Plato burned his poems after meeting Socrates and never spoke in his own voice
A young Athenian aristocrat who wrote tragedies gave them up for philosophy once he met Socrates. In the dialogues that followed, Plato never speaks as himself. Yet his complete works have survived 2,400 years, a rare fate, and one philosopher called the whole European tradition a series of footnotes to him.
Sometime between 428 and 423 BC, Plato was born to a powerful Athenian family, descended through his mother from the lawgiver Solon. The story that Plato was a nickname for his broad build, replacing a birth name Aristocles, is widely doubted. His brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus fought at Megara in 409 BC and later appear in the Republic. He grew up during the war with Sparta and wrote dithyrambs and tragedies until Socrates drew him into philosophy.
Athens' defeat in 404 BC brought the Thirty Tyrants, including his relatives Critias and Charmides. Plato was invited to join them, refused, and was repelled when they tried to entangle Socrates in an illegal arrest. The trial and death of Socrates in 399 BC ended his political ambitions. He studied the ideas of Heraclitus, who saw everything in flux, and of Parmenides, who thought change an illusion, spent time at Megara, and learned mathematics with thinkers such as Archytas and Theaetetus. A scroll from Herculaneum deciphered in 2024 suggests he was once sold into slavery on Aegina.
Around 383 BC he founded the Academy in the grove of Hecademus outside Athens, at first just a house and garden. Comic playwrights mocked its students, one fragment showing two of them arguing over how to classify a pumpkin. Aristotle arrived in 367 BC. Pythagorean influence shows in his trust in mathematics as a foundation for thought and in the Theory of Forms, his answer to the problem of universals.
Politics kept pulling him back. He made three trips to Syracuse, hoping on the second to turn the young tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher king, and on the third was held against his will until Archytas intervened. His Socrates, often ironic, differs from the Socrates of Xenophon and Aristophanes, and scholars still debate where teacher ends and pupil begins. Plato died around 347 BC.
Source: Plato
