Plato
of Athens
c. 428 BC — 348 BCHistorical Archive · Portrait Study
Plato
Athens, c. 428 BC · Athens, 348 BC
The aristocrat who watched Athens kill the best man he knew, and asked what a city would have to be so that it never happened again.
Born into one of the old families, he followed Socrates for a decade and was twenty-eight when the restored democracy executed him. He gave up politics, travelled to Italy and Sicily, and in 387 BC began teaching in the grove of Academus; Aristotle came at seventeen and stayed twenty years. He went to Syracuse twice to make a philosopher of a tyrant and failed both times. He wrote no treatise, only conversations, and in nearly all of them he wears the mask of a man who wrote nothing.
His ideal city abolishes the family, censors Homer and tells its citizens a noble lie. He will defend some of it.