Aristotle

Plato his life and thought
Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica

Plato was born, the son of Ariston and Perictione, in Athens, or perhaps in Aegina, in about 428 BC, the year after the death of the great statesman Pericles. His family, on both sides, was among the most distinguished in Athens. Ariston is said to have claimed descent from the god Poseidon through Codrus, the last king of Athens; on the mother's side, the family was related to the early Greek lawmaker Solon. Nothing is known about Plato's father's death. It is assumed that he died when Plato was a boy. Perictione apparently married as her second husband her uncle Pyrilampes, a prominent supporter of Pericles; and Plato was probably brought up chiefly in his house. Critias and Charmides, leaders among the extremists of the oligarchic terror of 404, were, respectively, cousin and brother of Perictione; both were friends of Socrates, and through them Plato must have known the philosopher from boyhood.
His own early ambitions--like those of most young men of his class--were probably political. A conservative faction urged him to enter public life under its auspices, but he wisely held back. He was soon repelled by its members' violent acts. After the fall of the oligarchy, he hoped for better things from the restored democracy. Eventually, however, he became convinced that there was no place for a man of conscience in Athenian politics. In 399 BC the democracy condemned Socrates to death, and Plato and other Socratic men took temporary refuge at Megara with Eucleides, founder of the Megarian school of philosophy. The next few years are said to have been spent in extensive travels in Greece, in Egypt, and in Italy. Plato himself (if the Seventh Letter is his; see below General features of the dialogues) states that he visited Italy and Sicily at the age of 40 and was disgusted by the gross sensuality of life there but found a kindred spirit in Dion, brother-in-law of Dionysius I, the ruler of Syracuse.

The Academy and Sicily:
In about 387 Plato founded the Academy as an institute for the systematic pursuit of philosophical and scientific teaching and research. He presided over it for the rest of his life. The Academy's interests were not limited to philosophy in a narrow sense but also extended to the sciences: there is evidence that Plato encouraged research in such diverse disciplines as mathematics and rhetoric. He himself lectured (on at least one occasion he gave a celebrated public lecture "On the Good"), and he set problems for his pupils to solve. The Academy was not the only such "school" in Athens--there are traces of tension between the Academy and the rival school of Isocrates. (see also Index: science, history of)
The one outstanding event in Plato's later life was his intervention in Syracusan politics. On the death of Dionysius I in 367, Dion conceived the idea of bringing Plato to Syracuse as tutor to his brother-in-law's successor, Dionysius II, whose education had been neglected. Plato was not optimistic about the results; but because both Dion and Archytas of Tarentum, a philosopher-statesman, thought the prospect promising, he felt bound to risk the adventure. The plan was to train Dionysius II in science and philosophy and so to fit him for the position of a constitutional king who might hold Carthaginian encroachment on Sicily at bay. The scheme was crushed by Dionysius' natural jealousy of the stronger Dion, whom he drove into virtual banishment. Plato later paid a second and longer visit to Syracuse in 361-360, still in the hope of effecting an accommodation; but he failed, not without some personal danger. Dion then captured Syracuse by a coup de main in 357, but he was murdered in 354. Plato himself died in 348/347.

Of Plato's character and personality little is known, and little can be inferred from his writings. But it is worth recording that Aristotle, his most able pupil, described Plato as a man "whom it is blasphemy in the base even to praise," meaning that Plato was so noble a character that bad men should not even speak about him.

To his readers through the ages Plato has been important primarily as one of the greatest of philosophical writers; but to himself the foundation and organization of the Academy must have appeared to be his chief work. The Seventh Letter contrasts the impact of written works with that of the contact of living minds as a vehicle of philosophy, and it passes a comparatively unfavourable verdict on written works. Plato puts a similar verdict into the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedrus. He perhaps intended his dialogues in the main to interest an educated outside world in the more serious and arduous labours of his school.

All of the most important mathematical work of the 4th century was done by friends or pupils of Plato. The first students of conic sections, and possibly Theaetetus, the creator of solid geometry, were members of the Academy. Eudoxus of Cnidus--author of the doctrine of proportion expounded in Euclid's Elements, inventor of the method of finding the areas and volumes of curvilinear figures by exhaustion, and propounder of the astronomical scheme of concentric spheres adopted and altered by Aristotle--removed his school from Cyzicus to Athens for the purpose of cooperating with Plato; and during one of Plato's absences he seems to have acted as the head of the Academy. Archytas, the inventor of mechanical science, was a friend and correspondent of Plato.

Nor were other sciences neglected. Speusippus, Plato's nephew and successor, was a voluminous writer on natural history; and Aristotle's biological works have been shown to belong largely to the early period in his career immediately after Plato's death. The comic poets found matter for mirth in the attention of the school to botanical classification. The Academy was particularly active in jurisprudence and practical legislation. As Plutarch testifies,

Plato sent Aristonymus to the Arcadians, Phormion to Elis, Menedemus to Pyrrha. Eudoxus and Aristotle wrote laws for Cnidus and Stagirus. Alexander asked Xenocrates for advice about kingship; the man who was sent to Alexander by the Asiatic Greeks and did most to incite him to his war on the barbarians was Delios of Ephesus, an associate of Plato.

The Academy survived Plato's death. Though its interest in science waned and its philosophical orientation changed, it remained for two and a half centuries a focus of intellectual life. Its creation as a permanent society for the prosecution of both humane and exact sciences has been regarded--with pardonable exaggeration--as the first establishment of a university.

Formative influences:
The most important formative influence to which the young Plato was exposed was Socrates. It does not appear, however, that Plato belonged as a "disciple" to the circle of Socrates' intimates. The Seventh Letter speaks of Socrates not as a "master" but as an older "friend," for whose character Plato had a profound respect; and he has recorded his own absence (through indisposition) from the death scene of the Phaedo. It may well be that his own vocation to philosophy dawned on him only afterward, as he reflected on the treatment of Socrates by the democratic leaders. Plato owed to Socrates his commitment to philosophy, his rational method, and his concern for ethical questions. Among other philosophical influences the most significant were those of Heracleitus and his followers, who disparaged the phenomenal world as an arena of constant change and flux, and of the Pythagoreans, with whose metaphysical and mystical notions Plato had great sympathy.
Plato had family connections with Pyrilampes, a Periclean politician, and with Critias, who became one of the most unscrupulous of the Thirty Tyrants who briefly ruled Athens after the collapse of the democracy.

Plato's early experiences covered the disastrous years of the Deceleian War, the shattering of the Athenian empire, and the fierce civil strife of oligarchs and democrats in the year of anarchy, 404-403. He was too young to have known anything by experience of the imperial democracy of Pericles and Cleon or of the tide of the Sophistic movement. It is certainly not from memory that he depicted Protagoras, the earliest avowed professional Sophist, or Alcibiades, a brilliant but unreliable Athenian politician and military commander. No doubt these early experiences helped to form the political views that were later expounded in the dialogues.