beautiful, because one does not desire what one already has; love is a spirit between mortal and divine, the child of Resource and Poverty, and what it wants is to give birth in beauty, which is as close as mortals come to being permanent.

Then the ascent, at 210a-211c. It has rungs, and they are in order.

to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty Symposium 211c, trans. Benjamin Jowett

And what is at the top:

a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another Symposium 211a, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Nothing in that is a friendship. The first rung is the love of one beautiful body, and the energy that carries a person up the ladder is the same energy that started there. Diotima’s ascent is desire redirected, not desire renounced, and the reason for redirecting it is that a body decays and Beauty does not.

The dialogue then does something no summary survives. Alcibiades arrives drunk, garlanded, at 212c, insists on praising Socrates instead of love, compares him to one of those Silenus figurines sold in the shops that open to reveal gods inside, and describes at length how he arranged to be alone with Socrates, got him under a cloak, and was refused. The book that gave English its word for sexless love ends with a beautiful man complaining that the philosopher would not sleep with him.

The phrase is not Plato’s, and it is not Greek. Marsilio Ficino coined amor platonicus in the circle of Cosimo de’ Medici, in his commentary on the Symposium written in 1469 and in a letter of 1476, and he read Diotima’s final Beauty as God. It reached English in the 1630s, in a court fashion under Charles I and Henrietta Maria; the earliest recorded use in print is William Davenant’s comedy The Platonick Lovers, licensed in November 1635 and printed in 1636, which sends the fashion up and ends by returning its chaste lovers to ordinary appetite. By the eighteenth century the phrase had settled into its present meaning, which is Ficino’s ladder with the ladder taken away.

Whether Plato’s Republic is a blueprint for totalitarianism

Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies in New Zealand between 1938 and 1943 and called it his war work. The first volume is about Plato. It is the most influential attack on a philosopher written in the twentieth century, most classicists think it is wrong in detail, and none of them has made the discomfort go away.

The charge. Popper’s Plato is a reactionary of genius. He inherits from Heraclitus and from his own theory of Forms a picture of history as decay from an original perfection, and his politics is an attempt to stop the decay by stopping change itself. Against the open society, which Popper locates in democratic Athens and defines as one where inherited beliefs can be criticised, Plato proposes a return to the closed tribal society: fixed classes, no mobility, no criticism, and an elite that owns the truth. Justice in the Republic, Popper says in the chapter he titles Totalitarian Justice, is not a matter of how individuals are treated at all, but the maintenance of the class structure. Plato recognises only one standard, the interest of the state.

In spite of such arguments I believe that Plato’s political programme, far from being morally superior to totalitarianism, is fundamentally identical with it. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, chapter 6, p. 87 in the fifth edition of 1966

He also makes a positive argument that has outlasted the historical case. Plato asked who should rule, and the question is the trap, because it invites the answer “the best” and builds no defence against the answer being wrong. Popper replaces it: how can political institutions be arranged so that bad or incompetent rulers can be removed without violence and prevented from doing too much damage? Democracy is then not the rule of the wise but the only system that lets a people get rid of a government without killing anyone.

What the text gives him. Popper is not short of material, and this is the part that admirers of the Republic tend to hurry past.

The noble lie is in the book, at 414b-415d, and it is a state myth about hereditary metal in the blood, to be told first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, then to everyone:

Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron Republic 415a, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Censorship of stories, music and rhythm from the nursery upward runs from 376e to 403c. Marriages among the guardians are fixed by a lottery rigged so that the best breed most often and nobody discovers it, at 458c-461e, with defective infants disposed of at 460c. The family is abolished for the guardian class. And at 540e-541a, when Socrates is asked how the ideal city could actually be founded, the answer is not gradual:

They will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents Republic 540e-541a, trans. Benjamin Jowett

And the Laws, which is often produced as the mellow late work, contains this, which Popper quoted and which is not taken out of context:

no one of either sex should be without a commander; nor should the mind of any one be accustomed to do anything, either in jest or earnest, of his own motion, but in war and in peace he should look to and follow his leader, even in the least things being under his guidance Laws 942a-b, trans. Benjamin Jowett

The replies. There are four, and they are of unequal strength.

