Plato
（
Πλάτων). The greatest of the Athenian philosophers. He
was born May 26 (the seventh of Thargelion), B.C. 428, probably at Athens, though some say at
Aegina (
Diog. Laert. iii. 2, 6). He was of an aristocratic family,
his father Aristo claiming descent from Codrus, the last of the Athenian kings, and his mother
Perictioné being of the family of Sohn. His name was originally Aristocles, after
his grandfather, but he was subsequently called
Πλάτων, in
consequence of his fluency of speech, or, as others say, because of his broad (
πλατύς) forehead or his broad shoulders (
Diog.
Laert. iii. 4). The traditions that have come down regarding his birth and
career are largely mythical, and are given by Diogenes Laertius. One story makes him the son
of Apollo, and another tells how bees settled on his lips when a child, thus foreshadowing his
honeyed eloquence (
Div. i. 36, 78). Plutarch relates that he was humpbacked, but this,
perhaps, was not a natural defect; it may have first appeared late in life as a result of his
severe studies (
De Audiend. Poët. 26, 53). Other ancient writers, on
the contrary, speak in high terms of his manly and noble mien. The only authentic bust that we
have of him is at present in the gallery at Florence. It was discovered near Athens in the
fifteenth century, and purchased by Lorenzo de' Medici. In this bust the forehead of the
philosopher is remarkably large. Plato first learned grammar, that is, reading and writing,
from Dionysius. In gymnastics, Ariston was his teacher; and he excelled so much in these
physical exercises that he entered, as is said, a public contest at the Isthmian and Pythian
Games (
Diog. Laert. iii. 4). He studied painting and music under the
tuition of Draco, a scholar of Damon , and Metellus of Agrigentum; but his favourite
employment in his youthful years was poetry. The lively fancy and powerful style which his
philosophical writings so amply display must naturally have impelled him, at an early period
of life, to make some attempts at versification, which were assuredly not without influence on
the beautiful form of his later works. After he had enjoyed the instruction of the most
eminent teachers of poetry in all its forms, he proceeded himself to make an attempt in heroic
verse; but when he compared his production with the masterpieces of Homer, he consigned it to
the flames. He next tried lyric poetry, but with no better success; and finally turned his
attention to dramatic composition. He elaborated four pieces, or a tetralogy, consisting of
three separate tragedies and one satyric drama; but an accident induced him to quit this
career, for which he was not probably fitted. A short time before the festival of Dionysus,
when his pieces were to be brought upon the stage, he happened to hear Socrates conversing,
and was so captivated by the charms of his manners as from that moment to abandon poetry, and
apply himself earnestly to the study of philosophy. But, though Plato abandoned his poetic
attempts, he still attended to the reading of the poets, particularly Homer, Aristophanes, and
Sophron, as his favourite occupation; and he appears to have derived from them, in part, the
dramatic arrangement of his dialogues. He had already heard the instructions of Cratylus, a
disciple of the school of Heraclitus (Aristot.
Metaphys. i. 6), and was now
twenty years of age when he became acquainted with Socrates. He continued a professed disciple
of that philosopher for the space of eight years, until the death of the latter. During all
this period Socrates regarded him as one of his most faithful pupils, and Plato always
cherished a deep affection and esteem for his master, so that when the latter was brought to
trial he undertook to plead his cause; but the partiality and violence of the judges would not
permit him to proceed. After the condemnation he presented his master with money sufficient to
redeem his life, which, however, Socrates refused to accept. During his imprisonment Plato
attended him, and was present at a conversation which he held with his
friends concerning the immortality of the soul, the substance of which he afterwards committed
to writing in the dialogue entitled
Phaedo, not, however, without interweaving
his own opinions and language. Upon the death of his master he withdrew, with several other
friends of Socrates, to Megara, where they were hospitably entertained by Euclid, and remained
till the
émeute at Athens subsided. Brücker thinks
that Plato received instruction in dialectics from Euclid. Cicero relates that the Megarean
philosopher drew many of his opinions from Plato (
Academ. Quaest. 4,
42).
Desirous of making himself master of all the wisdom and learning which the age could
furnish, Plato, after this, travelled into every country which was so far enlightened as to
promise him any recompense for his labour. He first visited that part of Magna Graecia where a
celebrated school of philosophy had been established by Pythagoras. It is commonly believed
that Plato formally became a scholar of the Pythagoreans, and many persons are expressly named
as his teachers in the doctrines of that sect of philosophy. But this multitude of teachers is
of itself sufficient to excite suspicion; and, besides, Plato must then have been at least
thirty years old, and was undoubtedly acquainted with the Pythagorean system long before his
Italian voyage. How long Plato remained in Italy cannot be determined, since all the accounts
relative to this point are deficient. But so much is certain, that he did not leave this
country before he had gained the entire friendship of the principal Pythagoreans, of which
they subsequently gave most unequivocal proofs. From Italy Plato went to Cyrené,
the celebrated Greek colony in Africa. It is not certain whether he visited Sicily in passing.
