108 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.

Which wife of Socrates is led home in tears at the start of Plato's Phaedo, holding their child?

Xanthippe cries out that this is the last time Socrates will talk with his friends, and he asks for her to be taken home. Plato names her in no other dialogue.

In Plato's Phaedo, which storyteller's work has Socrates been turning into verse while he waits in prison?

Aesop supplied the plots because Socrates, who had never written a line of poetry before, said he had no talent for inventing stories of his own.

What reason does the narrator of Plato's Phaedo give for Plato's own absence from Socrates' last day?

He was ill, Phaedo believes, so Plato writes himself out of the room. He never speaks as himself anywhere in his dialogues.

Which French painter's 1787 canvas The Death of Socrates stages the final scene of Plato's Phaedo?

Jacques-Louis David took liberties with the text: he seats an aged Plato at the foot of the bed, though Plato was a young man when Socrates died.

The sacred ship that delays Socrates' execution in Plato's Phaedo commemorates a voyage by which hero?

Theseus had sailed with fourteen young Athenians and brought them home alive, so Athens sent a thanksgiving ship every year and executed no one until it came back.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates tells Simmias that true philosophers spend their whole lives practising for what?

Dying is only the soul's release from the body, Socrates reasons, and a philosopher has spent years trying to free the mind from the body's distractions.

What does Socrates do just before the poison in Plato's Phaedo, to spare the women a task afterwards?

Socrates takes a bath so the women will not have to wash his corpse, then says goodbye to his three sons and the women of his household.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates drinks the poison near which time of day, though friends urge him to wait?

Sunset was near but the light still lay on the hilltops, and Socrates refused to linger, saying it would be absurd to cling to a life that was already forfeit.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates says people live around the sea like ants or which other creatures around a pond?

Frogs around a marsh is his image for how small the known world is: he pictures the true earth as vast, with humanity huddled in one damp hollow of it.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates suggests that gluttons and drunkards may come back to life as which animals?

Donkeys suit souls ruled by the belly, he says, while the violent return as wolves or hawks and the dutiful but unphilosophical as bees or ants.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates cannot be executed until a sacred ship returns from which Aegean island?

Delos was sacred to Apollo, and from the moment his priest crowned the ship's stern Athens had to stay unpolluted, so the death sentence waited for the ship's return.

Simmias and Cebes, who raise the hardest objections in Plato's Phaedo, are visitors from which Greek city?

Thebes was home to both men, who had earlier offered their money to help Socrates escape from prison, an offer he turned down.

In Plato's Phaedo, Simmias fears the soul is like the tuning of which instrument, lost when it breaks?

A lyre can be smashed and its strings cut, Simmias argues, and the harmony ends with it, so the soul might equally end when the body does.

In Plato's Phaedo, Cebes likens the soul to which old craftsman, who outlasts most of his own handiwork?

A weaver wears out many coats in a lifetime yet the last one survives him, Cebes says, so a soul that outlasts several bodies could still perish in the end.

In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates uses pairs of sticks and stones to argue we are born knowing which idea?

Equality itself is never seen, Socrates argues: no two sticks match perfectly, so the standard they fall short of must be remembered from before birth.

Late in Plato's Phaedo, Socrates pictures every river on earth flowing in and out of which vast chasm?

Tartarus pierces the whole earth in this telling, and the worst offenders are hurled into it for ever while lesser ones are washed back out after a year.

In Plato's Phaedo, whose book claiming that Mind orders all things first thrilled the young Socrates?

Anaxagoras let him down by falling back on air and ether as causes, never showing why things are arranged for the best.

In the frame story of Plato's Phaedo, which listener in the town of Phlius asks to hear how Socrates died?

Echecrates keeps breaking into the story, at one point admitting that the objections have shaken his own trust in argument.

Which Athenian board, named for its size, has Socrates unchained on his last morning in Plato's Phaedo?

The Eleven's servant later announces the hour and bursts into tears, calling Socrates the noblest and gentlest man ever to enter the prison.

In Plato's cave allegory, what is the very last thing the freed prisoner becomes able to look at?

The sun comes last because his eyes need time: he works up from reflections to solid things, then to the heavens after dark, before he can face the source of all light.

Which science-fiction film counts Plato's allegory of the cave among its influences?

The Matrix mirrors the freed prisoner: its hero is unplugged from a lifelong illusion and has to adjust to a far harsher real world.

In Plato's cave allegory, what light source behind the prisoners produces the moving images they watch?

A fire blazes above and behind them, with a raised walkway in between along which people carry statues and figures that cast the images.

In Plato's cave allegory, the prisoners are chained by their legs and which other part of the body?

The neck is held fast so that no prisoner can turn his head, which is why none has ever seen what lies behind him or even his neighbours directly.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates offers the cave allegory as an image of the effect of what on human nature?

Education, for Socrates, is the whole point of the image: the prisoners show a mind left untaught, and the climb into daylight shows what learning does to it.

In Plato's cave allegory, what would the prisoners do to anyone who tried to free them and lead them up?