The category is anachronistic. Totalitarianism as a concept was assembled in the 1930s out of mass parties, mass literacy, secret police, radio and industrial bureaucracy. A fourth-century BCE city of a few thousand citizens could not have been totalitarian in that sense if Plato had wanted it, and describing him with the word imports machinery he never imagined. The counter to this is that Popper’s claim was about intention and structure, not capability.

The scholarship is tendentious. Ronald Levinson’s In Defense of Plato (Harvard, 1953) is six hundred and seventy-four pages of going through Popper’s citations one at a time, and it found translations bent toward the conclusion and quotations detached from their qualifications. The charge that classicists have repeated since is that Popper read the dialogues without their history and without their irony. Popper answered in later editions and conceded very little. Renford Bambrough’s collection Plato, Popper and Politics (1967) gathered the whole quarrel between covers.

The rulers are the ones who lose. This is the strongest textual reply. The guardians own nothing, have no families, live in barracks, and are compelled to govern against their inclination. At 519d-520c the founders explicitly override the philosophers’ preference for the contemplative life, and Socrates says that the best-governed city is the one whose rulers are most reluctant to rule. A tyranny in which the tyrants are the only people with no property and no private life is at least a peculiar tyranny.

It may not be a proposal. At 592b, when Glaucon says the city exists nowhere on earth, Socrates does not argue:

In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter Republic 592b, trans. Benjamin Jowett

On this reading, and Julia Annas presses it hard in her introduction of 1981, the city is a diagram of the soul, introduced at 368c-369a for exactly that purpose, and treating it as a manifesto is a category mistake. Leo Strauss went further in The City and Man (1964): the Republic shows what perfect justice would actually cost, in order that the reader should decide against it, which makes the book the first and greatest critique of political idealism rather than its charter.

The reply that changed the field is Gregory Vlastos’s, in “The Theory of Social Justice in the Polis in Plato’s Republic” (1977), and it goes at Popper’s strongest move. Popper reads the happiness of the whole city as the happiness of the state considered as something over and above the people in it, which is what makes the programme totalitarian rather than merely authoritarian. Vlastos argues that Plato means the happiness of all the citizens, distributed unequally because their natures differ, and that a doctrine about who flourishes how is not the same doctrine as one in which persons exist for the state. The argument has been widely accepted, and it is the reason the controversy went quiet rather than being won.

Why it does not settle. Because Socrates keeps saying the city could exist. At 473c-e, 499b-d and 540d-e he insists the thing is difficult but not impossible, and the ironic reading has to explain all three away. Because Popper’s history of ideas is largely rejected and his central worry is not. And because the plainest description of what is in the text remains true whatever Plato intended by it: unaccountable rule by a class certified as expert, a founding myth known to be false by the people telling it, censorship justified by the good of the censored, and the removal of children from their parents.

Readers who love the Republic have to hold that. Readers who use Popper to dismiss it should notice that Levinson, Bambrough, Annas and Strauss were not defending totalitarianism. They were saying that a book can contain a monstrous proposal and still be the most searching thing ever written about why a person should be just when nobody is watching.

Whether Plato was against democracy, and what Republic Book VIII says

He was, and he says so in a book that gives democracy its own chapter and a character sketch to match.

Books VIII and IX, 543a to 576b, describe a decline through five constitutions, each with a matching human type: aristocracy, then timocracy where honour replaces wisdom, then oligarchy where money does, then democracy, then tyranny. Each degenerates by exaggerating the thing that made it work.

Democracy is described at 555b-562a with something close to affection, which is what makes it damaging. It arrives when the poor win, kill or expel some of the rich, and distribute offices by lot. It is the most various of constitutions and, at 558c in Jowett’s rendering, a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. A man may do as he likes; nobody has to fight if there is a war or keep the peace if there is peace; sentenced men walk around as if nobody had noticed. The democratic man treats all his appetites as equal and calls that freedom.

