PLATO

In 399 B.C.E., five years after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.), Socrates (469–399) was charged with impiety, tried by the Athenian court, and executed. To this day scholars debate the character and significance of this event. What were the real issues that led to Socrates’ trial and execution? What was Athens like in 399, and why were the majority of dicasts (jurors) convinced of Socrates’ guilt? Indeed, of what was Socrates really guilty? What kind of life did he live? How did he defend himself? Does the event teach us anything in general about the role of philosophy in society and the relation between philosophy and morality or philosophy and politics?

By the time this trial took place, Socrates was an old man of seventy. He had been born in Athens and left it only two, perhaps three times, for military service. We know very little of his life. He was a citizen of modest means, who had a deep commitment to Athens, who was married with young children at the time of the trial, and who had been associated, in the popular mind, with the Sophists, those itinerant educators of fifth century Greece, teachers of language, rhetoric, oratory, argument, and political skills. There is reason to think that early in his life, when Athens flourished under Pericles and was the hub of Greek intellectual activity, Socrates had been interested in the investigations of nature of people like Democritus and Anaxagoras. At some point, however, probably prior to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431, he turned to other matters, to the examination of beliefs about ethical notions. He came to hold the primacy of the soul and its well-being and became committed to seeking knowledge of the good and the truth about the best human life. His fellow Athenians found him difficult, annoying, an enigma, and perhaps even a threat. Many of his associates and students, e.g., Alcibiades and Critias, were pro-Spartan, aristocratic, and antidemocratic, and it is possible that his characteristic conduct, the elenchos or critical interrogation, led many to think that he too opposed the democracy. At the very least, some took him to be a threat to Athenian values or disdainful of them. If Plato’s Apology is an accurate portrayal of his defense, he was not able—or perhaps did not even try—to persuade them otherwise.

Modern students of Greek philosophy and culture have found Socrates to be a richly rewarding subject. He wrote nothing, but many of Plato’s dialogues are taken to reflect with some fidelity his method of philosophical interrogation, his moral and religious views, and his political thought. But the picture we get from Plato, especially when it is supplemented from other ancient sources, e.g., Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Aristotle, is unclear and hard to fill in consistently. Socrates was committed to the primacy of soul or character in living the best human life. Knowledge was central to that commitment, and hence philosophy, as the quest for moral knowledge, was also fundamental. Moreover, Socrates was convinced that the best character and knowledge were closely tied to right conduct, and that harmful or unjust action was self-destructive. But the intricacies of these and other of his views are complex and have led to much debate, as has the nature of Socrates’ political thought and his primary political allegiance. One wonders how perspicuous was the average Athenian’s understanding of this man.

While many Athenians may have been satisfied, if not pleased, with the verdict against Socrates and his execution, some clearly were not. Among this group of Socrates’ friends, associates, and disciples was a young Athenian aristocrat who labored for a lifetime under the shadow of these events. Later in life he reports the disturbing effects that these events had on him and his thinking:

But this young aristocrat realized he was wrong when this government acted corruptly, on one occasion commanding “Socrates, an older friend of mine whom I should not hesitate to call the wisest and justest man of that time,” to participate in the assassination of Leon of Salamis, “planning thereby to make Socrates willy-nilly a party to their actions.” He refused, to his credit, but later, after the democracy had been reinstated in 403,

Here Plato (427–347), in his famous Seventh Letter, reflects on the pivotal role that Socrates’ trial had had on his life and on his thinking about justice, human nature, and the state.

Plato was born in 427, probably in Athens. Both his father Ariston and his mother Perictione were of distinguished lineage; indeed, Perictione traced her descent from the great lawgiver Solon. Critias, Perictione’s cousin, was one of the most violent and most hated of the Thirty Tyrants of 404, the oligarchic government which Sparta enforced at the conclusion of the war, while Charmides, her brother, was also a member of the Thirty and one of the overseers of the Piraeus, the Athenian port. Plato had two brothers, Glaucon and Adiemantus, who appear as major players in the Republic, and one sister, Potone, whose son Speusippus was appointed head of the Academy (see below) upon Plato’s death.

We know nothing in detail of Plato’s youth. Doubtless he would have had the normal Athenian education in culture and gymnastics that he describes in the Republic. Clearly he developed a high degree of literary skill and studied the various subjects taught by the Sophists and natural investigators. He became acquainted with Socrates no later than when he was twenty and, given his status, certainly had military service, probably in the cavalry.

After Socrates’ death, Plato and some other disciples left Athens to join Euclides, a close associate of Socrates, in Megara, where he remained until 395 or so, when he would have been called to serve in the Corinthian War. During the next several years, we may surmise, Plato wrote many of the early, short dialogues in which Socrates is the chief character and which aim to clarify and portray the Socratic life. These dialogues include the Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Ion, Hippias Major, and Hippias Minor.

When he was forty, in 387, Plato made the first of three visits to Italy and Sicily. Later sources claim that his trip was motivated by his desire to meet the Pythagorean philosophers and religious thinkers there, especially the important mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum, who became a lifelong friend and may have influenced Plato’s belief in the immortality of the soul and the importance of mathematics to philosophy. While in Sicily, moreover, Plato met Dion, then twenty, the brother-in-law of the powerful tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus I. With Dion Plato developed a close, indeed intimate relationship. Dion was a brilliant and receptive student who quickly became Plato’s disciple and a convinced Socratic, committed to the life of virtue and goodness and opposed to the hedonistic, luxurious style of Italian and Sicilian life.

