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60 free Plato trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01Roughly when did Plato live?
c. 428–347 BC
He was born into an aristocratic Athenian family during the Peloponnesian War and is usually called the foundational thinker of Western philosophy.
Q 02Which student arrived at Plato's Academy in 367 BC and became as famous as his master?
Aristotle
He came from Stagira, shortly before Plato left on his second trip to Sicily.
Q 03What did the property of Plato's Academy consist of at first?
A house with a garden
During his lifetime the school's work probably took place in an open area for the study of philosophy and mathematics.
Q 04According to Diogenes Laertius, what was Plato's birth name, 'Plato' being a nickname?
Aristocles
Modern scholars widely regard the story as false.
Q 05Through his mother Perictione, Plato was descended from which Athenian statesman?
Solon
Solon is credited with laying the foundations of Athenian democracy.
Q 06Which two brothers of Plato appear as Socrates' main interlocutors in the Republic?
Glaucon and Adeimantus
They distinguished themselves at the battle of Megara in 409 BC; Plato also had a sister, Potone, and a half-brother, Antiphon.
Q 07What did Plato reportedly do with his youthful poems and tragedies when he met Socrates?
Burned them
He had written dithyrambs, lyric poems and a tetralogy of tragedies before turning to philosophy.
Q 08Plato's relatives Critias and Charmides belonged to which regime installed in Athens in 404 BC?
The Thirty Tyrants
Plato was invited to join but declined, disillusioned when they tried to implicate Socrates in seizing Leon of Salamis.
Q 09Which of Plato's dialogues is the only one in which Socrates does not appear?
Laws
It was Plato's longest work and still unfinished at his death.
Q 10Which Sicilian city did Plato visit three times, becoming entangled with its tyrants Dionysius I and II?
Syracuse
Dion, the tyrant's brother-in-law, became his disciple; on the third visit Dionysius II held Plato against his will until a friend from Tarentum interceded.
Q 11Which Pythagorean of Tarentum was Plato's friend and rescuer from Dionysius II's court?
Archytas
After the Corinthian War Plato travelled to southern Italy to study with him and other Pythagoreans.
Q 12Who succeeded Plato as head of the Academy?
Speusippus, his nephew
Speusippus was the son of Plato's sister Potone; Xenocrates followed him in 339 BC.
Q 13Where was Plato buried after his death in 348/347 BC?
In his garden at the Academy
His surviving will does not mention the Academy, suggesting a separate endowment.
Q 21What name does Plato give the utopian city of the Republic, ruled by philosopher-kings?
Kallipolis
Karl Popper's 1945 attack singled it out as a dystopia.
Q 22Which sophist argues in Republic Book I that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger?
Thrasymachus
Cephalus had said justice was honesty and repaying debts, which Socrates refutes with the example of a borrowed knife and a madman.
Q 23What magical object does Glaucon invoke in Republic Book II to test whether the unobserved stay just?
The Ring of Gyges
Gyges uses the ring's invisibility to commit injustices and gain great advantages.
Q 14What is Plato's most famous philosophical contribution, aimed at the problem of universals?
The Theory of Forms
It holds that the changing material world is only a copy of an unchanging world of Forms grasped by reason.
Q 15Which dialogue, set on the day of Socrates' death, first introduces Plato's theory of Forms?
Phaedo
Its subtitle is On the Soul; Francis Cornford called Forms and the immortal soul the twin pillars of Platonism.
Q 16Which modern philosopher said the European tradition consists of 'a series of footnotes to Plato'?
Alfred North Whitehead
Plato's complete works are believed to have survived, unlike those of nearly all his contemporaries.
Q 17In the Meno, how does Socrates show that knowledge is recollection?
By drawing a geometrical fact out of an uneducated slave boy
Plato links recollection to reincarnation, which he discusses in several dialogues.
Q 18Where does a late Platonic dialogue locate the three parts of the soul in the body?
Head, upper torso and middle torso
The Republic gives the soul the same three parts, mirrored by the three classes of the ideal city.
Q 19What dilemma does Socrates pose in the Euthyphro?
Is the pious loved by the gods because pious, or pious because loved?
The Protagoras separately argues that no one does wrong on purpose and that knowledge is virtue.
Q 20What is the Greek title of the Republic?
Politeia
Written around 375 BC, it asks what justice is and whether the just man is happier than the unjust.
Q 24What is the 'noble lie' of the Republic, illustrated by the myth of the metals?
Citizens contain gold, silver or bronze, fitting them to rule, guard or produce
Socrates says the myth would make citizens 'more inclined to care for the state and one another'.
Q 25What are the five types of regime Socrates ranks in Republic Book VIII, from best to worst?
Aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny
Tyranny is the most unjust; democracy's populism lets a demagogue exploit mob rule to seize power.
Q 26In which book of the Republic does the allegory of the cave appear?
VII
It follows the analogies of the Sun and the Divided Line and is narrated by Socrates to Glaucon.
Q 27In the allegory of the cave, what do the chained prisoners take for reality?
Shadows cast on the wall by objects carried past a fire
The freed prisoner who returns is the philosopher; the film The Matrix and Orwell's 1984 echo the image.
Q 28With what tale of a soldier who returns from the dead does the Republic end?
The Myth of Er
Book X also banishes imitative artists from the just city.
Q 29Which 1945 book by Karl Popper attacked Plato's Republic as a totalitarian dystopia?
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Gadamer, by contrast, read the city as an ironic heuristic never meant to be built.
Q 30Which Roman general axed the sacred olive trees of the Academy in 86 BC to build siege engines?
Sulla
Even invading Spartans had spared the 'groves of Academe' out of respect for the Dioscuri.