Plato was born at Athens in 428/7 B.C.; thus he grew
up in the throes of the Peloponnesian war. He died in 347
B.C., not long before the Hellenic lands fell
definitively under Macedonian rule. Both of his parents
were from families belonging to the old Athenian
aristocracy: members of these families had been
figures on the political stage. Plato himself left active
politics severely alone.
His family background allowed
him to receive a catholic education: he studied
literature, sciences, philosophy, and music. He was a
pupil of Cratylus; and Cratylus had himself been a pupil
of Heraclitus. He continued his studies with Socrates,
the beloved teacher whose condemnation and death not only
sickened and disillusioned Plato but significantly
coloured his political thinking: it shook still further
his belief in the institutions of the democracy.
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After Socrates died, Plato left Athens for Megara. After a
brief return to Athens, he embarked on a series of voyages to
Sicily, Lower Italy, and Egypt and Cyrene. He was especially
interested in Sicily, visiting it thrice, and his sojourn there
was linked with experiments in organizing an ideal, perfect
state. Every one of his journeys had study as its aim; and in the
cities he visited he was able to meet important personalities in
the political and scientific world.
In 387 B.C. he came home to Athens. He had a plot of land in
the suburb of Colonos, near a shrine sacred to the hero Academus,
and it was there that he set up his own philsophical school
(named 'Academy', after the hero). This, the largest school in
the ancient world, lasted until 529 A.D., when it was shut down
by the emperor Justinian. The Academy taught astronomy,
mathematics, and above all, philosophy. The governing principle
was that the end of education is to orient the pupil's mind and
soul towards the contemplation of what is stable and unchanging -
that is, towards the world of ideas/the forms.
The influence of Plato's oeuvre,
from his day to our own, has been enormous. Starting with St
Augustine, and ending with Bacon, numerous authors were to be
imitators of his, notably of his ideal state; and more recent
trends in philosophy have been influenced by Plato's ideas.
We can cite as typical the opposition between
followers of Plato and Aristotle in the Byzantine world.