Once back in Athens, in 387, Plato purchased some buildings and a grove of trees nearly a mile outside the walls of Athens. There he founded a society or religious fellowship (thiasos), on the model of an Orphic-Pythagorean religious association, which he called the Academy, after the hero Hecademus, to whom the spot was sacred. Until his death he was its director, organizing and coordinating its activities, from meals held according to fairly strict rules, to lectures, discussions, guided research, and visits by foreign scholars. Among the many subjects studied and examined in the Academy, philosophical inquiry, mathematics, and moral-political thought were probably preeminent. During the 380s, moreover, Plato wrote further dialogues, but these dialogues develop his own thinking, on Socratic foundations, on matters such as moral character, virtue (arete), inquiry, knowledge, metaphysics, and more. These writings include the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno, followed by the middle dialogues, in which his own thinking emerges in full form, the Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, and Cratylus. In these dialogues, he first displays his famous theory of Forms or Ideas, develops his understanding of philosophical inquiry, its stages and ultimate goal, sketches an account of philosophical education and moral development, identifies various capacities and states of the soul in an increasingly subtle psychology, and works out the features of his moral view and its political implications.

In 368 Dionysus I of Syracuse died and was replaced immediately by his inexperienced and insecure son Dionysus II. To Dion, who was dazzled by the possibilities of Plato’s moral and political thinking and all too unrealistic in his expectations, the situation seemed propitious. He persuaded the young ruler to invite Plato to Syracuse, and he himself wrote to Plato suggesting that the young Dionysus might be an ideal subject for Plato’s proposals about philosophy and political rule as expressed in the Republic. Whatever Plato’s hopes or misgivings, he accepted the invitation but, upon arriving in Syracuse, found a situation of jealousy, conflict, and intrigue. Eventually, Dion was expelled from Sicily, and, when war broke out with Carthage, Plato was sent home. By 365 Dion had joined Plato in Athens, where for four years Plato directed research, taught, and wrote, all the while keeping abreast of affairs in Sicily. By this time too Plato’s disenchantment with politics had grown deeper; it was directed not only at Dionysus and Sicily but also at Athens and the city’s misguided efforts to regain her power, her empire, and her prestige.

By 362 a new invitation had arrived from Dionysus II, who showed signs of the commitment to philosophy that Plato had long sought. Full of doubts, Plato once again sailed to Sicily, and once again his plans came to naught. The young Dionysus refused Plato’s directions for philosophical education, began to sell off Dion’s property while he was still a virtual exile, and in the end held Plato under house arrest. Only the intervention of Plato’s old friend Archytas enabled him to escape and return to Athens.

Amid all this turmoil, Plato had begun a serious deepening of his own thinking about knowledge, inquiry, reality, politics, morality, and law. He wrote or at least began an extraordinarily rich set of dialogues, the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Politicus, and Sophist. In the remaining thirteen years of his life, he completed these works, began several new ones, and continued to direct the affairs of the Academy. He died in 347, leaving unfinished his last great work, the Laws. In it Plato’s sense of political realism emerges in full force. He attempts to set out in detail the structure, goals, and character of a polis that is both ideal and realistic, a polis in which expert rulers play their roles alongside an elaborate legal order that coordinates philosophy, political life, religion, and ethics.

Since the 360s Plato had appreciated the demands on the worldly career of philosophy; already in the Republic he had tried to reconcile the philosopher’s religious goals, his aspiration to transcendence, with his political responsibilities and the complex psychology of the embodied soul. By the time he begins the Laws, Plato is fully aware of the limitations on human hopes and possibilities. The prominence of law and all its accoutrements in his last work expresses that awareness and all that comes with it, the sober recognition that human life is a fragile but difficult blending of this world and beyond and that any genuine understanding of philosophy and the moral-political life must appreciate that blending to the fullest.

Recommended Readings

Allen, R. E. Socrates and Legal Obligation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.

Annas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Brickhouse, Tom, and Nicholas Smith. Socrates on Trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Cross, R. C., and A. D. Woozley. Plato’s Republic: A Philosophical Commentary. London: Macmillan, 1964.

Dover, K. J. Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1974.

Gulley, Norman. The Philosophy of Socrates. London: Macmillan, 1968.

Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy. Vols. III–IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 1975, 1978.

Irwin, T. H. Classical Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Irwin, T. H. Plato’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Irwin, T. H. Plato’s Moral Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Kraut, Richard (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kraut, Richard. Socrates and the State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Morgan, Michael L. Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth Century Athens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Murphy, N. R. The Interpretation of Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951.

Okin, Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Price, Anthony W. Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Reeve, C.D.C. Philosopher-Kings. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Reeve, C.D.C. Socrates in the Apology. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.

Santas, Gerismos. Socrates. London: Routledge, 1979.

Vlastos, Gregory (ed.). The Philosophy of Socrates. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.

Vlastos, Gregory (ed.). Plato. Vol. II. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970.

Vlastos, Gregory. Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca: Cornell, 1991.

White, N. P. A Companion to Plato’s Republic. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979.

Woozley, A. D. Law and Obedience: The Arguments of Plato’s Crito. London: Duckworth, 1970.