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Plato and His Contemporaries

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Plato and His Contemporaries V Plato and his Contemporaries 1. PLATO’S LIFE As a young man I went through the same experience as many others; I thought that, the very moment I became my own master, I should devote myself to public affairs. And by the hazard of politics a chance of this offered itself to me… thirty rulers were set up with supreme powers. Some of these happened to be relatives and friends of mine, and they at once called me to join in this as my proper work… I paid great attention to what they should do. but I saw that in a little time their behavior had made the former constitution seem a golden age by comparison. For among other crimes, there was their treatment of Socrates… When I saw all this and much else like it, I was indignant and withdrew myself from contact with the evils of that time… I considered these events and the kind of men that were engaged in politics, and the existing laws and customs, and the more I considered and the older I grew, the more difficult did it seem to me to conduct the affairs of the state properly. For it was not possible to effect anything without the aid of friends and associates. And it was not easy to discover such men, even when they existed… The laws and customs, also, went on deteriorating to an extraordinary degree. I did not cease to investigate all possible means of improving these points, and indeed, of reforming the whole constitution, while as far as action went I went on awaiting a favorable opportunity. But in the end I came to the conclusion that all the cities of the present age are badly governed… Plato’s Seventh Letter 324b-326a Plato was born, either in Athens or on the island of Aegina off the Attic coast, in 424/3 BCE.1 Pericles had died the year before in the plague, and Socrates was already forty-two years old. His parents, Ariston and Perictione, were distinctly upper-class. He was the youngest, with two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus 1So Debra Nails (2002), who provides the most sophisticated reconstruction of Plato’s life to date, and is to be consulted by anyone interested in the details of Plato’s biography. The date given by Appollodorus is 427. Some Ancient sources say 429. Our chief source for Plato’s life is his Seventh Letter, which is generally assumed to be authentic, but was written by someone near Plato not long after his death if not, and so bears some weight even in that case. We also have some information from later biographers, the best of whom is Diogenes Laertius. They all view Plato, like Pythagoras, as a divinity, and report more in the way of miracles than facts, but Diogenes at least names his sources, and so provides facts vouched for by near contemporaries of Plato himself. For an intelligent and thorough account of problems and sources, see Guthrie’s History IV (1975). For an attractive account of Plato’s life, both thorough and well written, see Field (1930). I.V. Plato and his Contemporaries 2 (who play a role in his Republic), and a sister, Potone, who was the mother of Speusippus, his successor in the Academy. Critias and Charmides, both members of the Thirty in the short-lived oligarchy of 404, were cousin and brother of Plato’s mother. While Plato was still a child his father died, and his mother remarried to her uncle,2 Pyrilampes, a man of political prominence who served as ambassador to Persia and other Asian powers. Pyrilampes’s son, Antiphon, figures in Plato’s Parmenides. Pyrilampes died by 413, and Adeimantus, at 19 years, became his mother’s guardian. The rich and noble families that at first accepted Periclean democracy had gradually been driven into opposition by the unending financial burdens of the war. While Plato was coming to manhood, many near him became determined opponents of the democratic constitution, but he remained somewhat in favor of it, following, it appears, his parents’ lead. He refused to participate in the violent actions of many of his older relatives, and approved of the renewed democracy and its moderation toward its erstwhile opponents, despite its uncharacteristically harsh treatment of his friend and teacher, Socrates. He believed, perhaps, that democracy is the best form of government if one had to endure corruption and incompetence, since it best guards the citizens against the injustice of their fellow citizens in power. Boyhood education in Greece emphasized physical training, a necessity if the boys were to serve well as soldiers. Moreover, athletic contests played an important diplomatic role—there would be a truce during important games, if any wars were on, allowing for negotiation, and games and festivals were established to memorialize, and help maintain, a new alliance. Plato took an interest in wrestling, and as a boy he represented Athens at the Isthmian games at Corinth. He may have been called ‘Plato’, ‘The Broad’, because of his broad shoulders, having been named ‘Aristocles’ by his parents. The arts also formed an important part of an upper-class education. It was a pastime in noble families to recite poetry at dinner parties, and anyone of even moderate culture could turn out passable verse. Plato displayed poetic gifts quite early, and intended a career as a dramatist before Socrates converted him to philosophy. With his education completed he would have served in the cavalry in the last five years of the Peloponnesian War, and probably saw action. It is notable and odd that Plato never married. The tradition is that he was homosexual, and had endured the loss of someone he profoundly loved in his youth, but that would not have ruled out marriage, which was generally regarded as a duty to one’s family. Plato almost certainly heard Socrates before twenty years of age. In 396, several years after Socrates’s 2Such marriages within the family were useful to preserve family estates intact. I.V. Plato and his Contemporaries 3 execution, the young man, now 28, cautiously withdrew to the nearby city of Megara, where he stayed with a fellow philosopher, Euclides. We don’t know how long he was there, but at the latest he would have been summoned home in 395 to serve in the Corinthian War. Possibly Plato wrote the Socratic dialogues at Megara, and it seems reasonable to assume they reflected his own views at the time as well as Socrates’s. After this he may, according to later sources, have visited the mathematician Theodorus in Cyrene, a Greek trading city in Egypt, and perhaps the Socratic Aristippus, living in the same city. He then, about 385, traveled to Syracuse and Sicily, where he saw the Pythagorean Philolaus, and Archytas. It was probably in Sicily that he learned mathematics and Pythagoreanism, and left some of his Socratic views behind. In particular, Plato developed his own views on matters of psychology, views less optimistic than Socrates’s about the possibility of bringing people to wisdom through rational discussion. After a series of preparatory dialogues, the Meno, Protagoras, Gorgias, Lysis and Republic I, in which he explored and criticized Socrates’s philosophy, Plato announced his new views in Republic II–X. He states there that only a few people can learn about the good through dialectic, and this only after long training, much of which is not intellectual training at all. He became convinced that there were multitudes of desires for different things, as opposed to a single desire for the good, many of them irrational inasmuch as they had no root in any belief about the good. He rejected, then, the Socratic view that people are always motivated by a rational desire for the good, following reason as well as they could in pursuit of a life of maximal pleasure, and he also rejected Socrates’s psychological egoism, for he thought one who loves the good rationally will seek the good wherever it is found, even when it is the good of others. Disillusioned by his political experience, he came to think that the personalities of most were distorted by habitual attention to non-rational desires, until many no longer took any interest in rational desires at all.3 The dramatic settings of Plato’s dialogues in the days of the Democracy and Socrates often draws attention to the precarious political situation in Athens. The Symposium is set just months before the incident of the mutilation of the Herms, which led to the political downfall of Alcibiades, Phaedrus, and other chief figures in the dialogue. The Laches, in an arch discussion of Nicias’s confession that divination is a form of wisdom, foreshadows the general’s disastrous delay in removing from Sicily in response to an eclipse of the Moon, a delay that doomed the Athenian army to destruction. Those who enlist Socrates in the discussion in the Republic would soon be executed by the Thirty, and old Cephalus’s profitable armament factory would be confiscated 3See Penner (1992). I.V. Plato and his Contemporaries 4 by their oligarchy. The freedom and rich life under the democracy is balanced by the instability and foolishness of the citizens, easily swayed by demagoguery and rhetoric. The natural and logical result is that Plato shows far less commitment to preserving others’ intellectual autonomy than Socrates. Socrates trusted people to work things out for themselves once they began to examine their own views, and thought it a bad idea to announce and argue for his own views, since that would tend to make people stop investigating the truth.
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