ABSTRACT
PLATO, son of Ariston and Perictione, was born in the month Thargelion (May–June) of the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad by the reckoning of the scholars of Alexandria, 428–7 B.c. of our own era, and died at the age of eighty or eightyone in 01. 108.1 (348–7 B.c.). These dates rest apparently on the authority of the great Alexandrian chronologist Eratosthenes and may be accepted as certain. Plato's birth thus falls in the fourth year of the Archidamian war, in the year following the death of Pericles, and his death only ten years before the battle of Chaeronea, which finally secured to Philip of Macedon the hegemony of the Hellenic world. His family was, on both sides, one of the most distinguished in the Athens of the Periclean age. On the father's side the pedigree was traditionally believed to go back to the old kings of Athens, and through them to the god Posidon. On the mother's side the descent is equally illustrious and more historically certain, and is incidentally recorded for us by Plato himself in the Timaeus. Perictione was sister of Charmides and cousin of Critias, both prominent figures in the brief “oligarchic” anarchy which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian war (404–3 B.c.). The grandfather of this Critias, Plato's maternal great-grandfather, was another Critias, introduced in the Timaeus, whose own great-grandfather Dropides was a “friend and kinsman” of Solon, the great Attic legislator. The father of this Dropides, also called Dropides, the first member of the house who figures in authentic history, was the archon of the year 644 B.c. Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had at least three other children. These were two older sons, Adimantus and Glaucon, who appear as young men in Plato's Republic, and a daughter Potone. Ariston appears to have died in Plato's childhood; his widow then married her uncle Pyrilampes, whom we know from the allusions of the comic poets to have been a personal intimate of Pericles as well as a prominent supporter of his policy. Pyrilampes was already by a former marriage the father of the handsome Demus, the great “beauty” of the time of the Archidamian war; by Perictione he had a younger son Antiphon who appears in Plato's Parmenides, where we learn that he had given up philosophy for horses. 1
