Plato: Philosophy in an Hour

Neither democracy nor tyranny had worked, and Athens desperately needed government that could provide order

There was complete equality of men and women (though in another dialogue Plato does let slip that “if the soul fails to live well for its appointed time in a man, it passes into the body of a woman”

Until the age of twenty they would be educated in gymnastics and uplifting music

And it wasn’t long before Plato was spotted in the slave market at Aegina by his well-heeled old friend Anniceris the Cyrenaic, who bought him for the bargain price of twenty mina

This reads in part like an abstract echo of the Book of Genesis (which was written some eight hundred years before the Pythagorean conception from which it is derived

His father Ariston was descended from Codrus, the last king of Athens, and his mother was descended from the great Athenian lawmaker Solon.

At his birth in 428 B.C. Plato was given the name Aristocles

Pythagoras believed that beyond the jumbled world of appearances there lies an abstract harmonious world of number. In fact, his conception of number was closer to what we would call ‘form

Indeed, what Socrates taught was not so much a philosophy as philosophic method: clear thinking. This he saw as not only a means to arriving at the truth but also a way to good behavior.

No less than three of Plato’s early dialogues – The Apology, Crito, and Euthyphron –as well as the later Phaedo, are devoted to the trial, prison days, and ultimate death of Socrates