Phaedrus. A pastime, Socrates, as noble as the other is ignoble, the pastime of a man who can be amused by serious talk, and can discourse merrily about justice and the like.
Socrates. True, Phaedrus. But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.
If Plato believed what he put in the mouth of Socrates, he must have felt embarrassment at having burdened later generations with a score of written dialogues besides more than a dozen Letters. Perhaps Plato saw his writings as a harmless pastime.
In his own person, in the Seventh Letter, Plato disowned any who would claim to have written down his teachings.
Thus much, at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries—that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself. (Seventh Letter, J. Harward trans.)
Plato lived in an age of transition in Athens when the written word was invading the world of learning. And this seems to confirm the warnings (reported by Plato) of the Egyptian god-king Thamus to Thoth, the inventor of writing. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth . . .” (Phaedrus).
In the earlier great age of ancient Greek literature, writing had been mainly an aid to speaking. The Iliad and the Odyssey were written down to be memorized for singing or speaking. The “works” of the great tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—were dramas written to be witnessed in ritual competition. A pitifully small sample in writing survives of even the three great tragedians. Most of the Greek tragedians survive only in their names. We are misled because the “literature” that makes the ancient Greeks great for us survives as the written Word. So we read the words of Demosthenes that were intended to be heard.
In Plato’s time the relative merits of the written and the spoken word were being debated. Herodotus and Thucydides had produced written histories, and Anaxagoras and Democritus had written works of philosophy. Thucydides apologizes and explains at the outset of his history that his written account can only approximate the evanescent spoken word. But he aims to provide “a possession for all time,” which he describes as if it were a new literary form. Reading aloud was still the common way of enjoying literature. The crucial event in Socrates’ intellectual life (reported by Plato in Phaedo), which we have noted, was not his own reading from a book of Anaxagoras, but hearing someone read the book. The rhetorician and Sophist Alcidamas (fourth century B.C.), champion of Gorgias and the old school of Sophists, was still arguing that speeches should never be written down, even for delivery, but should always be improvised. We can better understand the Athenians’ impatience with the written word when we recall the cumbersome form of the written word in their time. The reader had to unroll the papyrus, seeking passages without aid of an index—in an unpunctuated text, without paragraphs or even spaces between words.
Athens, we must remember, was not governed by pieces of paper shuffled among bureaucrats. Government was by a live assembly of citizens, each of whom served as soldier and, in the democratic interludes, as judge and member of the governing body, all in his own person. The idea of representative government did not occur to them. In the sovereign assembly the citizens could debate, offer proposals, decide on war or peace, on taxation or other government measures. A smaller body of some five hundred, the boule prepared for these meetings, controlled foreign policy, supervised administration, and sat as a judicial body (as in Socrates’ case). These five hundred were chosen by lot for one year, but no one could serve more than twice in his lifetime. Most officials, too, were chosen by lot, and all were directly responsible to the Assembly or the Council (Boule). Participation in Athenian democracy meant being physically present, and saying your piece in your own voice. Being a citizen meant going frequently to the center of government, an automatic limitation on the size of the city-state.
Since political wisdom was assumed to emerge from these encounters of the spoken word, it is not surprising that Athenians thought the fires of philosophic wisdom might be ignited in the same way. “After much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself” (Seventh Letter). What the Assembly and the Boule were to Athenian politics, the Dialogue would be to Athenian philosophy.
It is significant but not surprising that none of Socrates’ writing has survived, since his way of seeking was in the living words. Yet all of Plato’s dialogues that we know about have survived in writing. And nothing is more revealing of Plato’s way of seeking than his chosen vehicle, the dialogue. Just as the exchanges of the living words of citizens would ensure the health of the city-state, so the converse of citizens in dialogue could promote the health of their souls. Socrates, a man of notable physical vigor, and an admirer of medical science, considered himself a doctor of the soul. His conversations were not in a lecture hall, but in an open-air Athenian athletic center. To the gymnasium (from the Greek word meaning “place to exercise naked”) Athenians came for the vigor of their bodies, filling rest periods with conversation. An ancient Greek gymnasium was usually an open court surrounded by columns, with places for running and jumping and a covered hall for wrestling and bathing. This legacy—athletics for body and mind—survived in the names of two great Athenian schools of philosophy, Plato’s “Academy” and Aristotle’s “Lyceum.” Both were names of gymnasium groves near Athens.
The playful interludes and interruptions in Plato’s dialogues remind us that the Way of Dialogue was exercising the mind at play. Plato believed that learning could not be forced, and that to be remembered, lessons should take the form of play. Man must be wary of taking himself too seriously. “May we not conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods,” observes Plato’s Athenian Stranger in The Laws, “either their plaything only, or created with a purpose—which of the two we cannot certainly know.”
