The market for the higher education of young men with wealth and aspirations to political prominence did not abate in the fourth century. Various individuals, some of them native Athenians like Isocrates (436-338 B.C.E.), established schools in which rhetoric and other subjects were taught. Thus, after only a generation or so, the novel and at times controversial educational offerings of the fifth-century sophists and rhetoricians were well on their way to becoming institutionalized and mainstreamed. Plato was a direct beneficiary of this process of institutionalization and, in something of a paradox, he was indirectly beholden to the sophists. To be sure, Plato’s portrayals of men like Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus (in
Protagoras),
Polus and Gorgias (in
Gorgias),
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus (in
Euthydemus),
and Thrasymachus (in
Republic)
are not flattering. He dismisses the claims to knowledge and expertise and educational proficiency that such “professors of wisdom” had staked for themselves, and discredits the ways in which these men and their successors—notably Isocrates—taught rhetoric and the “art” of public persuasion. Nonetheless, Plato’s Academy capitalized upon the desire and demand for higher education that Protagoras, Gorgias, and others had cultivated during the preceding decades. Without the fertile field the sophists planted, Plato might never have had the opportunity to found his Academy—or write his dialogues.
Socrates
It is impossible to conceive of Plato apart from Socrates. A native Athenian who lived from approximately 470 B.C.E. until his execution in 399, Socrates committed nothing to writing. What we know of his activities comes largely from the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, in which Socrates is very often the primary interlocutor. The other intact source—and the sole one dating to Socrates’ lifetime—is Aristophanes’
Clouds,
which antedates Plato’s and Xenophon’s works by twenty-five years at the minimum and was composed when Socrates was not yet fifty years old. There are fragments of other comedies from the 420s that mention Socrates, and a very few fragments of works by other “Socratics” who, like Plato and Xenophon, took to writing about the man after his death and using him as a figure in dialogues.
Aristophanes presents an image of Socrates very different from those of Plato and Xenophon. In Clouds, Socrates is portrayed as a professional sophist running a “Think Factory.” His students pay to learn rhetoric (that is, how to “make the weaker argument the stronger”) and other language arts, as well as absurd “scientific” techniques (for example, how to measure the leaps of fleas) and a novel cosmology positing that Zeus “is not.” This Socrates has no scruple about taking on a pupil who wants to cheat his creditors in court, and he is indirectly responsible for a young man’s beating of his aged father.
According to Plato and Xenophon, however, Socrates was in no way a professional; he had no pupils and took no fees. Plato takes particular pains to distance Socrates from Aristophanes’ caricature and from the sophists. He has him disavow all interest in rhetoric and admit to only a youthful and unsatisfying flirtation with the cosmological theories of Anaxagoras (for example, in
Phaedo
96a-100a). The Socrates of Plato’s works professes an exclusive commitment to making his fellow Athenians “better” by urging them to examine their values and actions systematically, on the grounds that “the unexamined life is not worth living”
(Apology
38a). He exhorts them to think and act in consistently virtuous, just, temperate, and courageous ways, even if such behavior endangers material prosperity and life itself (for example,
Apology
29c-30b); he argues that the welfare and health of the soul are more important than any consideration of material comfort. The Platonic Socrates is depicted, moreover, as a paragon of this consistently virtuous way of life, always electing to do what is truly beneficial over what is immediately convenient and gratifying. So consistent is his devotion to the pursuit of the “good life,” for himself and others, that he is willing to permit himself to be killed for its sake
(Apology
35c;
Gorgias
522d-e).