Then the turn, at 562b-564a. The disease of oligarchy was wealth; the disease of democracy is the thing it is made of.

The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. Republic 564a, trans. Benjamin Jowett

A people trained to tolerate everything cannot tolerate authority, will not be governed at all, and hands itself to a protector who becomes a tyrant. Tyranny is not the opposite of democracy. It is its product.

The case against government by the many is put earlier, at 488a-489a, in the image of the ship. The shipowner is large and strong and slightly deaf; the sailors quarrel over the helm, none of them having learnt navigation and none believing it can be learnt; they drug the owner and take the ship. Anyone who says that steering requires attention to the seasons and the sky and the stars is called a stargazer and a good-for-nothing. Socrates does not bother to explain the figure.

Two things should be said against taking this as simple reaction. The first is what Athenian democracy was: direct rule by an assembly of any citizen who showed up, most offices filled by lot, juries of hundreds with no judge, and no professional civil service. Plato had watched it lose a twenty-seven-year war, condemn six generals in a single illegal collective vote after the battle of Arginusae in 406, and kill Socrates. The second is that democracy is ranked fourth of five, not fifth. He thought tyranny worse, and the Republic argues at length that the tyrant is the unhappiest man alive.

And in the Laws, thirty years later, he builds a constitution with elected magistrates, a council, an assembly and a scrutiny of officials, because by then he had stopped expecting the philosopher to arrive.

Why Plato expels the poets from the ideal city

He does it twice, for different reasons, and the two arguments are usually run together.

The first expulsion, Books II and III, 376e-403c, is about content and about children. Homer and Hesiod tell stories in which gods deceive, quarrel, change shape and take revenge, and in which heroes weep, fear death and are bribed. A child cannot tell allegory from report, and at 378d Socrates says that what is absorbed young becomes fixed. So the stories are edited. So are the musical modes, and the rhythms, on the grounds that they train the body and the temper before the mind can object. Guardians will be raised on tales in which the divine is good and does no harm.

The second expulsion, Book X, 595a-608b, is metaphysical and much stranger. There are three beds: the Form of bed, the carpenter’s bed, and the painter’s picture of the carpenter’s bed, made by copying one appearance from one angle. The painter need know nothing about carpentry. At 597e the conclusion is drawn: the imitator is third from the truth. And the poet does the same with courage, justice and everything else, producing convincing images of virtue without any knowledge of it, in front of audiences who cannot tell the difference.

Then at 605c-606d comes the argument that is actually persuasive, and it is psychological rather than metaphysical. In our own griefs we hold ourselves together. In the theatre we let go, because the sorrow belongs to someone else and there is no shame in it, and we praise the poet who makes us weep hardest. What is exercised gets stronger.

in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled Republic 606d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

The same holds, he says, for comedy: the joke a person would be ashamed to make is enjoyed in the theatre, and then made at home.

At 607a-b Socrates concedes what it costs him. He admits Homer is the greatest of poets and the first of the tragedians, that the eulogists who call him the educator of Hellas are excellent people, and that he himself is charmed. Only hymns to the gods and praises of good men are allowed to stay. And he names the quarrel he is continuing rather than starting: there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. At 607c-e the door is left ajar. If poetry, or anyone speaking for it, can give an argument for why it belongs in a well-run city, it may return.

Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963) explains why the stakes were so high. In a culture without cheap writing, the poems were the archive. Metre, formula, repetition and concrete imagery are memory technology, and the Homeric corpus stored the law, the genealogies, the seamanship and the morals of a whole people. Greek education, in practice, meant memorising Homer. Plato is not objecting to entertainment. He is trying to displace the incumbent medium of a civilisation with a new one, abstract prose, and the poets are not artists in his way but the holders of the archive he intends to replace.