According to Apuleius, the object of his journey was to learn mathematics of Theodorus. This
mathematician, whose fame perhaps surpassed his knowledge, had given instruction to the youth
of Athens in this branch of science; and Plato, in all probability, merely wished now to
complete his knowledge on this subject. From Cyrené he proceeded to Egypt, and, in
order to travel with more safety upon his journey to the last-named country, he assumed the
character of a merchant, and, as a seller of oil, passed through the kingdom of Artaxerxes
Mnemon. Wherever he came, he obtained information from the Egyptian priests concerning their
astronomical observations and calculations. It has been asserted that it was in Egypt that
Plato acquired his opinions concerning the origin of the world, and learned the doctrines of
transmigration and the immortality of the soul; but it is more than probable that he learned
the latter doctrine from Socrates, and the former from the school of Pythagoras. It is not
likely that Plato, in the habit of a merchant, could have obtained access to the sacred
mysteries of Egypt; for, in the case of Pythagoras, the Egyptian priests were so unwilling to
communicate their secrets to strangers that even a royal mandate was scarcely sufficient in a
single instance to gain this permission. Little regard is therefore due to the opinions of
those who assert that Plato derived his system of philosophy from the Egyptians (Iamblich.
Myst. Aeg. i. 2, p. 3). That Plato's stay in Egypt extended to a period of
thirteen years, as some maintain, or even three years, as others state, is highly incredible;
especially as there is no trace in his works of Egyptian research, and all that he tells
us of Egypt indicates at most a very scanty acquaintance with the subject.
After leaving Egypt, he went to Sicily in order to see the volcano of Aetna, and visited
Syracuse at the time when Dionysius the Elder was reigning. At the court of Dionysius Plato
became acquainted with Dio , the brother-in-law of the tyrant, and Dio endeavoured to produce
an influence upon the mind of Dionysius by the conversation of Plato. But the
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Plato. (Bust at Florence.)
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attempt failed, and had nearly cost the philosopher his life. Dionysius was highly
incensed at the result of an argument in which he was worsted by Plato, who took occasion also
to advance in the course of it some unpalatable truths; and in the first heat of his passion
he would have punished the hardihood of the philosopher with death, had not Dio and
Aristomenes together restrained him from it. They conceived, therefore, that Plato could no
longer stay at Syracuse without hazard, and accordingly secured passage for him in a ship
which was about to carry home Polis, a Lacedaemonian ambassador, or, according to
Olympiodorus, a merchant of Aegina. Dionysius heard of it, and bribed Polis to sell him as a
slave. He was accordingly sold by the treacherous Polis on the island of Aegina, which was
then involved in war with Athens. According to some writers he was sold by the Aeginetans. A
certain Anniceris, from Cyrené, ransomed him for twenty or thirty minae. Plato's
friends and scholars (according to some, Dio alone) collected this sum in order to indemnify
Anniceris, who, however, was so noble-minded that with the money he purchased a garden in the
Academé, and presented it to the philosopher. When Plato had completed his travels,
and had reached the end of his various dangers and calamities, he returned to Athens, and
began publicly to teach philosophy in the Academy. He had inherited here a garden, which was
purchased for five hundred drachmae. This garden remained the property of the philosophic
school that he had founded. His memory was honoured by the Athenians and by foreigners with
monuments and statues. Diogenes states that Plato taught philosophy first in the Academy, and
also in a garden at Colonus. His Academy soon became celebrated, and was numerously attended
by high-born and noble young men; for he had already, by means of his travels, and probably by
some publications, acquired a distinguished name. Among these disciples, from whom he exacted
no fee, were his nephew Speusippus, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, Aristotle, Heraclides of Pontus,
Hestiaeus of Perinthus, and Philippus the Opuntian, while others, who were not regularly
enrolled among his immediate followers, numbered such men as Iphicrates, Timotheus, Phocion,
Lycurgus, Hyperides, Isocrates, and possibly Demosthenes (
Cic.
De Orat. i. 20, 89).
Plato taught in the Academy for twenty-two years prior to his second journey to Syracuse,
which he undertook at the instigation of Dio , who hoped, by the lessons of the philosopher,
to influence the character of the new ruler of Syracuse. This prince, it is said, had been
brought up by his father wholly destitute of an enlightened education, and
it was now the task of Plato to form his mind by philosophy. It seems, at the same time, to
have been the plan of Dio and Plato to bring about, by philosophical instruction, a wholesome
reform of the Sicilian constitution, by giving it a more aristocratic character. But, whatever
may have been their intentions, they were all frustrated by the weak and voluptuous character
of Dionysius. Dio became the object of the tyrant's suspicion, and was conveyed away to the
coast of Italy, without, however, forfeiting his possessions. In this condition of affairs,
Plato did not long remain in Syracuse, where his position would at best have been ambiguous.
