ABSTRACT
Plato (about 428-347 bc), bachelor, aristocrat and sometime cavalry officer, belonged in his youth to the circle of Socrates, a group of young Athenian men who admired and loved the philosopher (in spite of his snub nose and bulging eyes) and learnt from him how philosophy was to be done. The most traumatic event in Plato’s life, which occurred when he was 31, was the execution of Socrates, who was required to drink hemlock after his condemnation by the Athenian court on charges of ‘irreligion’ and of corrupting the minds of young men. Other significant events in Plato’s life were his founding of the ‘Academy’, the first university (attended by, among others, Aristotle), and his three visits to Syracuse in Sicily. In his most famous work, the Republic, Plato argues that the ideal state can only come into being when the philosopher becomes king – or, presumably, when the king becomes a philosopher. The visits to Syracuse appear to have been an (unsuccessful) attempt to put theory into practice, to persuade the military dictator of Syracuse to govern his state according to the principles set out in the Republic. (A couple of millennia later, as we shall see, after Heidegger’s resignation from his post as an important Nazi official, a friend remarked ruefully: ‘Back from Syracuse?’)
Plato wrote some two dozen compositions known as ‘dialogues’ on account of their conversational form. In almost all of them, the main character is ‘Socrates’. Though modelled on the real person, it seems to be the case that, as Plato became older, ‘Socrates’ became ever-increasingly his own literary construction; a mouthpiece through which he expressed his own ideas rather than reporting those of the hero of his youth.