The self-indictment is obvious and he never addresses it. Plato is the finest prose stylist in Greek. He argues by myth constantly, including in the same book, which ends with the vision of Er. And the biographical tradition says he wrote tragedies before he met Socrates. Book X is a man arguing against the thing he is best at.

What Plato says about women in Republic Book V

The proposal in Book V is more radical than anything else in surviving Greek literature, and the argument that gets there is built on a premise most modern readers find hard to hold in the same hand.

It arrives at 451c as the first of three waves of ridicule Socrates says he must swim through. The reasoning is by analogy with dogs: the females of the guard-dogs share the work, so the question is whether the difference between human males and females is relevant to guarding. Socrates argues it is not. Difference of nature matters only where it bears on the job, and bearing children no more disqualifies a woman from governing than baldness disqualifies a man from cobbling. So women guardians receive the same education, the same military training, the same gymnastic exercise, undressed, in the same palaestra, and hold the same offices. At 540c they may become philosopher-rulers.

At 452a-b Socrates anticipates the laughter, particularly at the sight of older women exercising, and answers that the only thing genuinely ridiculous is what is bad, and that the joke will stop when the practice is seen to work. That is a real argument and it is not a common one in the fourth century BCE.

Then the qualification, at 455d, which is quoted less often and cannot be detached:

the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man. Republic 455e, trans. Benjamin Jowett

So the argument is that women should do everything men do, and will do all of it slightly worse, and that this is a reason to sort by ability rather than by sex, since a gifted woman will outdo an ordinary man.

The rest of the corpus does not sustain even that. The Timaeus, at 42b-c and 90e-91a, has men who live badly reborn as women, as the first step of a descent that continues into animals. The Laws gives women common meals and military training but no political equality, and at 781a-b explains their supposed secretiveness by their weakness.

The scholarly argument about this is unusually clean. Julia Annas, in Plato’s Republic and Feminism (1976), argues that the proposals are not feminist at all: every reason offered is about the efficiency of the state, none is about fairness to women or about what women might want, and no interest whatever is shown in the women who are not guardians, who remain in the households of the producing class. Gregory Vlastos, in Was Plato a Feminist? (1989), argued the other way, that whatever the motive, the provisions for the guardian class amount to a demand for equal opportunity that nobody else in antiquity made.

Both are right about what they are describing, which is why the question keeps being asked.

Atlantis, invented in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias

Everything anyone has ever believed about Atlantis descends from about twenty-five pages written around 360 BCE, and from nothing else.

It appears in the Timaeus at 20d-26e and in the unfinished Critias at 108e-121c. The frame is a chain of hearsay designed to look impressive: Critias reports what his grandfather told him, who had it from Solon, who had it from priests at Sais in Egypt. The Egyptian priest opens with the line that gives the passage its authority:

O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Timaeus 22b, trans. Benjamin Jowett

The Greeks, he explains, keep losing their records to floods and fires, and so keep starting over; Egypt keeps hers. And among them is a war Athens fought nine thousand years before Solon, against a power that came out of the Atlantic: an island beyond the Pillars of Heracles larger than Libya and Asia together, ruling as far as Egypt on one side and Tyrrhenia on the other. An early Athens, alone after her allies fell away, defeated it. Then:

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. Timaeus 25c-d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

The Critias returns to fill it in and produces the details that later readers have combed for clues: concentric rings of land and water, the temple of Poseidon plated in silver and orichalcum, ten kings meeting every fifth and sixth year, the bull hunted with staves and nooses and sacrificed over an inscribed pillar. And a moral: the divine element in the Atlanteans was diluted by repeated mixture with mortal stock until human nature got the upper hand, and they became grasping. Zeus assembles the gods to decide what to do about it, begins to speak, and the dialogue stops in mid-sentence. It was never finished.

Its function in the text is not mysterious, and Plato states it. At Timaeus 19b-c Socrates says he has described the best city at rest and now wants to see it in motion, at war, doing something worthy of it. Atlantis is the enemy invented so the Republic’s city can be shown fighting, and the whole apparatus of Egyptian records exists to smuggle an ideal Athens into the deep past. Socrates himself, at 26e, remarks with satisfaction that the tale has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction, which is the joke being made out loud.