They would kill him if they could lay hands on him, Socrates says, since the returned man's failing eyes convince them that the journey up only does harm.

Remembering his fellow prisoners from the sunlight, the man freed from Plato's cave feels what for them?

Pity is what he feels, Socrates says, and he would rather be a penniless servant above ground than win every prize the cave has to offer.

When Glaucon calls the prisoners in Plato's cave strange, whom does Socrates say they are like?

Ourselves, Socrates replies, turning the picture on his listeners: everyone starts out mistaking appearances for the real thing.

In Plato's cave allegory, how does the freed prisoner get up the steep path into the daylight?

He is dragged by force up a rough, steep climb and held until he stands in the daylight, pained, angry and too dazzled to see anything at all.

Before he can look at things directly, the man freed from Plato's cave studies their reflections in what?

Water gives him a gentler copy of the people and objects around him, a halfway step for eyes that have known only a dim cave.

In Plato's cave, the low partition behind the prisoners is likened to a screen used by which performers?

Puppeteers hide below a screen and hold their figures above it, and the people in the cave do the same with statues of men and animals.

In Plato's cave allegory, what makes the prisoners believe the images passing before them can speak?

An echo off the far side of the cave carries the words of the people walking behind, so each sound seems to come from whatever image is passing.

In Plato's Republic, what must those who escape the cave be made to do, though they would rather stay above?

Return and rule is the price of their schooling: Socrates says the city raised them to lead, so they must go back down and share the prisoners' labours.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates explains that the cave itself stands for the world known through which sense?

Sight is the cave's sense: the prison is everything the eyes show us, and the climb out is the mind's ascent to what can only be understood.

Which English philosopher borrowed Plato's image for his 'Idols of the Cave', each person's private biases?

Francis Bacon listed them in his Novum Organum as errors bred by each person's own temperament, upbringing and habits.

Which Nobel-winning novelist's book The Cave ends with Plato's cave found beneath a giant shopping complex?

José Saramago tells it through an elderly potter who is forced to move into the complex after it cancels its orders for his crockery.

In Plato's Republic, the cave allegory comes straight after which geometric image of four levels of knowing?

A divided line sorts the mind's states into four segments, the lower two for what is visible and the upper two for what is grasped by thought alone.

After Plato's cave allegory in the Republic, which study does Socrates call the coping-stone of the rest?

Dialectic, the skill of asking and answering questions, is set over every other science, with nothing higher left for the guardians to learn.

After the cave in Plato's Republic, Socrates says real teaching adds nothing new; what does it do to the soul?

Turns it around is his image: the power to learn is already there, like an eye that can only face the light if the whole body turns with it.

In Plato's cave, the prisoners give honours to whoever is best at which skill involving the passing images?

Predicting the next one, by remembering which usually came before and after, earns prizes the freed man no longer cares about.

The title of Plato's Apology comes from a Greek word meaning what, rather than an expression of regret?

A defence speech is what the Greek apologia meant, and Socrates is anything but sorry: he tells the jurors he will never stop doing philosophy.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates says his mission began when which sanctuary's oracle declared no one wiser?

Delphi's priestess gave the answer to a friend who had dared to ask, and Socrates set out to prove her wrong by finding someone wiser.

After quizzing politicians and poets in Plato's Apology, Socrates finds his only edge is admitting his own what?

Ignorance, honestly admitted, is the whole of his wisdom: the men he questioned knew nothing either but were sure that they did.

After the guilty verdict in Plato's Apology, what does Socrates first say he deserves instead of a penalty?

Free meals for life in the Prytaneum was an honour Athens kept for Olympic victors and public benefactors, and Socrates argues he has served the city better than any champion.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates says death is either a journey to another world or something like what?

A dreamless sleep would be a gain, he says, since few nights of anyone's life pass so pleasantly, and the other possibility lets him go on questioning the dead.

In Plato's Apology, what has warned Socrates off mistakes since childhood, yet stayed silent at his trial?

A divine voice only ever told him what not to do, so its silence on the day of the trial convinced him that death could not be an evil.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates blames his bad name partly on which stage comedy that shows him walking on air?

The Clouds had put a character called Socrates on stage, dangling in a basket to study the sky, and he says the jurors had grown up on that caricature.

Besides Plato, which soldier-historian and follower of Socrates wrote an Apology about the trial?

Xenophon was away serving with a Greek mercenary army during the trial, so his version relies on a friend who had been in court.

In Plato's Apology, which common courtroom tactic does Socrates refuse to use to win the jurors' sympathy?

Bringing in his children to weep before the jury would shame Athens, he says, and a juror has sworn to judge the case, not to hand out favours.

In Plato's Phaedo, what does the jailer tell Socrates to do after drinking the poison, until his legs feel heavy?

Walk around was the whole instruction: once his legs grew heavy he was to lie down and let the poison work, and the numbness then crept upward from his feet.

In Plato's Apology, which hero of the Trojan War does Socrates cite as his model for staying at his post?

Achilles was warned by his goddess mother that killing Hector would seal his own fate, and Socrates says a man must likewise hold his post whatever the danger.