Plato was born, the son of Ariston and Perictione, in about 428 BC, the year after the death of the great statesman Pericles. 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. 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. Plato himself 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.
In about 387 Plato founded the Academy as an institute for the systematic pursuit of philosophical and scientific teaching and research. 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. The Academy was not the only such "school" in Athens--there are traces of tension between the Academy and the rival school of Isocrates.
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 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. 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.
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.
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 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. 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.
Dialogues
The canon and text of Plato was apparently fixed at about the turn of the Christian Era. By reckoning the Letters as one item, the list contained 36 works, arranged in nine tetralogies. None of Plato's works has been lost, and there is a general agreement among modern scholars that a number of small items--Alcibiades I, Alcibiades II, Theages, Erastae, Clitopho, Hipparchus, and Minos--are spurious. The Hippias Major and the Menexenus are regarded as doubtful by some, though Aristotle seems to have regarded them as Platonic. Plato's literary career extended over the greater part of a long life. The Laws, on the other hand, was the work of an old man, and the state of its text bears out the tradition that Plato never lived to give it its final revision. Only through it can the development of Plato's thought be adequately charted. Unfortunately, Plato himself has given few clues to the order: he linked the Sophist and the Statesman with the Theaetetus externally as continuations of the conversation reported in that dialogue. Modern scholars, by the use of stylistic criteria, have argued that the Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus (with its fragmentary sequel Critias), and Laws form a distinct linguistic group, belonging to the later years of Plato's life. Since the Theaetetus commemorates the death of the eminent mathematician after whom it is named, it may be ascribed to c. 368, the eve of Plato's departure for Syracuse.
The earlier group of dialogues is generally believed to have ended with the Theaetetus and the closely related Parmenides. Apart from this, perhaps all that can be said with certainty is that the great dialogues, Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic (and perhaps also Protagoras), in which Plato's dramatic power was at its highest, mark the culmination of this first period of literary activity. The later dialogues are often thought to lack the dramatic and literary merits of the earlier but to compensate for this by an increased subtlety and maturity of judgment.
In the Republic, the greatest of all the dialogues that precede the Theaetetus, there are three main strands of argument deftly combined into an artistic whole--the ethical and political, the aesthetic and mystical, and the metaphysical. Other major dialogues belonging to this period give special prominence to one of these three lines of thought: the Phaedo to the metaphysical theme; the Protagoras and the Gorgias to the ethical and political; the Symposium and the Phaedrus to the aesthetic. But it should be noted that Plato's dialogues are not philosophical essays, let alone philosophical treatises, and they do not restrict themselves to a single topic or subject.
The reader learns the meaning of Socrates' ruling principle that the supreme business of life is to "tend" the soul and his conviction that "goodness of soul" means knowledge of good and evil. The three dialogues directly concerned with the trial of Socrates have a further purpose. The Apology, or Defense, purports to give Socrates' speeches at his trial for impiety. In the Crito Socrates, in the condemned cell, explains why he will not try to escape paying the death penalty; the dialogue is a consideration of the source and nature of political obligation. The Euthyphro is represented as taking place just before Socrates' trial. Its subject is the virtue of "piety," or the proper attitude for men to take toward the gods. The Hippias Major propounds the question "What is the 'fine'?" The Hippias Minor deals with the paradox that "wrongdoing is involuntary." The Ion discredits the poets, who create not "by science" but by a nonrational inspiration. The Menexenus, which professes to repeat a funeral oration learned from Aspasia, Pericles' mistress, is apparently meant as a satire on the patriotic distortion of history. The Charmides, Laches, and Lysis are typical dialogues of search. The question of the Charmides is what is meant by sophrosune, or "temperance," the virtue that is shown in self-command, in dutiful behaviour to parents and superiors, in balance, and in self-possession amid the turns of fortune. It seems that this virtue can be identified with the self-knowledge that Socrates had valued so highly. The Laches is concerned with courage, the soldier's virtue; and the Lysis examines in the same tentative way friendship, the relation in which self-forgetting devotion most conspicuously displays itself.
Plato argues that, since language is an instrument of thought, the test of its rightness is not mere social usage but its genuine capacity to express thought accurately.
The Gorgias, the Protagoras, and the Meno, like several of the lesser dialogues, give prominence to ethical and political themes. The Gorgias begins ostensibly as an inquiry into the nature and worth of rhetoric, the art of advocacy professed by Gorgias, and develops into a plea of sustained eloquence and logical power for morality--as against expediency--as the sovereign rule of life, both private and public. It ends with an imaginative picture of the eternal destinies of the righteous and of the unrighteous soul.
Gorgias holds that rhetoric is the queen of all "arts." If the statesman skilled in rhetoric is clever enough, he can, though a layman, carry the day even against the specialist. Socrates, on the other hand, declares that rhetoric is not an art but a mere "knack" of humouring the prejudices of an audience. There are two arts conducive to health of soul, those of the legislator and of the judge. The orator is thus not the wise physician of the body politic but its toady. This severe judgment is disputed by Polus, an ardent admirer of Gorgias, on the ground that the successful orator is virtually the autocrat of the community, and to be such is the summit of human happiness because he can do whatever he likes.
Socrates rejects this view. It may be a convention of the herd that unscrupulous aggression is discreditable and wrong, but "nature's convention" is that the strong are justified in using their strength as they please, while the weak "go to the wall." To Socrates, however, the creators of the imperialistic Athenian democracy were no true statesmen; they were the domestic servants of the democracy for whose tastes they catered; they were not its physicians. A happy life consists not in the constant gratification of boundless desires but rather in the measured satisfaction of wants that are tempered by justice and sophrosune.
The Meno is nominally concerned with the question of what virtue is and whether it can be taught. But it is further interesting for two reasons: it states clearly the doctrine that knowledge is "recollection"; and it introduces as a character the democratic politician Anytus, the main author of the prosecution of Socrates.
Whether virtue can be taught depends on what virtue is. But the inquiry into virtue is difficult--indeed, the very possibility of inquiry is threatened by Meno's paradox concerning the quest for knowledge. If a person is ignorant about the subject of his inquiry, he could not recognize the unknown, even if he found it. To advance this argument, Socrates shows that a slave boy who has never studied geometry can be brought to recognize mathematical truths. He produces the right answer "out of himself." In general, knowledge is "recollection." Socrates next produces the hypothesis that virtue is knowledge and infers that it is teachable. But if virtue is knowledge, there must be professional teachers of it.
The Protagoras gives the most complete presentation of the main principles of Socratic morality. In this dialogue Socrates meets the eminent Sophist Protagoras, who explains that his profession is the "teaching of goodness"--i.e., the art of making a success of one's life and of one's city. Socrates urges, however, that both common opinion and the failure of eminent men to teach "goodness" to their sons suggest that the conduct of life is not teachable. Protagoras is ultimately ready to identify all of the virtues except courage with wisdom or sound judgment. Socrates then attempts to show that, even in the case of courage, goodness consists in the fact that, by facing pain and danger, one escapes worse pain or danger.