The evidence that it is invented is negative and total. Jowett put it plainly in his own introduction: there is no such legend in any writer before Plato, nothing in Homer, nothing in Hesiod or Pindar, nothing in Herodotus, and no later writer citing an earlier one for it. No Egyptian source has ever been found. Strabo, at 2.3.6 and 13.1.36, preserves a remark usually attributed to Aristotle, that the man who invented the island also sank it; no surviving text of Aristotle mentions Atlantis at all, and Thorwald Franke has argued the attribution comes from conflating two separate Strabo passages, so even the ancient scepticism is not securely sourced.

The modern industry begins with Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, which supplied almost everything now popularly believed. The most that can responsibly be said in the other direction is that a Greek writing in the fourth century BCE had heard of the Bronze Age eruption at Thera and the disappearance of Minoan sea power, and may have furnished his island from those memories. That is a claim about where Plato got his props. It is not a claim about Atlantis.

What Plato’s Laws proposes, and the city he designed second

The Laws is the longest thing he wrote, twelve books, unfinished when he died in 347, and by a distance the least read. Diogenes Laertius passes on a tradition that Philip of Opus transcribed it from the wax tablets it was left on.

Socrates is not in it. Three old men walk from Cnossos toward the cave of Zeus on a hot day, resting under cypresses: an unnamed Athenian who does the talking, Megillus of Sparta, and Cleinias of Crete, who has been appointed to help found a colony. By the end of the first day the conversation has become that colony’s constitution, and the city has a name, Magnesia.

The design is specific to the point of eccentricity. There are to be 5,040 households, a figure chosen because the number divides by every integer from one to twelve except eleven, which makes it convenient for taxation, military levies, voting districts and land division. Each household holds an inalienable allotment that can be neither sold nor subdivided. Wealth is capped at four times the value of the basic allotment, and anything above it is forfeit. Gold and silver are effectively banned; there is a token currency for internal use.

The constitution is mixed and looks far more like a real Greek city than anything in the Republic: elected magistrates, a council of three hundred and sixty drawn evenly from four property classes, an assembly, courts, and a scrutiny of officials at the end of their term. There is no philosopher-king. The magistrates are subordinate to the law, and the Athenian gives them a title to make the point, calling them the servants or ministers of the law and saying he does not mean it as a novelty:

For that state in which the law is subject and has no authority, I perceive to be on the highway to ruin; but I see that the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferiors of the law, has salvation, and every blessing which the Gods can confer. Laws 715d, trans. Benjamin Jowett

That is the earliest clear statement in Western literature of the idea that a government can be bound by its own rules.

The most original thing in it is a matter of drafting. At 722d-723b the Athenian argues that each law should carry a prelude, a passage of persuasion explaining the reasoning, because a free person should be convinced and not merely ordered. A law that only commands treats the citizen as a slave being given instructions by a doctor in a hurry. Nothing in ancient legislation resembles this.

And then Book X. The Athenian sets out to prove that the gods exist, that they care about human beings, and that they cannot be bribed, and having proved it to his own satisfaction he legislates. Unbelief is treated as a curable error where it comes with a decent character: five years minimum in a House of Reformation, no visitors except members of the Nocturnal Council, who come to argue with the prisoner about the health of his soul. If he is unconvinced at the end, death. Those who combine unbelief with the manufacture of private cults and the sale of charms get life in a prison in a desolate part of the country and are thrown out unburied. Private shrines are forbidden entirely; all worship goes through the public temples.

The regimentation passage at 942a-c, quoted above, sits in the section on military training and extends past it: standing, moving, washing, eating and getting up at night are all to be done under orders, and the soul is not to be habituated to acting alone. The Nocturnal Council itself, at 951d-969d, is a body of senior officials and selected young men meeting before dawn to guard the principles behind the laws, and the dialogue ends without saying what happens if it decides the laws are wrong.

