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Plato was a well-known wrestler, and the name by which we know him today was his ring name. Plato means broad or flat: presumably in this case the former meaning, referring to his shoulders (or, as some sources insist, to his forehead). At his birth in 428 B.C. Plato was given the name Aristocles. He was born in Athens, or on the island of Aegina, which lies just twelve miles offshore from Athens in the Saronic Gulf. Plato was born into one of the great political families of Athens. His father Ariston was descended from Codrus, the last king of Athens, and his mother was descended from the great Athenian lawmaker Solon.

Like any bright member of a political family, Plato’s earliest ambitions were in other fields. Twice he carried off the wrestling prize at the Isthmian Games but seemingly never made it to the Olympics at Olympia. Instead he set about trying to become a great tragic poet, but he failed to impress the judges in any of the major competitions. Having failed to win an Olympic gold, or carry off the ancient Greek equivalent of the Nobel Prize, Plato was almost resigned to becoming a mere statesman. Then, as a last fling, he decided to have a go at philosophy, and went off to listen to Socrates.

It was love at first sight. For the next nine years Plato sat at the feet of his master, absorbing all he could of his ideas. Socrates’ combative teaching methods forced his pupil to realize his full intellectual potential, at the same time opening his eyes to the unrealised possibilities of the subject.

Socrates taught by a conversational method in which the subject under discussion was gradually analysed and defined. This method was known as dialectic – from the ancient Greek word for discussion or disputation (dialect has the same root). Socrates would encourage his conversational protagonist (or pupil) to put forward a definition of some particular topic, and would then proceed to question this – discovering its weaknesses, its strong points, suggesting additions, qualifications, extending the range of the topic, and so forth.

It’s difficult for us to imagine the profoundly innovative nature of this method, which relied heavily on reason. Philosophy before Socrates had had little or nothing to do with reason. The Pre-Socratics were for the most part more interested in such topics as Being – the metaphysical nature of what it means to be alive – or the ultimate nature of the world itself (speculating that it might be composed of water, or atoms). A few of these wild-and-woolly intuitions were uncannily accurate, given the way they were arrived at, but it was Socrates who realized that philosophy couldn’t go on like this. Philosophers were already a laughingstock, but there was no reason why philosophy itself should be relegated to this category. If philosophical thought was to stop itself from becoming an intellectual joke, or slipping back into religious speculation (from which it had emerged), it needed a more rigorous approach. This was supplied by Socrates’ dialectal method. With the benefit of well over two thousand years of hindsight, we can now see this as the forerunner of logic– which was to be invented by Plato’s pupil Aristotle a century or so later.

Socrates’ achievement, and his pupil Plato’s understanding of this, marked a crucial stage in the evolution of philosophy. To appreciate the full extent of this advance, one need only imagine a serious intellectual discussion devoid of reason.

Yet despite having found his true métier, Plato was still tempted to become a backslider and enter politics. Fortunately he was dissuaded by the behavior of Athenian politicians. When the Thirty Tyrants took over after the Peloponnesian War, two of their leaders (Critias and Charmides) were close relatives. The reign of terror that followed might have inspired a young Stalin or Machiavelli, but it didn’t impress Plato. After the democrats took over, Plato’s beloved teacher was tried on trumped-up charges of impiety and corrupting youth, and sentenced to death. In Plato’s eyes, democracy was now tarred with the same brush as tyranny.

Plato’s close association with Socrates placed him in a dangerous position, and he was forced to remove himself from Athens for his own good. Thus began his travels, which were to last for the next twelve years. After learning all he could at the feet of his master, he would now learn from the world. But the world wasn’t that large in those days, and for the first period of his exile Plato studied just twenty miles away in the neighboring territory of Megara, with his friend Euclid. (This was not the famous geometer but a former pupil of Socrates who had become renowned for the subtlety of his dialectic. Euclid had so loved Socrates that he had traveled through enemy Athenian territory disguised as a woman to be present at the death of his master.)

Plato stayed with Euclid in Megara for three years, then journeyed to Cyrene in North Africa to study with the mathematician Theodorus. After this he seems to have traveled on to Egypt. According to one persistent story, he now wished to visit some magi in the Levant and ended up traveling east as far as the banks of the Ganges, but this seems unlikely.

Possibly during his stay in Megara, or during a stop on his travels, Plato wrote his earliest extant works. These are in the form of dialogues and are heavily influenced by Socrates, both personally and intellectually. Yet Plato was not completely in his shadow. These dialogues are the creation of a consummate mind – great works of literature as well as philosophy. In many of them Socrates makes an appearance as a leading character and puts forward his ideas. He comes across as infuriating, brilliant, but ultimately endearing, a complex blend of the buffoon and the saint.

No less than three of Plato’s early dialogues – The Apology, Crito, and Euthyphron – as well as the later Phaedo, are devoted to the trial, prison days, and ultimate death of Socrates. These events had a profound effect on Plato, and his description of them ranks alongside Hamlet and Dante’s Inferno in Western literature. The Apology describes Socrates’ trial and the seventy-year-old philosopher’s defense of himself before the people of Athens. As a legal or even a convincing defense, this is flimsy to say the least. Socrates treated the charge with the contempt it deserved and moved on to more interesting topics, such as why he was considered to be wise. He maintained that he was merely living up to the role proclaimed for him by the Delphic Oracle, which had described him as the wisest man on earth. At first he had been suspicious of this pronouncement, as he knew nothing (a typical Socratic claim). So he had begun questioning others reputed to be wise, and discovered that in truth they knew nothing too. This is a classic example of the dialectic method: philosophy being used to reduce contemporary thinking to ruins. It bears a curious resemblance to Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis in modern-day philosophy. Indeed, what Socrates taught was not so much a philosophy as philosophic method: clear thinking. This he saw as not only a means to arriving at the truth but also a way to good behavior. He would certainly have concurred with Wittgenstein’s twentieth-century claim: ‘Philosophy is not a theory but an activity’. Such an attitude leaves an essential vacuum at the heart of philosophic thinking. After Socrates, this was to be filled by Plato.

After more than a decade of traveling, Plato arrived in Sicily, where he visited the crater of Mount Etna. This was a great tourist attraction of the period, and not just as a geographical phenomenon. This, people believed, was what the underworld looked like, and a visit to Etna thus afforded an instructive glimpse of future living conditions. But the crater held an even greater attraction for Plato, owing to its association with Empedocles, the fifth-century philosopher-poet. Empedocles had been gifted with such prodigious intellectual powers that he had eventually become convinced he was a god, and had plunged into the boiling lava of Etna to prove it.

More important, here Plato also made contact with the followers of Pythagoras, who flourished throughout the Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy. Pythagoras’s discovery of the relation between number and musical harmony had led him to believe that numbers held the key to understanding the universe. Everything could be explained in terms of number, which existed in an abstract realm beyond the everyday world. This theory had a profound effect on Plato, who came to believe that the ultimate reality was abstract. What began as numbers with Pythagoras was to become forms or pure ideas in Plato’s philosophy.

The central feature of Plato’s philosophy is his Theory of Ideas (or Forms), which he continued to develop all his life. This means that Plato’s theory has come down to us in several differing versions, thus providing philosophers with sufficient material to argue over for centuries to come. (No philosophical theory can hope to last the pace unless it has room for argument about how it should be interpreted.)