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 The philosopher known as PLATO was born on the island of Ægina, in May 427 B.C., of an ancient and noble family. His father was Ariston, his mother Perictionê: he himself was called Aristocles: the name Plato, indicating perhaps his robust frame, or breadth of brow, was added afterwards.
His friendship with Socrates began when he was twenty years old, and remained unbroken till the death of Socrates in 399. Taking the aristocratic side in politics, and being connected with some of the men who established on oligarchy in 403, he formed hopes of wise government which were speedily dissipated. With the noble resistance of Socrates to the tyranny of the Thirty Tyrants he cordially sympathized. After the restoration of democracy, and the martyrdom of Socrates, Plato retired to Megara, and lived for some time with Eucleides, a philosopher of that city. He subsequently travelled, like Pythagoras, in Egypt, and also associated with the Pythagorean schools still flourishing in Tarentum, Locri, and other cities of South Italy and Sicily. In Sicily he made acquaintance with Dion, over whom he gained strong influence. At Dion's invitation he visited the elder Dionysius at Syracuse; his free speech offended this tyrant, who caused him to be sold as a slave on his voyage homeward to Ægina. He was speedily ransomed and conveyed to Athens, where in 386 B.C. he opened a school of philosophy in a garden near the shrine of the hero Hekadêmus, situated about a mile from the north gate of the city. This was the first of several schools of philosophical teaching founded in Athens, which continued in activity for eight centuries, until finally suppressed by the Emperor Justinian in 529 A.D.
Plato had for his pupils many of the celebrities of the century: the orators Demosthenes and Hyperides; the philosophers Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Aristotle; the great geometer and astronomer Eudoxus. His life of teaching, continued till his death in 347, was varied only by two journeys to Syracuse; the first, in 367, undertaken at the insistance of Dion, with the vain hope of inducing the second Dionysius to model his government on philosophical principles; and the second, five years afterwards, to procure the restoration of Dion, whom Dionysius had banished. In 359, Dion succeeded, partly with help afforded by Plato's pupils, in making himself master of Syracuse, but was shortly afterwards assassinated. The failure of his hopes to witness a government founded on philosophy threw a gloom over Plato's last years. He appears to have been profoundly respected by the Hellenic world. The rival school which his pupil Aristotle opened, in the temple of the Lycean Apollo, does not appear to have disturbed the personal friendship of these two great thinkers.
Plato's works are written in the form of dialogue, the principal speaker being, in almost every case, Socrates. The practice of Socrates to lead people of every class into familiar talk, and to encourage them to sift their own thoughts and beliefs on the conduct of life, made him a dramatis persona into whose mouth opinions and arguments on every possible subject could be placed tentatively, without committing the author to any positive conclusion. It is therefore often very difficult, and not seldom impossible, to state with certainty what Plato thought; and much of what he wrote may be spoken of as dreams in dialogue, rather than philosophical expositions. The works that give the fullest account of his philosophical and social system are the Republic, the Timoeus, and the Laws. Of these a brief notice is now given.
The Republic, starting from the attempt to prove that righteousness is preferable to unrighteousness, whatever pains and calamities may go with the first, or pleasures with the second, depicts an ideal polity, in which the governing class, corresponding to the reasoning faculty in man, is trained and educated for the work in the most perfect way. For this class the institutions of private property and the family are to be suppressed. The children are to be children of the State. Both sexes are to receive the same gymnastic and intellectual training. In the education of their intellect the great object is to set them free from the tyranny of sense and prepare them for the perception of Ideas. This word meant with Plato something widely different from the conception with which Locke and Hume have made us familiar.
Every general term, as horse, man, table, denoting a group of objects, had in Plato's philosophy a real existence corresponding to it, of which any particular horse, man, or table was but an imperfect transitory copy. Men when uneducated were like dwellers in a cave chained with their backs to its mouth. A fire behind them shrew shadows of passing objects on the ground before them; and these shadows they take for the realities of things. A prisoner, set free from the cave and taken to the daylight would be dazzled and blinded, and it would be long before he got to know about real objects, and about the sun which gave them light, and brought the change of the seasons, and growth and life in the world. If such a man went down again into the cave he would again be blinded; none of his fellow-prisoners would believe his visions, and he would be less able than they to discourse eloquently about shadows. Such is the contrast between the trained mind of the philosopher cognizant of ideas and the untrained mind of the multitude. Nevertheless the great object of all wise polity is that philosophers should be kings.
The ideas of Plato recall the numbers of Pythagoras, but wander much further from positive philosophy than they. Numbers bear some relation to laws of Nature. Plato's Ideas confound an institution of humanity--the words in which the accumulating reason of mankind transmits its collective tradition--with the things of which they were the signs. But Plato's conception lent itself readily to the requirements of the Catholic creed, in which the word or Reason was upheld as the most sacred and eternal of Beings.
In the Timoeus a description is given of the genesis of the universe and of the human body. Plato here introduces his conception of the Demiurgus, or constructive workman, who, by impressing the eternal Forms or Ideas upon pre-existent formless matter, produced the second order of gods, the stars and planets, by whom afterwards man with his mixed nature, compounded of earthly and divine, was created. It was this treatise that convinced the Alexandrine Jews and Christians that Plato had borrowed his leading conceptions from Moses.
In the Laws, Plato portrays a Commonwealth, not purely ideal as in the Republic, but such as might be actually realized in the Grecian world. He supposes it to be a colony founded in the island of Crete, and composed of settlers representing all varieties of the Hellenic race. He enters into minute details of legislation and of education; from which we gather that his guiding principle was to secure stability even at the risk of obscurantism and tyranny. No great public reform, he says, can be accomplished without large interference with public and private life. Private property is to be allowed, but is to be fenced in with restrictions that few socialist schemes have exceeded. The number of landholders is to be rigidly fixed: marriage is to be compulsory, the number of children strictly limited; and one son only is to succeed to the landed property of the father. But, above all, everything connected with the education and religion is to be sedulously guarded from change. As in Egypt, so in Greece, all songs, dances, and festive ceremonies must first receive approval of official censors, who are to be men above the age of fifty, and when so approved must never afterwards be changed. All the existing dramatic literature of Greece must be freely and systematically expurgated. Much reading of any kind is to be discouraged. Arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy are to be taught, not for their practical utility, but to inspire true thoughts as to the universe and the great divinities, the sun, moon, and planets. The belief that the planets moved irregularly should be regarded as blasphemous. Bodily exercises, under the same stringent regulations, are to be systematically encouraged in both sexes, and their efficacy in restraining sexual impulse is strongly insisted on. In his criminal legislation, heresy--that is, erroneous beliefs about the gods--occupies a very prominent place. Even when the life has been morally blameless, the punishment is five years' imprisonment; persistence in unbelief being punishable with death. Heresy, combined with vicious conduct, sorcery or charlatanry, is punishable as the worst of crimes. It is certain that the legislation here proposed by Plato would have condemned Socrates many times over.
The influence of Plato's thoughts has been great and prolonged; but it is largely due to the dramatic skill and poetic style in which they were delivered. To the building up of human life on the basis of science they contributed nothing. But they inspired ardour for social regeneration; and when transplanted into the soil of Alexandria they formed one of the channels through which Jewish and Christian thought penetrated into the Western world.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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