Plato may well have crafted his representations of Socrates to suit his own purposes, just as Aristophanes doubtless shaped the portrayal in
Clouds
in accordance with his comic agenda. If we prefer to believe that Plato’s depiction is the more accurate, it is still possible to understand how Aristophanes could have proffered such a disparate perspective on Socrates’ activities. According to Plato, Socrates’ self-appointed mission of spurring his fellow citizens toward self-examination—he describes himself as a gadfly sent to “rouse” Athens, as if it were a large and lazy horse, in
Apology
30e—necessitated challenges to their most cherished values and assumptions—including their own presumptions to wisdom. As a result, he may well have irritated, infuriated, and at times humiliated them. For all the distance that Plato strives to create between his mentor and the sophists, we may imagine that, to the average Athenian, the differences between the challenges to traditional conceptions of just behavior offered by Socrates and someone like Antiphon might not have seemed so great. Socrates could have come across as just another sophist who was relentlessly critical of the traditional and the time-honored.
If Plato’s depiction is reliable, Socrates was also highly critical of Athens’ democratic government. We know that he traveled in the elite circles of Athenian society and was closely linked to prominent men from aristocratic families. He was particularly friendly with Pericles’ ward, the charismatic and ambitious Alcibiades (450-404 B.C.E.), whose extravagant behavior and defection to the Peloponnesian alliance in 415 left his associates under a cloud of suspicion. He also knew Critias, the infamous leader of the Thirty Tyrants of 404-403, and other men who harbored open hostilities to democracy. Socrates was almost certainly not actively involved with the Thirty, but his past associations with Critias and Alcibiades may have caused unease in the tense years immediately after the democratic government was restored in 403. The general amnesty obviated his prosecution on political charges, and it is likely that the charges of impiety and corrupting youth that were officially laid against him in 399 were efforts to drive him into exile because of his political associations and views.
Socrates, however, did not go into exile, even though he could have done so after his conviction. On orders from the court that convicted him, he committed suicide by drinking hemlock. He left behind a band of friends and followers who, because of their dedication to preserving Socrates’ legacy, came to be known as “Socratics.” By the late 390s B.C.E., several texts purporting to contain the speeches of prosecution and defense given at Socrates’ trial were in circulation; two texts by Plato and Xenophon, both titled
Apology
(which literally means “Defense”), are the only extant examples of the latter, and none of the former survives. Dialogues featuring Socrates as an interlocutor remained popular throughout the fourth century, so much so that Aristotle’s
Poetics
identifies Socratic dialogues as “examples of imitation.” How scrupulously any of these works—including those of Plato—aimed to represent the actual views and activities of Socrates remains an open question.
Plato
We know the names of several Socratics active during the fourth century B.C.E. in Athens and elsewhere: Antisthenes, Phaedo, Eucleides, Aristippus, Aeschines, as well as Plato and Xenophon. Only works by Plato and Xenophon survive intact, and, of these two authors, Plato is by far the more philosophically significant.
Plato was born into a wealthy, aristocratic Athenian family in 428 or 427 B.C.E., and he lived until 348 or 347. (A note in passing: “Plato” was a nickname according to one tradition, but it is now generally accepted as his given name.) He had kinship ties with many prominent men, including the notorious Critias. A large body of writing attributed to Plato survives from antiquity, including
Apology
(a recreation of Socrates’ defense speech),
Republic
and a number of other dialogues, and a series of letters. Most of these works are considered genuinely Platonic, although the authenticity of some texts (including some of the letters and a handful of dialogues) has been doubted at various points in the past 2400 years.
The Seventh Letter, which many scholars today view as authentic, offers an autobiographical account explaining how the vicious abuse of power by the Thirty Tyrants and the subsequent trial and execution of Socrates under the restored democracy persuaded Plato to eschew a political career in Athens. It also details his association with the rulers of the Sicilian city of Syracuse, Dionysius I and his son Dionysius II, and their kinsman Dion, who was Plato’s close friend and student. Plato visited Sicily three times during the period from the early 380s to the late 360s. He and Dion evidently planned to educate the younger Dionysius in the hopes that, upon succeeding his father, he would put into practice the political ideals they cherished. Several scholars have speculated that these political ideals were something like the proposals for the ideal state and the government of philosopher-rulers that Socrates advances in
Republic.
