Plato – Travels in Sicily

Plato was born in Athens in 427 B.C., in an aristocratic family which included considerable figures in the city, including his mother’s cousin, Critias, who was one of the Thirty Tyrants. His youthful years passed amid the most serious political unrest; the Peloponnesian War ended in 404 with the crushing of Athens, whose maritime empire was destroyed forever; inside the city, it is a seesaw between democracy and an oligarchic tyranny; democracy was overthrown in March 411 by the oligarchy of the Four Hundred, which lasted only a few months; in 404, the Lacedaemonians forced the Athenians to adopt the oligarchic government of the Thirty Tyrants; these tyrants, whose leader was Critias, were systematically hostile to the Athenian navy and commerce; they fell in September 403 to be replaced by the democratic government which was to condemn Socrates. Plato’s work bears the mark of these events: political instability of governments, danger of imperialism based on maritime trade, these are the constant themes of his political works; as hostile to the tyranny of Critias as to the democracy of Pericles, he had to look elsewhere than in the Athenian environment for the possibility of political renewal. The death of Socrates must have been a definitive reason for the political pessimism which emerges in the Gorgias (515 e).

It was nine years after this death that he undertook his first major journey (390-388), which led him first to Egypt, whose venerable Antiquity and perfect political stability he never ceased to admire, then in Cyrene, where he met the geometer Theodore, finally in Magna Graecia where he met the Pythagoreans, and in Sicily, where he visited the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse for the first time and became friends with his nephew Dion. It was on his return that he founded his school; he bought near the village of Colone a piece of land called Academy, on which he established a sanctuary of the Muses; this fund became the collective property of the school, or religious association, which annually celebrated the feast of the Muses; she kept it until the time of Justinian (529). What did Plato’s teaching consist of? This is what is difficult to know, because most of his works, intended for a wide audience, should not reflect this; However, we must except those kinds of logical exercises which are the second part of the Parmenides and the beginnings of the Theaetetus and the Sophist; if we pay attention that these exercises are intended to test the logical vigor of the student, that, moreover, Plato considers the influence of living speech to be much greater than that of writing (Phaedrus), finally that speech, as a Socratic understands it, is less exposition followed than discussion, we can undoubtedly conclude that the doctrinal exposition must not have had the place it took in Aristotle.

He made a second trip to Sicily, in 366, at the urging of Dion; Dion hoped that he could win over Dionysius the Younger, who had just succeeded Dionysius the Elder, to his ideas; but on his arrival, Dion was disgraced and exiled, and Plato was, for a year, rather the prisoner than the host of the tyrant. In 361, at the urging of Dionysius, a new trip to Syracuse, as unsuccessful as the first two: received magnificently, pampered as a friend of the Pythagorean Archytas, tyrant of Tarentum, he was unable to reconcile Dion with his cousin; the last ten years of his life were darkened by the conspiracy of Dion against Dionysius (357); the attempt failed, and Plato’s friend perished tragically, the victim of a conspiracy (353).

It is to the letters of Plato that we owe some information on these trips to Sicily; no document of this kind speaks of the relationships he undoubtedly had with the Athenian political advisors of his time, notably with Isocrates, who also claimed to be a philosopher; who opposed his Busiris to the pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates; but he criticized certain Socratics quite violently, such as the cynic Antisthenes. Now, Plato, in the Phaedrus (278 e-279 b), publicly demonstrated his sympathy for this rhetorician who, like him, had been a companion of Socrates; he thinks there is a philosopher in him; Isocrates, wise mind, friend of a moderate democracy, enemy of political utopia, basically had the same goal as Plato, the defense of Hellenism against barbaric danger (1). Plato died in 348, during the war that Philip had undertaken against the Athenians and which was to result in the definitive political decadence of the Greek city.

(1) G. Mathieu, Les Idées politiques d’lsocrate, 1925, p. 177-181.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2023 Nicolae Sfetcu