‘Plato: A Civic Life’
By Carol Atack
Reaktion Books, 240 Pages

Strictly speaking, there can be no biography of Plato — only what Carol Atack calls a “biographical tradition.” Exactly when he was born, exactly where he traveled, and to what extent his famous dialogues are fact and not fiction remain subject to debate and speculation. Much of what has been written about Plato’s life is the product of authors born many years after his death.

Without doubt, parent-less Plato met Socrates at an impressionable age. The execution of the man who taught Plato philosophy also served as a life-long example of the need to be circumspect, to avoid politics as much as possible, and to use the dialogue form so as to obviate the direct expression of opinions that might get a philosopher in trouble.

Plato’s well known skepticism of democracy seems the result of his fear of what happens when you put things to a vote. That’s how Socrates died — voted into a death sentence when his case was presented to a Greek jury evidently fed up with the philosopher’s outspoken questioning of the community’s fundamental beliefs, which supposedly led to the corruption of young minds.

The truth, Plato came to believe, was not empirically demonstrable but had its source in ideal forms beyond the mortal world. In his own time, though, Plato was attacked for the notion that we are no better off than those dwellers in the famous allegory of the cave who saw only the shadows of what was real, not reality itself.  

Ms. Atack parses the biographical tradition, especially the so-called seventh letter, one of several epistolary communications attributed to Plato but that are probably the product of those writing in Plato’s voice, seeking to fill the gaps in the life of a canny thinker.

Ms. Atack cannot let the seventh letter alone because it contains a “great deal of personal information, explaining Plato’s motives for choosing certain courses of actions, such as his apparent withdrawal from political life in the wake of Socrates’ death.”

The author explores the origins of Plato’s skepticism about democracy, noting that along with his brothers he was closely connected to the new regime of oligarchs, known as the “board of Thirty.” Members of his extended family were involved in “key executive roles and with clear responsibility for the regime’s brutal actions.”

Plato might well have pursued a political career, Ms. Atack suggests, if the regime had not turned against Socrates. Even when democracy was restored, the results led to the people taking “revenge for the wrongs they had suffered under the oligarchy.”

At Socrates’s trial, Plato was nowhere to be found, even though he wrote up what happened and portrayed Socrates as unwilling to escape into exile, and affirming his respect for the rule of law even when it was applied unjustly against him. 

One of Plato’s main failures, as Aristotle saw it, was his attempt in the “Republic” to create an ideal state that had no convincing examples in the governments of Greece or anywhere else for that matter. So put out was Plato with the constant changes in the political history of the Greeks that he favored Egypt, “unchanging over centuries in obedience to divine commandments.” 

The philosopher evidently traveled in order to observe the link between mystery cults and his conception of an eternal world of forms, the repository of ultimate truth that became the foundational teaching of the academy he established at Athens. Apparently, he decided that if he could not rule, he could emulate Socrates as a persuader, perfecting the complexity and sophistication of his dialogues.

In the later stages of Plato’s life, Ms. Atack shows, he went further and further back to the mythical foundations of the state, as if to perpetuate his ideas as devolving from the very origins of Greek life.

In a final chapter, Ms. Atack arrays Plato among and against the philosophers who survived him. If Plato, in the end, was too revered to become the object of direct attacks, that was not so for his academy, which after his death became involved in the disputes of rival philosophers.

Whatever vulnerabilities are found in Plato’s thought, his biographer observes that there remains an engaging vitality in the dialogues that make it seem, as one commentator put it, he could “walk into and join any seminar discussion today.”

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”