Plato: student of Socrates
Find out how one student turned his teacher's last days into questions that people are still asking thousands of years later.
Plato was born in Athens to an aristocratic family, around 428 or 427 BCE. He had been heading for a career in politics and poetry, but he reportedly burned his early poems and gave it all up after meeting Socrates as a young adult.
Socrates was a classical Greek philosopher from Athens who would sit in the marketplace of ancient Athens on busy mornings and stop strangers to ask them questions like What is courage? What is justice? What does it really mean to be good?
Socrates never wrote a single book about his ideas, so instead almost everything we know about him comes from other people. The most famous of them is Plato, who made Socrates the main character of nearly all his writings. It is almost impossible to introduce you to Plato without speaking about Socrates!
So what happened to Socrates? In 399 BCE, when he was 70 years old, he was put on trial for not honouring the city's gods and for corrupting the young people of Athens, and a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death by drinking hemlock. Plato was deeply affected and left Athens to travel for a while before coming home to teach and write.
After Socrates' death, around 387 BCE, Plato started a school in a wooded area near Athens, called the Academy. It wasn't a university like the ones we know today, but it's often called the first school for higher learning in the Western world. One of its students was another famous philosopher, a young man named Aristotle who learned from Plato and grew up to tutor Alexander the Great.
Plato's work was special because he would write dialogues, which are conversations that read a bit like plays, and Socrates is the main speaker is all of them except one. The traditional collection put together in the 1st century has 36 dialogues, although only 26 or 27 of them are generally accepted to be written by Plato with the others thought to be fakes by other writers.
So where should a new reader begin? Philosophers suggest starting with Socrates himself, in three dialogues that follow his final days. In the Apology, Socrates defends himself at his trial (don't worry, 'apology' here means a defence, not saying sorry!) and tells the jury that questioning yourself and others each day is the greatest good, and that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Next comes the Crito, set in the prison, where a close friend named Crito turns up early with a plan to help Socrates escape, but Socrates refuses and decides he mustn't go against the laws of Athens.
The trilogy ends with the Phaedo, a retelling of Socrates' last day by his follower Phaedo, in which his friends are grieving but Socrates stays calm and even cheerful. They talk about a huge question, whether our soul lives on after we die, and one of Socrates' arguments is about perfect ideas like equality and justice: we recognise them even though we've never seen a perfect one, and he takes that as a clue that our souls knew them before we were born.
That brings us to Plato's biggest idea, the Theory of the Forms. He explained it with a famous story in his dialogue the Republic called 'The Allegory of the Cave'. It was about people chained in a cave who can't even turn their heads, with a fire burning behind them and puppeteers holding up objects that cast shadows on the wall, so the prisoners think the shadows are the whole world! If one were to be set free and turn around, they would see the real objects and realise their mistake. The story is about learning to understand the Forms with our minds, not just our eyes.
He believed that perfect ideas of things (which he calls Forms) like Justice and Beauty are real, and that every physical object or concept of anything in our world is just an imperfect copy or shadow of a pure Form. For example, a physical tree out in the park is just something temporary that is similar to the eternal Form of 'treeness'.
You can think about Forms like a template. Imagine a baker making gingerbread people. Every single cookie comes out a little different; maybe one has a broken arm, one is burnt, or the decoration on one isn't the same as the others. Despite this, you still know what they are meant to be because they were all made with the the same cookie cutter. Plato believed that all things in our world are like the baked gingerbread cookies, slightly flawed and changing. The Form is the invisible, unchanging cookie cutter behind them all.
Forms are not just physical, they include things like maths, colours, or wisdom. At the very top sits the Form of the Good, which Plato compares to the sun because it lights up all the other Forms, making them understandable and true.
According to Plato, in the dialogue Meno, he says that the human soul existed in the same place as all the Forms before birth, so when you learn something it is not that you are discovering something new but rather that you are remembering the perfection that your soul has already seen.
In Plato's early writings, Socrates ask questions and admits he knows nothing, but as Plato continues to write his dialogues, the character of Socrates suddenly starts to confidently explain the Forms, the Allegory of the Cave, and the nature of the soul. Many historians think that this shift means that Plato was using his old teacher as a dramatic character to give more authority to his own, newer, philosophical ideas. Socrates never wrote anything down, so we will never know his actual thoughts on the Theory of Forms.
Historians still argue today about how closely Plato's descriptions of Socrates actually match the real man, and trying to separate the man from the character created by his followers is called the "Socratic Problem."
Plato's dialogues don't hand you the answer to his questions, because he seems more interested in getting you to think for yourself than telling you what to think. The best way to meet Plato is to let yourself be challenged, and you might even want to recruit an adult or a friend and read a dialogue together. Before you know it, you'll be exploring all sorts of big questions, just as Plato would have wanted!
Think About It
Here are some questions that Plato asked through his dialogues:
Can you learn to be good? In the Meno, Meno opens the dialogue by asking Socrates whether being good is "acquired by teaching or by practice", or whether it comes in some other way, such as by nature. Do you think kindness is something we're born with, something we're taught, or something we get better at with practice?
What is courage? In the Laches, Socrates asks Laches to tell him, if he can, what courage is. Can you think of a time someone showed courage? What did all the courageous moments you thought of have in common?
Is something right because someone says so, or does someone say so because it's right? In the Euthyphro, Socrates ask whether the gods love pious acts (meaning acts that show someone's faith to the gods) because they are pious, or whether those acts are pious because the gods love them. Think about a rule at home or school: is it a good rule because a grown up made it, or did the grown-up make the rule because it's good?
Until next time,
λεῖος πλόος!
Written by Eleanor-Scarlett Russell
Education and Programs Officer
Hellenic Museum
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