He returned to Athens, but, in consequence of some fresh disagreement between Dionysius and
Dio , with respect to the property of the latter, he was induced to take a third journey to
Syracuse. The reconciliation, which it was his object to effect, completely miscarried; he
himself came to an open rupture with Dionysius, and only obtained a free departure from Sicily
through the active interposition of his Pythagorean friends at Tarentum. It does not appear
that he took any part in the later conduct of Sicilian affairs, though his nephew and disciple
Speusippus and others of the Academy, rendered personal assistance to Dio , in a warlike
expedition against Dionysius. From this time Plato seems to have passed his old age in
tranquillity in his garden, near the Academy, engaged with the instruction of numerous
disciples, and the prosecution of his literary labours. He died while yet actively employed
about his philosophical studies, in B.C. 347.
The philosophical writings of Plato have come down to us complete, and have always been
admired as a model of the union of artistic perfection with philosophical acuteness and depth.
They are in the form of dialogue; but Plato was not the first writer who employed this style
of composition for philosophical instruction. (See
Dialogus.) Zeno the Eleatic had already written in the form of question and answer.
Alexamenus the Teian and Sophron in the mimes had treated ethical subjects in the same form.
Xenophon, Aeschines, Antisthenes, Euclides, and other Socratics had also made use of the
dialogical form; but Plato has handled this form not only with greater mastery than any one
who preceded him, but, in all probability, with the distinct intention of keeping by this very
means true to the admonition of Socrates, not to communicate instruction, but to lead to the
spontaneous discovery of it. Moreover, the dramatic form gives great force and liveliness to
the teaching, and was used by Plato with so much ability as to lead to the grouping of the
dialogues into trilogies and tetralogies as though they had been actual dramas. The dialogues
of Plato are closely connected with one another, and various arrangements of them have been
proposed. Schleiermacher divides them into three series or classes. In the first he considers
that the germs of dialectic and of the doctrine of ideas begin to unfold themselves in all the
freshness of youthful inspiration; in the second those germs develop themselves further by
means of dialectic investigations respecting the difference between common and philosophical
acquaintance with things, respecting notion and knowledge (
δόξα and
ἐπιστήμη); in the third they receive
their completion by means of an objectively scientific working out, with the separation of
ethics and physics. The first series embraces, according to Schleiermacher, the
Phaedrus, Lysis, Protagoras, Laches, Charmides, Euthyphron, and
Parmenides; to which may be added as an appendix the
Apologia, Crito,
Ion, Hippias Minor, Hipparchus, Minos, and
Alcibiades II. The second
series contains the
Gorgias, Theaetetus, Meno, Euthydemus, Cratylus, Sophistes,
Politicus, Symposium, Phaedo, and
Philebus; to which may be added as
an appendix the
Theages, Erastae, Alcibiades I., Menexenus, Hippias Major, and
Clitophon. The third series comprises the
Republic, Timaeus,
Critias, and the
Laws. This arrangement may be accepted as a matter of
convenience, but scholars long ago ceased to think it possible to discover in the dialogues
any satisfactory evidence of the order of their composition. The genuineness of many of the
dialogues has been questioned, and the following are undoubtedly spurious:
Alcibiades
II., Axiochus, Clitophon, Demadocus, Epinomis, Erastae, Eryxias, Hipparchus, De Iust., Minos,
Sisyphus, Theages, De Virtute. The following are probably spurious:
Hippias
Minor, Alcibiades I., Menexenus. The
Letters are perhaps forgeries.
(See Gudeman in
Classical Studies in Honour of Henry Drisler, pp. 61-66 [New
York, 1894].) The following are cited by Aristotle as having been written by Plato:
Republic, Timaeus, Laws, Phaedrus, Symposium, Gorgias, Meno, Hippias I.; but
obviously his silence as to the rest proves nothing.
