Plato Trivia
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108 free Plato trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Plato trivia starts with the man: the aristocratic family descended from Solon, the brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, the poems he burned on meeting Socrates, the relatives among the Thirty Tyrants, the trial that ended his political ambitions, his studies with Cratylus and the Pythagoreans, three ill-fated trips to Syracuse and the founding of the Academy near the olive grove of Hecademus. It asks who arrived in 367 BC, who succeeded him and where he was buried. The philosophy section covers the Theory of Forms and where it first appears, recollection and the slave boy, the three parts of the soul, the Euthyphro dilemma, and the Republic in depth: Thrasymachus, the Ring of Gyges, the city of pigs, the noble lie and its metals, philosopher-kings, the five regimes, the cave in Book VII, the Myth of Er and Karl Popper's attack. Then the Symposium's hiccups, Diotima and Alcibiades, the Timaeus's Demiurge and Atlantis, the Apology's accusers and Delphic oracle, the Phaedo's Pythagoreans and Crito's rooster, and the Academy's later fate under Sulla and Justinian. It closes with how the dialogues reached us: Thrasyllus's arrangement, Ficino's translation and Whitehead's footnotes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Plato, the Republic, the Academy, the cave allegory, the Symposium, Timaeus, Apology and Phaedo, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit any curious player; the expert tier reaches Philip of Opus and the Ecclesiazusae.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Plato grew up in Athens during which long war?
The Peloponnesian 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.
Q 02Which philosopher joined Plato's Academy as a teenager and stayed for about twenty years?
Aristotle
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.
Q 03By ancient tradition, which plant poison was in the cup Socrates drinks in Plato's account of his execution?
Hemlock
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.
Q 04Plato's mother Perictione traced her family to which Athenian lawgiver, one of the Seven Sages of Greece?
Solon
Solon cancelled the debts that were turning poor Athenians into slaves, a reform remembered as the 'shaking off of burdens'.
Q 05In the Republic, which poet does Socrates bar from the ideal city despite loving his work since boyhood?
Homer
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.
Q 06What did Plato reportedly do with his youthful poems and tragedies when he met Socrates?
Burned them
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.
Q 07Plato's relatives Critias and Charmides belonged to which regime installed in Athens in 404 BC?
The Thirty Tyrants
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.
Q 08Which of Plato's dialogues is the only one without Socrates as a character?
Laws
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.
Q 09Which Sicilian city did Plato visit three times, becoming entangled with its tyrants Dionysius I and II?
Syracuse
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.
Q 10When Plato defined man as a 'featherless biped', a rival philosopher reportedly brought what into his school?
A plucked chicken
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'.
Q 11Speusippus, who took charge of the Academy when Plato died, was which relative of the founder?
His nephew
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.
Q 12A scroll charred by which volcano was read in 2024, pinpointing where in the Academy Plato was buried?
Mount Vesuvius
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.
Q 13What is Plato's most famous philosophical contribution, aimed at the problem of universals?
The Theory of Forms
Q 21Which sophist argues in Republic Book I that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger?
Thrasymachus
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.
Q 22What magical object does Glaucon invoke in Republic Book II to test whether the unobserved stay just?
The Ring of Gyges
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.
Q 23In the Republic's 'noble lie', which metal is mixed into the souls of the city's soldiers?
Silver
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.
Q 14Which dialogue is set in Socrates' prison cell on the day of his death?
Phaedo
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.
Q 15Which modern philosopher said the European tradition consists of 'a series of footnotes to Plato'?
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Q 16In Plato's Meno, whom does Socrates lead through a puzzle about squares to show that knowledge is recollection?
A slave boy
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.
Q 17Plato divided the soul into reason, spirit and which third part?
Appetite
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.
Q 18In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates presses a man prosecuting his own father to define which virtue?
Piety
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.
Q 19In the Republic, Socrates likens the city's guardians to which animals to argue that women should serve too?
Dogs
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.
Q 20What name does Plato give the ideal city of the Republic, ruled by philosopher-kings?
Kallipolis
Kallipolis means 'beautiful city', yet its guardians may own no private property and must eat and live together like soldiers in camp.
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.
Q 24In the Republic's ranking of five regimes, which one does Socrates say tyranny naturally grows out of?
Democracy
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.
Q 25In the allegory of the cave, what do the chained prisoners take for reality?
Shadows on the wall
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.
Q 26With what tale of a soldier who returns from the dead does the Republic end?
The Myth of Er
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.
Q 27Which 1945 book by Karl Popper attacked Plato's Republic as a totalitarian dystopia?
The Open Society and Its Enemies
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.
Q 28Which Roman general felled the Academy's sacred grove in 86 BC for timber to build siege engines?
Sulla
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.
Q 29Which emperor closed the revived Neoplatonic Academy in AD 529?
Justinian I
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.
Q 30Tradition says a sign over the door of Plato's Academy turned away anyone ignorant of which subject?
Geometry
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.