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Plato

Plato

c. 428 BCE–c. 348 BCE · Athens

Plato (c. 428–348/347 BCE) was born into an aristocratic Athenian family; his mother Perictione traced descent from Solon, and his stepfather Pyrilampes had served Pericles. He received the education typical of elite Athenian youth and would have entered political life had he not encountered Socrates. The execution of Socrates in 399 BCE on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth marked Plato decisively: it convinced him that no existing political order was just, and that political philosophy must be grounded in philosophical inquiry into the soul, the good, and what truly is.

Around 387 BCE, after travels to Megara, southern Italy (where he met the Pythagoreans, especially Archytas of Tarentum), and reportedly Cyrene and Egypt, Plato founded the Academy in a grove northwest of Athens. It was the first sustained institution of higher learning in the Greek world and would operate for almost nine centuries. He made three voyages to Syracuse, twice attempting to tutor the tyrant Dionysius II in the philosopher-king ideal; both ventures failed politically but are reflected in the Seventh Letter and in the Republic and Laws. He died in Athens around 348/347 BCE and was succeeded as head of the Academy by his nephew Speusippus.

His thought is preserved in roughly two dozen authentic dialogues, almost always featuring Socrates as the principal speaker. At its heart is the Theory of Forms: the claim that intelligible, eternal, unchanging entities — Justice itself, Beauty itself, the Good — are more truly real than the sensible particulars that participate in them, and that knowledge proper is knowledge of these Forms. His tripartite soul (reason, spirit, appetite) parallels the three classes of his ideal city, and the Form of the Good is the ultimate source of being and intelligibility. Late dialogues (Sophist, Timaeus, Laws) refine and self-criticize this metaphysics.

Few philosophers have so durably shaped what came after. Aristotle was his pupil. Plotinus and Neoplatonism reread him as the philosopher of a mystical ascent that would shape Augustine and the Christian Platonic tradition. Islamic philosophers (al-Farabi, Avicenna) adapted his political philosophy to monotheism. Marsilio Ficino's Florentine translations made him central to the Renaissance. Alfred North Whitehead's remark that the European philosophical tradition consists of "a series of footnotes to Plato" is hyperbole, but barely.

See Plato’s journey on the map →
“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy... cities will never have rest from their evils.”
Plato, Republic 473c-d

Did you know?

  • An Egyptian priest told the Greeks they were “always children”

    In Plato's Timaeus, an Egyptian priest at Saïs tells the Athenian lawgiver Solon that Egypt's temple records reach back thousands of years, then declares: “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children; there is no such thing as an old Greek.” The people we call the ancient Greeks felt young beside a civilization they saw as vastly older than themselves.

    How we know

    Plato, Timaeus 22b (c. 360 BCE), Bury/Loeb translation.

  • The great interpreter of Plato lived closer to the fall of Rome than to Plato

    Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE) built his entire philosophy on Plato, founding what later became known as Neoplatonism — yet he lived so late that his death fell only about 200 years before the conventional fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, but more than 600 years after Plato died (c. 348 BCE). The devoted successor stood far nearer to Rome's collapse than to the master he spent his life expounding.

    How we know

    Plotinus c. 204–270 CE; Plato d. c. 348 BCE; fall of the Western Roman Empire conventionally 476 CE. Death→Plato ≈ 617 yrs; death→476 CE = 206 yrs. 206 < 617.

    Meet Plotinus →

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→

Stop 1 of 10428 BCEBorn

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Born into an aristocratic Athenian family (his mother Perictione descended from Solon). Studied under Cratylus the Heraclitean and Hermogenes the Parmenidean before falling in with Socrates around age 20.

About Athens

The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.

In Athens at the same time

Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon

See other sages who lived in Athens→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Plato’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Plato’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(31)

Influenced bySocratesPlatoShapedXenocrates of ChalcedonAristotleSpeusippus