Whatever their aspirations were, Plato and Dion were disappointed when Dionysius II took power in the early 360s and quickly broke with his kinsman and his tutor.
Soon after Plato returned to Athens from his first visit to Syracuse in the early 380s, he began teaching at a place near the grove of the hero Academus on the city’s outskirts. The school came to be called the “Academy” because of its location, and its original mission, like that of Isocrates’ school, may have been to train young men for civic leadership. Plato taught what he called “philosophy”
(philosophia)
and subjects he deemed essential to its study, notably mathematical sciences.
Plato probably started to compose dialogues before he established the Academy. In all but a few of his dialogues Socrates is the main interlocutor, and most are peopled with figures who would have been well known in Athens’ elite circles during the fifth century. Plato’s older brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, play prominent parts in
Republic
and figure briefly in
Parmenides’
introduction. Several dialogues have identifiable “dramatic dates,” at least in approximate terms. The gathering of sophists and their followers at Callias’ house in
Protagoras,
for example, is set sometime around 432 B.C.E., and the party at Agathon’s house described in
Symposium
would have taken place in the spring of 416. Most of these works also contain anachronistic details, which seem deliberately planted in order to underscore their inherent fictionality. It is important for readers to keep in mind that the dialogues are not historically accurate accounts of actual conversations, although they may aim to suggest the kinds of conversations that Socrates
could
have had with Protagoras, Agathon, Plato’s brothers, and other men. Interestingly and importantly, Plato never represents himself as a speaker, although he is mentioned by Socrates in
Apology
and by Phaedo in
Phaedo.
Many scholars have speculated about the dating of Plato’s works, and at times the speculation has inspired heated controversy. Relative dating of the dialogues is complicated by the fact that there is little external evidence corroborating when any of them was composed. One long-popular approach has been to classify the texts as “early,” “middle,” and “late,” on the grounds that there is a development in styles and concerns that reflects the maturation of Plato’s thought.
Apology
and the “Socratic” dialogues, which feature Socrates in conversation with various men about basic ethical questions and tend to end “aporetically” (without reaching satisfactory resolutions), are thus thought to date to the early years of Plato’s career, when he was still more or less a “Socratic.” “Middle” dialogues in which Socrates is made to advance positive theories, most importantly the theory of the metaphysical “ideas,” are viewed as reflecting the fruition of Plato’s own philosophical inquiries. Those dialogues that reflect less interest in the theory of the ideas and deal instead with other concerns and analyses (for example, the method of “collection and division”) are grouped together as “late.”
According to this interpretation,
Republic
is categorized among the “middle” dialogues because, among other things, it contains one of the most detailed expositions of the theory of the ideas, which Plato almost certainly derived independently of Socrates from Parmenides’ theory of “Being.” Some critics accordingly estimate that it was composed during the 370s B.C.E. Yet, once again, readers should be aware that such dating is purely speculative, since it depends upon subjective estimations of the developmental stages in Plato’s thought and style.
The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in Plato’s reliance on the dialogue format, and readers can find overviews of the topic in John M. Cooper’s introduction to
Plato: Complete Works
(pp. xviii-xxi) and Ruby Blondell’s
The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues
(pp. 1-52). The fact that he chose to write not treatises, but dialogues in which different points of view compete, coupled with the fact that he never presents himself as an interlocutor, raises important questions about the relationships among written texts, Plato’s actual thoughts, and his teachings at the Academy. Passages such as
Phaedrus
274e-278b, in which Socrates asserts that a sensible and noble man treats written discourse as a mere “amusement,” further complicate interpretation of all the dialogues, including
Republic.
Readers of
Republic
will note that, at a crucial moment (7.536b-c), Socrates reminds Glaucon that they are “not serious.” And, although Socrates remarks more than once on the importance of the issues he and his companions are discussing, he repeatedly draws attention to their conversation’s incomplete and provisional qualities.