Far from being a textual exercise, the pursuit of philosophy, the love of wisdom—for Plato as for his teacher Socrates—was an athletic activity of minds in converse. The Dialogue as a written work seems to have been an invention of Plato, in whose hands this new literary form flourished. Plato is reputed to have written dramas, which he destroyed. And his dialogues are full of drama. His Socratic dialogues, as Werner Jaeger has observed, revealed “his desire to show the philosopher in the dramatic instant of seeking and finding, and to make the doubt and the conflict visible.” And the dialogue survived as a literary form for Seekers. Though less appropriate to Aristotle’s way of seeking, Aristotle’s own dialogues (most written before the death of Plato) were applauded. They survive only in fragments. The form was to be exploited by Plutarch and Lucian, and the Latin dialogue provided Cicero with the vehicle for some of his most durable ideas.
Plato is rare among the great figures of ancient Greek thought in that the whole of his works seem to have been preserved. Socrates (in Plato’s Phaedrus) explained that “lovers of wisdom, or philosophers” were worthy of their name only if they were able t
o defend their ideas “by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison.” “He who cannot rise above his own compilations and compositions, which he has been long patching and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may be justly called poet or speechmaker or law-maker.” But not a philosopher.
7
Plato’s Other-World of Ideas
In early life Plato had fancied himself in a political career, but he was turned off by the sordid politics of Athens in the era of the Peloponnesian Wars. He saw the Thirty Tyrants, including his relatives, try to involve his friend, the aged Socrates, in their crimes. When Socrates, “the most upright man of that day,” was sent to his death on fabricated charges, Plato determined to “withdraw from any connection with the abuses of the time.” And so he stifled his “strong impulse towards political life.”
What we know of Plato’s sallies into politics leaves us doubly glad that he saved himself from a longer career of frustration. His naive Sicilian adventure proved him a poor judge of people and of political opportunities. Still, he was not pipe-dreaming when he had thought of a political career. For his distinguished family and the Athenian tradition of civic participation would easily have offered him opportunities for leadership. But we have little reason to believe that he could have been another Pericles, or that he had the conspiratorial talents even to be an Alcibiades.
Plato claimed to trace his ancestry back to the old kings of Athens, to friends of the legendary Solon, and finally to the god Poseidon. His stepfather, in whose house he was raised, was a prominent supporter of Pericles. But Plato himself had seen more than enough of Athenian politics to make him critical of “democratic” ways. When only eighteen he seems to have been a listener, if not actually a disciple, of Socrates.
After Socrates was put to death, his friends, under suspicion by the regime, may have moved for a while to nearby Megara. At this time Plato may have taken something like a grand tour of southern Italy, Cyrene, neighboring Africa and Egypt. Some of his remarks in The Laws on Egyptian customs, games, art, and music have the authentic ring of the observer. Before he first visited Sicily, he had already arrived at his familiar axiom that “there will be no cessation of evils for the sons of men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive sovereign power in the States, or those in power in the States by some dispensation of providence become true philosophers.”
What Plato, now in his forties, found in southern Italy and Sicily excited his “strong disapproval of the kind of life which was there called the life of happiness, stuffed full as it was with the banquets of the Italian Greeks and Syracusans, who ate to repletion twice every day, and were never without a partner for the night. . . . For with these habits formed early in life, no man under heaven could possibly attain to wisdom—human nature is not capable of such an extraordinary combination.”
The fateful event of this first visit to Syracuse was meeting an attractive and impressionable young man, whose fortunes and misfortunes would draw Plato into Sicilian politics for the rest of his life. Dion became his eager disciple. At first Plato did not realize that Dion, son-in-law of the reigning “tyrant,” Dionysius I, was contriving the overthrow of the ruling tyranny. Could this be a time and a place for testing Plato’s vision of the philosopher-king? “For Dion, who rapidly assimilated my teaching as he did all forms of knowledge, listened to me with an eagerness which I had never seen equalled in any young man, and resolved to live for the future in a better way than the majority of Italian and Sicilian Greeks.” Dion’s reformed ways made him unpopular among his contemporaries. Numerous stories recount the efforts of Dionysius I to be rid of Plato. One tells that Dionysius I had Plato kidnapped and handed over to a Spartan admiral, who exposed him for sale as a slave at Aegina, but Plato was luckily ransomed by an acquaintance from Cyrene.
It was probably on his return to Athens (about 388 B.C.) that Plato founded his famous Academy. Some would call Plato’s Academy the ancestor of the modern university, and so have distinguished Plato as “the first president of a permanent institution for the prosecution of science by original research.” But it could not have been more Athenian. The site he chose—about a mile out of Athens—was a garden next to a grove sacred to the Hero Hekademus or Akademus, from whom it took the name “Academy.” It was reputed to be a delightful, quiet place with shaded walks and a gymnasium. Plato had a small house of his own nearby. He soon acquired fame as a lecturer and attracted pupils from other Greek cities. There was no admission or tuition fee, but he did receive handsome presents from the pupils and their rich families. The comedies of the time ridicule the students for their fine and delicate garments and their elegant affectations. This was a far cry from the atmosphere surrounding Socrates’ conversations, open to the public as he passed his days in the marketplace or in the public porticoes. The rural atmosphere of the Academy attracted and held students for three or four years. Athens’ fame as the school of Hellas was gained and sustained here in Plato’s Academy.
