58 Fun Facts About Plato

Plato grew up in Athens during which long war?

The Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC, when Plato was a young man: Sparta, a land power, finally beat seafaring Athens with a fleet paid for by Persian money.

Which philosopher joined Plato's Academy as a teenager and stayed for about twenty years?

Aristotle left Athens around the time Plato died, went on to tutor the young Alexander the Great, and later came back to open his own school, the Lyceum.

By ancient tradition, which plant poison was in the cup Socrates drinks in Plato's account of his execution?

Hemlock. In Plato's telling the numbness creeps upward: Socrates walks until his legs grow heavy, lies down, and the attendant presses his foot to check whether he can still feel it.

Plato's mother Perictione traced her family to which Athenian lawgiver, one of the Seven Sages of Greece?

Solon cancelled the debts that were turning poor Athenians into slaves, a reform remembered as the 'shaking off of burdens'.

In the Republic, which poet does Socrates bar from the ideal city despite loving his work since boyhood?

Homer is hailed as the teacher of all the tragic poets, yet Socrates argues his gods and heroes set bad examples, so only hymns to the gods and praise of good men may stay.

What did Plato reportedly do with his youthful poems and tragedies when he met Socrates?

Burned them: the story goes that he was about to enter a tragedy contest when he heard Socrates outside the theatre, and he called on the fire god as his verses went up.

Plato's relatives Critias and Charmides belonged to which regime installed in Athens in 404 BC?

The Thirty Tyrants invited Plato to join them, says the Seventh Letter attributed to him, but he turned away after they ordered Socrates to help seize an innocent man, Leon of Salamis, for execution; Socrates went home instead.

Which of Plato's dialogues is the only one without Socrates as a character?

Laws swaps Socrates for an unnamed Athenian Stranger, who talks lawmaking with a Spartan and a Cretan as the three old men walk across Crete to the cave of Zeus.

Which Sicilian city did Plato visit three times, becoming entangled with its tyrants Dionysius I and II?

Syracuse was where Plato, by the account in the Seventh Letter attributed to him, hoped to turn a young tyrant into a philosopher-king; instead Dionysius II grew suspicious and held him until friends secured his release.

When Plato defined man as a 'featherless biped', a rival philosopher reportedly brought what into his school?

A plucked chicken: Diogenes the Cynic is said to have held it up and announced, 'Here is Plato's man', after which the definition was patched to add 'with flat nails'.

Speusippus, who took charge of the Academy when Plato died, was which relative of the founder?

His nephew, the son of Plato's sister Potone. Speusippus ran the school for eight years and, crippled by paralysis, is said to have sent for Xenocrates to take over.

A scroll charred by which volcano was read in 2024, pinpointing where in the Academy Plato was buried?

Mount Vesuvius buried a library at Herculaneum in AD 79; one carbonised scroll, read with new imaging, places Plato's grave in a garden of his own inside the Academy.

What is Plato's most famous philosophical contribution, aimed at the problem of universals?

The Theory of Forms holds that the table you touch is only a copy of a perfect pattern grasped by reason; Plato raised some of the sharpest objections to it himself, in the dialogue Parmenides.

Which dialogue is set in Socrates' prison cell on the day of his death?

Phaedo opens by explaining the weeks of delay: no one could be executed while Athens' sacred ship was away at Delos, so Socrates spent the wait talking philosophy in his cell.

Which modern philosopher said the European tradition consists of 'a series of footnotes to Plato'?

Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician for decades and took up a philosophy chair at Harvard only at 63; the line comes from his book Process and Reality.

In Plato's Meno, whom does Socrates lead through a puzzle about squares to show that knowledge is recollection?

A slave boy who has never studied the subject works out how to double a square, guided only by questions, which Socrates takes as proof the answer was already in him.

Plato divided the soul into reason, spirit and which third part?

Appetite sat in the belly, Plato said, with spirit in the chest and reason in the head, and a just person keeps them in that order of command, as his ideal city does.

In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates presses a man prosecuting his own father to define which virtue?

Piety: Euthyphro claims to know what the gods want, so Socrates asks whether they love the pious because it is pious, or whether it is pious only because they love it.

In the Republic, Socrates likens the city's guardians to which animals to argue that women should serve too?

Dogs: Socrates points out that nobody keeps female guard dogs at home while the males hunt and keep watch, so women with the talent should train and rule alongside men.