So the Laws is two things at once, and readers who want it to be only one are disappointed. It is Plato’s concession that the philosopher-king is not coming and that a second-best city has to be run by written rules binding on everyone including the rulers. It is also the book in which he prescribes execution for worship at a private altar.

After

He died in 347 BCE, in his early eighties, and was buried at the Academy. Aristotle left Athens shortly after.

The succession did not go to Aristotle. It went to Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, and Aristotle went east to Assos, then to Lesbos, then to Macedon to teach a boy called Alexander, and did not come back to Athens for twelve years. The usual explanation combines the succession with the anti-Macedonian temper of the city, and both are probably true.

The influence is not really measurable. Neoplatonism carried him into late antiquity; Augustine converted with Platonism already in hand and built it into Christian theology; the Islamic philosophers al-Farabi and Avicenna worked from him; the Renaissance Florentine Academy, funded by Cosimo de’ Medici, had Ficino translate the whole corpus into Latin - which is how Leonardo’s Florence acquired him. Whitehead’s line, that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, is a slogan, and it is not very far wrong.

For most of the last two thousand years almost nobody read the books this article is about. Plotinus, in the third century, produced out of the Parmenides and the Timaeus a system of emanation from an ineffable One, and it was that system, not the dialogues, which the ancient world called Platonism. Proclus systematised it further in the fifth century.

In the Latin West, the position was worse than obscurity. Around 321 Calcidius translated the Timaeus into Latin as far as 53c and wrote a commentary on it, and for roughly eight hundred years that fragment was the only substantial Plato available in western Europe. A medieval scholar who knew Plato knew half of one cosmological dialogue. Everything else came at second hand, through Augustine, through Cicero, through Boethius, and through Aristotle’s reports of a man he disagreed with.

The Greek survived in Byzantium and came west with Byzantine scholars. Gemistos Plethon lectured on Plato in Florence during the church council of 1438 and 1439, and Ficino’s own account credits those lectures with putting the idea of a Platonic academy into Cosimo de’ Medici’s head. Ficino finished his Latin translation of the complete works around 1469 and it was printed in 1484, which is the moment the whole of Plato re-enters western European reading.

Then the reaction, which is also influence. Nietzsche made the invention of a truer world behind this one the founding error of the West and named Plato as its author. Popper made him the first enemy of the open society. Twentieth-century analytic philosophy took the Theaetetus and the Sophist seriously as logic and let the metaphysics alone. Whitehead’s remark about footnotes is usually quoted as praise and was meant more carefully than that: he was crediting not a system but a wealth of general ideas scattered through the writings, which is a compliment to the questions rather than to the answers.

Why he is at this table

Seat nine, in the right wing, between Buddha and Darwin. It is the most quietly hostile placement in the room.

His function is to insist that appearances are not the last word. When the table settles into describing what happens - and it does, because Machiavelli and Darwin are both very good at it - Plato is the one who asks what any of it is for, and whether the thing being described is the thing itself or its shadow on a wall.

He is the source of nearly every move the other seats make against him. Nietzsche’s whole project is an attack on the idea of a truer world behind this one, and he names Plato as the origin: Christianity is Platonism for the people. Darwin, immediately to his right, has quietly abolished the fixed kinds that the Forms require, and did it not by argument but by evidence. Diogenes, at the far end of the other wing, produced a plucked chicken. Leonardo, who could not stop looking at the actual world, would want to know what a Form has ever explained about how water moves.

And on his other side sits the seat with which he shares the most and agrees least. Buddha also holds that ordinary perception is deluded and that a hard discipline is required to see past it. But Buddha’s conclusion is that nothing has a fixed essence at all - that the search for a permanent self or a permanent form is the delusion, not the cure. Two men who agree that the cave is real, and disagree entirely about what is outside it.

The question put to him here is the one the Parmenides already put and he never answered: whether the perfect world he pointed at was ever there, or whether he built it because his teacher had been killed by this one.