2024

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Week 1: Setting the Context

Some of this will be review for those who have done some of the other courses, but the background is helpful in appreciating the basic context of Plato and his philosophy.

Greece in the fifth century B. C.

The fifth century B.C. — running from 500 to 401 B.C. — was arguably the period of greatest political, social, and artistic development for ancient Greece, and certainly the period in which Athens was most prominent. Led by Athens, a coalition of Greek city-states defeated several attacks from Persia, which was at the time the greatest power around the Mediterranean, between the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) and the land and sea victories at Thermopylae and Salamis (480 B.C.). Freedom from the Persian threat allowed a fragile balance of power to develop covering most of the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean, and some of the coastal cities of Asia Minor. Athens became the leading power among them for a period, with the power of the so-called Delian League, which included at its peak more than three hundred separate Greek city-states, but not Sparta or many of the other cities to the south and west. The Delian League continued to prosecute occasional war against the Persians until the middle of the century, when it was concluded officially in 449 B.C. in the Peace of Callias.

The fifth century saw the development of much that we now consider characteristic of ancient Greece, though a good deal of it was in reality confined to Athens itself. The democracy that had taken root at around the turn of the century now came into full flower there, though many other cities had very different forms of government. The growth of what we often call Greek tragedy — in fact Athenian tragedy — took place at the same time. While it had its origins in the late sixth century, it came into prominence with the three great playwrights Aeschylus (ca. 525 – 455 B.C.), Sophocles (ca. 497 – 405 B.C.), and Euripides (ca. 480 – 406 B.C.). Comedy — what we now call Old Comedy — became popular as well. It tended to be edgy and highly political, and the only surviving examples we have are a number of plays of Aristophanes (ca. 446 – 386 B.C.). His satires on Socrates are, Socrates claims, a source of prejudice against him.

Athens: democracy and other problems

While its image has been highly idealized in 2400 years of hindsight, the Athenian democracy was hardly a paragon of what would be considered modern democratic virtues. It had a tumultuous birth, life, and death. There were few restrictions on what it could do, and in the absence of anything like a governing constitution, the will of the majority could be turned to almost any end without formal restriction. It produced wild swings in policy and programs, and an arbitrary structure of justice. A number of people at the time and since have viewed it with considerable skepticism — among the contemporaries Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Plato and Aristotle themselves.

The Peloponnesian War and its aftermath

In 431 B.C., tensions between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) broke out into open war. It was waged intermittently over the ensuing thirty years. Despite early advantages and something like a clear victory, Athens continued to wage war until it lost in 404 B.C. It left the Athenian democracy in disarray, and the state was taken over for a period by a group of oligarchic rulers (the Thirty Tyrants), though the democracy was restored in 403 B.C. While Athens would eventually reacquire some measure of prominence in the Corinthian War (395-387 B.C.), it never again became the dominant power in mainland Greece. By the end of the fourth century B.C. Athens, and most of the rest of mainland Greece had fallen to the power of the Macedonians to the north.

Socrates in the political scene

It was in this defeated and socially chaotic culture that Socrates was brought to trial and convicted. The people of Athens were somewhat dazed by their defeat and were looking to find someone to blame. Socrates was one option. In his Apology, he recounts his part in the wars and his more or less cavalier disobedience to the Thirty Tyrants afterward. For the most part, however, Socrates did not involve himself in political matters, and this is one of the points of contention that arise in the course of his prosecution and defense.

Who is Plato?

Socrates was brought to trial in 399 B.C., on charges of corrupting the youth, and executed that year. His younger friend and associate Plato (the name “Plato” is a nickname apparently implying his broad face: his given name was Aristocles) was about twenty-eight years old at the time; the bulk of his career was spent in recording (with greater or lesser accuracy) the conversations of Socrates — both from the period when they were personally associated, and considerably earlier — even well before Plato’s own birth. Whether those dialogues record actual conversations that Socrates had had is not clear; they might have been based on various reports, or they might have been composed to fill in gaps or answer questions that had arisen in the others. The perennial question that besets Plato scholarship — often simply called the Socratic problem — has to do with whether these are chiefly the work of Plato or of his mentor and teacher. There is probably no way for this problem to be resolved completely; at some point, however, it’s worth considering that, however it came about, the combined (even if undifferentiated) legacy of these two great minds of philosophy is of inestimable significance both in and of itself and for its influence through the succeeding generations. It has been considered important since very early on — with the almost unprecedented result that all, or almost all, of the Platonic corpus has survived.

Questions for discussion