What name does Plato give the ideal city of the Republic, ruled by philosopher-kings?

Kallipolis means 'beautiful city', yet its guardians may own no private property and must eat and live together like soldiers in camp.

Which sophist argues in Republic Book I that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger?

Thrasymachus storms into the conversation sneering at Socrates' questions, but by the end of Book I, sweating in the summer heat, he is blushing as his case collapses.

What magical object does Glaucon invoke in Republic Book II to test whether the unobserved stay just?

The Ring of Gyges makes a shepherd invisible; he seduces the queen, murders the king and takes the throne, and Glaucon bets that anyone, honest or not, would do the same.

In the Republic's 'noble lie', which metal is mixed into the souls of the city's soldiers?

Silver marked the soldiers, gold the rulers, and iron and bronze the farmers and craftsmen, yet a golden child born to bronze parents was to be raised to the ruling class.

In the Republic's ranking of five regimes, which one does Socrates say tyranny naturally grows out of?

Democracy: Socrates argues that its thirst for unlimited freedom breeds disorder, until the people raise up a champion to protect them and he makes himself tyrant.

In the allegory of the cave, what do the chained prisoners take for reality?

Shadows on the wall are all the chained prisoners have ever seen, so when one is freed and returns to describe daylight, the others decide the trip has ruined his eyes.

With what tale of a soldier who returns from the dead does the Republic end?

The Myth of Er has a soldier revive on his funeral pyre and report that souls pick their next lives; Odysseus, cured of ambition, chooses the quiet life of a private nobody.

Which 1945 book by Karl Popper attacked Plato's Republic as a totalitarian dystopia?

The Open Society and Its Enemies was the Austrian-born Popper's answer to the fascism that overran his homeland: teaching in New Zealand, he turned from the philosophy of science to politics.

Which Roman general felled the Academy's sacred grove in 86 BC for timber to build siege engines?

Sulla was besieging Athens and had run short of timber, so he took the grove that invading Spartan armies, by tradition, had always left untouched.

Which emperor closed the revived Neoplatonic Academy in AD 529?

Justinian I, a Christian emperor, barred pagans from teaching in 529; the school he silenced was a later revival, founded centuries after Plato's own had died out.

Tradition says a sign over the door of Plato's Academy turned away anyone ignorant of which subject?

Geometry: the motto 'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter' is reported only by writers many centuries later, so it may be legend, but it fits a school that prized mathematics as training for the mind.

In legend, the Academy's namesake hero told Castor and Pollux where which kidnapped girl was hidden?

Helen, years before Troy, had been carried off by Theseus; in Plutarch's telling Akademos revealed her hiding place to her brothers, and in thanks Spartan armies later spared his grove outside Athens.

Which god do the guests praise in speeches at the banquet of Plato's Symposium?

Eros is praised by one guest after another until Socrates' turn, when he argues that Love is not a god at all but a spirit shuttling between gods and mortals.

Which playwright's turn to speak in Plato's Symposium is delayed by a fit of hiccups?

Aristophanes hands his turn to a doctor, cures the hiccups with a sneeze, then tells the myth that humans were once double creatures split in two, each forever seeking its other half.

Which wise woman does Socrates cite in the Symposium as his teacher on love and beauty?

Diotima of Mantinea teaches a ladder of love, climbing from one beautiful body to Beauty itself; Socrates adds that her sacrifices once held off a plague from Athens for ten years.

Which drunken general bursts into the Symposium late and praises Socrates instead of the god?

Alcibiades arrives crowned with ivy and violets and confesses that, for all his looks, he never managed to seduce Socrates, who simply slept beside him unmoved.

Plato paired each of the four elements with a regular solid: which shape did he give to earth?

The cube went to earth because it sits most firmly on its base; fire got the sharp little tetrahedron, and a fifth solid was left over for the heavens.

According to Critias, in which country did an Athenian lawgiver hear the story of Atlantis?

Egypt: an aged priest at Saïs teases the visitor that Greeks are always children, their past wiped out by one catastrophe after another, while Egypt's temples kept the records.

Which three men formally accused Socrates at the trial recorded in Plato's Apology?

Anytus, Meletus and Lycon spoke, Socrates says, for the craftsmen and politicians, the poets and the orators: the very groups whose claims to wisdom he had punctured.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates compares himself to which insect, sent to sting a sluggish horse awake?

