What you think you know about Plato’s philosophy is probably right. There he taught until his death in 348–7. In the peace that followed, he visited Pythagoreans in what is now Southern Italy and met political leaders in Syracuse before founding the Academy in a park on the outskirts of Athens in 383. On his return to Athens, Plato likely fought in the Corinthian War (395–86). He had toyed with becoming a poet before committing to philosophy, traveling to Megara to visit the Socratic philosopher Euclides around 396. It was overthrown within eight months, and Athenian democracy was restored.įour years later, Socrates was executed for impiety and Plato withdrew from public life. When the war ended, the victorious Spartans imposed on Athens the rulership of the Thirty Tyrants, with Plato’s relative Critias-like him, an admirer of Socrates-among them. He was born around 424–3, during the Peloponnesian War, but was too young to fight in it. We’ll come back to the political intrigue, but apart from that, Waterfield’s portrait of Plato is traditional. Waterfield’s life of Plato gains vitality by arguing that this letter is in fact authentic. The exception is a series of misadventures in international politics described at length in a Platonic letter most scholars now regard as apocryphal. Plato’s life, like the life of most career academics, was relatively dull. The problem with Plato is that he was not much fun. We also know very little about Diogenes of Sinope, yet he’s had three biographers to date. We have no official Athenian records of his life, and the earliest (short) biographies were set down centuries later. The reasons for this neglect are partly historiographic: Though Plato’s dialogues survive, they barely mention him. How could Western philosophy, in its infancy, encompass such divergent figures: on one side, a scholar of metaphysics who was a member of the Athenian 1 percent, and on the other, a mendicant gadfly without political capital, a street performer known for his verbal wit, an activist who dismissed Plato’s discourse as a “waste of time”? Newly published books about the lives of Plato and Diogenes send us back to a time when philosophy did not know what it would grow up to be.Ī remarkable fact about Robin Waterfield’s Plato of Athens is that it’s the first full-length biography of Plato ever published. (When he saw a boy drinking from the hollow of his own hand, Diogenes threw away his cup: It was superfluous.) He did not live in a large ceramic jar, owning no more than a cloak, a stick, and a knapsack, as Diogenes is said to have done. When we think about the birth of Western philosophy, we tend to think of Diogenes’s contemporary, Plato, a systematic theorist who founded an academy and whose written dialogues, clocking in at more than half a million words, have been preserved in full. Philosophy is notoriously difficult to define, but you may wonder if this really counts. He replied, “Ruling over men,” and told the herald, “Spread the word in case anyone wants to buy himself a master.” Flouting social norms, Diogenes was said to masturbate in the marketplace, responding to side-eyed glances with bemusement: “If only one could do away hunger by rubbing one’s stomach.” Admonished for drinking in a bar, Diogenes shot back, “I also get my hair cut in a barbershop.” Captured and sold into slavery, Diogenes was asked to list his skills. Diogenes’s reputation rests on a gift for one-liners in the spirit of Groucho Marx. Yet his legacy doesn’t lie in his written work-almost none of which survives-but in colorful anecdotes about his life recorded by contemporaries and compiled most prominently by his namesake, Diogenes Laërtius, about 600 years later in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. D iogenes of Sinope, a beggar who lived on the streets of Athens in the fourth century B.C.E., has been hailed as the progenitor of performance art, an inspiration for the Occupy movement, and, by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, “the first, some might claim the best, stand-up comic.”
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