Isocrates’ competing institution was a school for practical success in the Athens of the day; Plato believed in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. And while Isocrates taught rhetoric and the arts of persuasion, Plato focused on mathematics.
Exactly how, when, or why Plato wrote the dialogues that became the foundation of Western philosophy remains a mystery. Perhaps his most famous Socratic dialogues were written before he was forty, and so before he founded his Academy. A few works, including his Laws, are usually ascribed to his old age. What might have been the course of Western philosophy if Socrates had never had a disciple in Plato?
Plato at the Academy—from the age of sixty till his death at eighty—busied himself organizing the school and lecturing. What Plato wanted was not written “works” of philosophy but active “discovery” in the company of other discovering minds. Aristotle describes Plato’s teachings at the Academy as “unwritten doctrine,” and he observes that Plato himself did not “lecture” from a manuscript. Plato’s famous lecture on “the Good,” supposed to be the best summary of his own philosophy, survives in diverse versions by hearers—Aristotle, Xenocrates, and Heraclides of Ponticus, who published their notes. But no manuscript by Plato himself has survived.
What might Plato have done with the last twenty years of his life, if he had not been seduced into a Sicilian adventure? The death of Dionysius I of Syracuse in 367 gave Plato his tempting opportunity. As annually elected dictator and generalissimo, Dionysius I had ruled Syracuse for thirty-eight years. Plato’s first visit to Sicily had introduced him to the Pythagorean communities that flourished there, pursuing a tradition quite different from that of the pioneer Ionian scientists. A charismatic personality, Pythagoras (born about 580 B.C.) of Samos had settled in southern Italy about 525 B.C. There he founded a school that had the appeal of a religion. Among other mystic dogmas he taught the transmigration of souls, and even claimed to remember his own earlier incarnations. Pythagoras saw the world organized around the aesthetic of numbers—for him the only reality. Having discovered the mathematical basis of musical intervals, Pythagoras had elaborated a cosmology of mathematical order. None of Pythagoras’ writings survived and, unlike Socrates, he never had the good luck to attract a recording disciple. But some of his themes lived on in Plato’s dialogues. And the overseas communities in Magna Graecia in southern Italy and Sicily tempted Plato with the opportunity he never had in Athens.
When Dionysius I died in 367 B.C. he was succeeded by his son, Dionysius II. This young man of weak character and little education was not up to the challenge of the expanding Carthaginians. Plato’s favorite pupil, the young man’s uncle Dion, now became ruling regent. “He thought it essential,” Plato records, “that I should come to Syracuse by all manner of means and with the utmost possible speed to be his partner in these plans, remembering in his own case how readily intercourse with me had produced in him a longing for the noblest and best life.” But Dion’s party of young men fed Plato
’s misgivings, “for young men are quick in forming desires which often take directions conflicting with one another.” “Lest I might some day appear to myself wholly and solely a mere man of words,” Plato decided to dare the Syracusan morass. “If ever anyone was to try to carry out in practice my ideas about laws and constitutions, now was the time.” With the enthusiastic aid of Dion, he needed only to persuade the new dictator of Syracuse.
Dionysius II proved even weaker than Plato had feared. After Plato had been in Syracuse only four months, intriguers at the court persuaded the insecure young tyrant that Dion was plotting to seize the throne. Dion was put out to sea in a small boat. Dionysius II feared being discredited by the departure of Plato and imprisoned him in the Syracusan acropolis. The young tyrant, though he became attached to Plato, refused to learn the lessons that might have made him a successful philosopher-king. Still Plato’s influence at court appeared when the study of geometry became fashionable. Defeated by court intrigues and Dionysius II’s weakness, Plato finally gave up his effort to educate the young ruler and was allowed to return to Athens.
This was not yet the end of the Sicilian adventure. Dionysius II kept in touch with Plato. Even after the young tyrant seized Dion’s property and forced his wife to make a dynastic marriage, Plato did not give up hope. Surprisingly, he responded to still another invitation, and returned again to advise Dionysius in 361 B.C. This trip was not entirely fruitless, for Plato did actually make a draft of a constitution for a federation of overseas Greek cities. A year later, when his life was threatened by Dion’s enemies, Plato returned to Athens, and never again played a role in Syracusan politics. Dion himself kept trying. He returned to Syracuse hoping to take over the government, but was murdered by one of his own officers. Perhaps the finest fruit of all these Sicilian adventures was Plato’s vivid autobiographical letter.
The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Page 5