It is impossible within any reasonable limits to give a satisfactory account of the Platonic
philosophy. His attempt to combine poetry and philosophy (the two fundamental tendencies of
the Greek mind) gives to the Platonic dialogues a charm which irresistibly attracts us, though
we may have but a deficient comprehension of their subject matter. Plato, like Socrates, was
penetrated with the idea that wisdom is the attribute of the Godhead; that philosophy,
springing from the impulse
to know, is the necessity of the
intellectual man, and the greatest of the blessings which he possesses. When once we strive
after Wisdom with the intensity of a lover, she becomes the true consecration and purification
of the soul, adapted to lead us from the night-like to the true day. An approach to wisdom,
however, presupposes an original communion with Being, truly so called; and this communion
again presupposes the divine nature or immortality of the soul, and the impulse to become like
the Eternal. This impulse is the love which generates in Truth, and the development of it is
termed Dialectics. Out of the philosophical impulse which is developed by Dialectics, not only
correct knowledge, but also correct action, springs forth. Socrates's doctrine respecting the
unity of virtue, and that it consists in true, vigorous, and practical knowledge, is intended
to be set forth in a preliminary manner in the
Protagoras and the smaller
dialogues attached to it. They are designed, therefore, to introduce a foundation for ethics
by the refutation of the common views that were entertained of morals and of virtue; for
although not even the words “ethics” and “physics”
occur in Plato, and even dialectics are not treated of as a distinct and separate province,
yet he must rightly be regarded as the originator of the threefold division of philosophy,
inasmuch as he had before him the decided object to develop the Socratic method into a
scientific system of dialectics, that should supply the grounds of our knowledge as well as of
our moral action (physics and ethics), and therefore he separates the
general investigations on knowledge and understanding, at least relatively, from those which
refer to physics and ethics. Accordingly, the
Theaetetus, Sophistes,
Parmenides, and
Cratylus are principally dialectical; the
Protagoras, Gorgias, Politicus, Philebus, and the
Politics
principally ethical; while the
Timaeus is exclusively physical. Plato's
dialectics and ethics, however, have been more successful than his physics. Plato's doctrine
of
ideas (
ἰδέαι) was one of the most
prominent parts of his system. He maintained that the existence of things, cognizable only by
means of conception, is their true essence, their
idea. Hence he asserts
that to deny the reality of ideas is to destroy all scientific research. He departed from the
original meaning of the word idea (namely, that of form or figure), inasmuch as he understood
by it the unities (
ἑνάδες, μονάδες) which lie at the basis
of the visible, the changeable, and which can only be reached by pure thinking. He included
under the expression “idea” every thing stable amid the changes of mere
phenomena, all really existing and unchangeable definitudes, by which the changes of things
and our knowledge of them are conditioned, such as the ideas of genus and species, the laws
and ends of nature, as also the principles of cognition and of moral action, and the essences
of individual, concrete, thinking souls. His system of ethics was founded upon his dialectics,
as is remarked above. Hence he asserted that, not being in a condition to grasp the idea of
the good with full distinctness, we are able to approximate to it only so far as we elevate
the power of thinking to its original purity.
The best MS. of the greater part of Plato is the Codex Clarkianus, secured in Patmos by
Daniel Clarke, an Englishman, and now in the Bodleian Library (Oxford). It dates from A.D.
896, and does not include the
Republic, of which the best copy is a Paris codex
(Codex Parisinus A) of the eleventh century.
Bibliography.—The principal editions of Plato are those
of Aldus
(Venice, 1513); H. Stephanus
(Lausanne, 1587), from which
the citations of Plato by page and letter are usually made; convenient texts by Stallbaum
(1881 foll.), Orelli
(1839), Hirschig
(1873), K. F. Hermann (last
ed. 1885 foll.); and a critical one is that of Schanz, not yet
(1895) completed.
Good editions of the separate dialogues with English notes are those of the
Protagoras by Sihler
(1881), the
Philebus by Badham
(1878), the
Theaetetus by Campbell
(1882), the
Phaedo by Geddes
(1885) and Andrew Hind
(1883), the
Euthydemus and
Symposium by Badham
(1866), the
Sophistes and
Politicus by Campbell
(1867), the
Phaedrus by Thompson
(1868), the
Apology by Wagner
(1869) and by Riddell
(1877), the
Gorgias by
Thompson
(1871), the
Parmenides by Maguire
(1882) and
by Waddell
(1894), the
Republic (bks. i.-v.) by Warren
(1888), and complete by Jowett and Campbell
(1894). There are notes
on the
Cratylus in French by Lenormant
(1861), and on the
Republic by Charpentier
(1877).
The great translation of all of Plato's works into English, by Prof. Jowett
(2d ed.
Oxford, 1890), is itself a classic. There is a
Lexicon Platonicum by
Ast
(1838) and a
Wörterbuch der Platonischen Philosophie
by Wagner
(Göttingen, 1799). There is an immense mass of literature
dealing with the Platonic philosophy, of which it is possible here to mention only the
following for the general student: the introduction to the several dialogues in Jowett's
translation; Grote's
Plato (giving analyses of all the dialognes); Zeller,
Plato and the Old Academy (Engl. trans. 1876); Stein,
Zur Geschichte des Platonismus (1862-75); Auffarth,
Die Platonische Ideenlehre (Berlin, 1883); Fouillée,
La Philosophie de Platon, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1888-89);
Pater,
Plato and Platonism (1895); and the chapters on Plato in the histories
of philosophy by Ueberweg and Schwegler. See
Philosophia.