A gadfly: Socrates tells the jury that Athens is a great, lazy horse that needs stinging awake, and warns that if they swat him they will doze on for the rest of their lives.

What were the two charges against Socrates in 399 BC?

Corrupting the youth and impiety: found guilty and asked to name his own penalty, Socrates proposed free meals for life at public expense, then a fine, and the jury chose death.

On his last day, Plato's Socrates says he shares a gift of prophecy with which birds, sacred to Apollo?

Swans, he says, sing loudest just before death out of joy, not grief, because they foresee the good awaiting them: an early telling of the 'swan song'.

Socrates' last words ask which old friend to pay a debt of a rooster to the god of healing?

Crito, a friend of about the same age, had offered days earlier to pay for an escape from prison; Socrates refused, saying he would not break faith with the city that had convicted him.

Plato's teacher Cratylus followed which thinker, credited with saying no one steps in the same river twice?

Heraclitus taught that everything flows. Cratylus went one better, insisting that you cannot step into the same river even once.

In Plato's Phaedrus, a legendary king warns that which new invention will make people forgetful?

Writing, the king says, will let people stop exercising their memories and seem wise without being so; Plato makes the case, of course, in a written book.

Which family funded Marsilio Ficino's first complete Latin translation of Plato, printed in 1484?

The Medici: Cosimo took the doctor's son into his household, gave him a country house at Careggi and set him to turning all of Plato into Latin.

In Plato's Apology, which kind of life does Socrates call unfit for a human being to live?

The unexamined life: Socrates says it while refusing to buy his freedom with silence, telling the jury that questioning himself and others every day is the greatest good a person can have.

Plato seems to have drawn on the followers of which thinker, credited with teaching that all things are number?

Pythagoras left behind a brotherhood that mixed mathematics with belief in reincarnation, and both turn up again in Plato, whose rulers train on numbers and whose souls are reborn.

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates likens which prized skill to pastry-baking, a knack for flattery and no true art?

Rhetoric, Socrates argues, stands to justice as pastry-baking stands to medicine: it pleases the crowd without knowing what is good for it.

In the Republic, Glaucon dismisses Socrates' first, simple city as fit only for which animals?

Pigs: the first city lives on bread, olives and figs with no couches or sauces, and Glaucon scoffs that swine would be fed the same, so Socrates adds luxuries, and with them war.

The standard page-numbering system for Plato's works comes from whose 1578 Geneva edition?

Henricus Stephanus, the Latin name of the French printer Henri Estienne, split each page into sections lettered a to e, which is why scholars still cite lines such as 'Republic 514a'.

Ancient biographers say a Sicilian tyrant punished Plato's frankness in which way?

Sold him into slavery, or so the biographers tell it: on the island of Aegina an admirer from Cyrene bought Plato's freedom and then refused to be repaid.

In Plato's Theaetetus, Socrates compares his questioning to the work of which profession, his own mother's?

A midwife: Socrates says he is barren of wisdom himself but helps others give birth to their ideas, then tests whether each newborn thought is true or a false birth.

In Plato's telling, the island of Atlantis lay in the ocean just beyond which landmark?

The Pillars of Heracles, the Greek name for the Strait of Gibraltar: Plato set Atlantis out in the Atlantic, made it larger than Libya and Asia together, and sank it in a single day and night.

Which Renaissance painter placed Plato at the centre of his Vatican fresco The School of Athens?

Raphael shows Plato pointing to the sky while the pupil beside him holds a hand out over the earth, a contrast usually read as lofty ideals against the everyday world.

The 17th-century English thinkers who tried to reconcile Plato with Christianity were based at which university?

Cambridge: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and their circle, most of them trained at Emmanuel College, turned to Plato to argue that reason and faith could never truly conflict.

Which logician's argument that numbers are real abstract objects revived Plato's influence on the philosophy of mathematics?

Gottlob Frege held that numbers exist whether or not anyone thinks of them. His own logical system was undone in 1902, when Bertrand Russell wrote to him with a paradox as its second volume went to press.

In which public lecture is Plato said to have set out his highest principle?

On the Good: Aristoxenus, a generation later, reports that the talk ran to mathematics and astronomy and left its unprepared public audience baffled.

Which Jewish philosopher references Plato in his Guide for the Perplexed?

Maimonides framed the Guide as a letter to a gifted student torn between philosophy and the teachings of his religion: the 'perplexed' of the title.