Plato
c. 428–c. 348 BCE · Ancient Greece
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
#5of 111Best Authors
Influence96th pct
Popularity72nd pct
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
InfluenceDrew from 6 · Inspired 11
Active period399 BCE – 370 BCE
Influence
The lineage through Plato
Drew From(6)
who shaped Plato
- The Republic's most notorious move — banishing the poets — is aimed straight at Homer, and the Iliad supplies the evidence
- Plato quotes its actual lines (Achilles defying the gods, the gods brawling) as the dangerous content to keep from the guardians
- Knowing the poem first makes the prosecution land — you can hear exactly which passages Plato thinks are too beautiful and too false to be safe
AristophanesAncient Greece
via The Clouds
- In the Apology Socrates names The Clouds directly — the "comic poet" who showed him walking on air is the source of the prejudice he's really fighting
- He calls these the "old accusers," more dangerous than the men formally prosecuting him, because they poisoned the jury years before the trial
- Read Aristophanes first and you hear the slander Socrates is answering — the Apology is a defense against a comedy
HesiodAncient Greece
- The Republic's Myth of Metals is Hesiod rewritten — the gold, silver, and bronze souls of the Noble Lie come straight from his myth of the golden, silver, and bronze races
- Plato names and censors Hesiod in Book 2, then mines him in Book 3; reading the Theogony/Works and Days first lets you watch the theft and the twist
- Hesiod's tale of decline becomes Plato's instrument of order — the same ladder of metals, repurposed to keep a city in its ranks
SapphoAncient Greece
via Sappho's Poems
- Socrates names his source: "the fair Sappho" at 235c, invoked as a wellspring before he speaks on love
- The Phaedrus' famous account of erotic madness draws on Sappho 31's anatomy of desire — the trembling, the fire, the body overcome
- Plato turns the lyric poet's experience of love into philosophy; reading Sappho first lets you hear what Socrates is building on
AesopAncient Greece
via Aesop’s Fables
- The Phaedo opens with Socrates versifying Aesop in his cell — Plato names the fabulist and adapts him on the page (60b–61b)
- Watch Socrates spin an Aesopic observation of his own, on how pleasure and pain are bound together at the head
- Knowing the fables makes the moment land: the simplest popular form, pressed into service at the threshold of death
AeschylusAncient Greece
via The Oresteia
- Aeschylus is one of Plato's chosen targets — Book 2 singles out the Oresteia's poet for praising a justice prized only for its good name, the view the whole dialogue exists to refute
- He's also expressly named among the tragedians banished from the ideal city
- Reading the Oresteia first lets you hear exactly whom Plato is arguing against when he indicts the poets
Inspired(11)
who Plato shaped
AristotleAncient Greece
- The book Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato's Academy absorbing — and then opened the Ethics by attacking
- The Republic's central metaphysics, the Form of the Good, is the exact target: Aristotle names it in Book 1.6 and dismantles it, arguing the good is too many different things to be one Idea
- His teacher built ethics on a transcendent Form; Aristotle, in answering him, grounds it empirically instead — useless to a doctor or carpenter even if it existed, he says
Marcus Tullius CiceroAncient Rome
- The blueprint for Cicero's De Re Publica — same title, same six-book span, same dialogue form, remade for Rome
- Cicero capped his version with the Dream of Scipio, a direct adaptation of the Republic's closing Myth of Er: where Plato sent a soul back from the afterlife with a vision of cosmic justice, Cicero sends Scipio
- One of the cleanest cases of a Roman taking a Greek masterwork as a template and rebuilding it in his own idiom
PetroniusAncient Rome
via The Satyricon
- Petronius read the Symposium closely enough to turn it inside out
- Trimalchio's dinner is the sympotic dialogue gone to seed — the philosophy of eros traded for new-money vulgarity, refined Athenian wit for freedman excess
- Watch for Habinnas crashing the party drunk: that's Plato's Alcibiades, ivy-crowned and uninvited, reborn as a stonemason on the make
ApuleiusAncient Rome
via The Golden Ass
- Apuleius was a card-carrying Platonist — he literally wrote a treatise On Plato and His Doctrine — and it shows in his fiction
- The Cupid and Psyche tale at the heart of the Golden Ass is built on Plato's two-Eros doctrine: Cupid's dual nature maps onto the Heavenly and Common Venus of Pausanias and Diotima
- Apuleius paraphrases the Symposium to point the allegory — the soul (Psyche) in love is Platonic philosophy turned into story
Thomas HobbesEnlightenment
via Leviathan
- Hobbes engages Plato by name — in Leviathan's thirty-first chapter he invokes "the Commonwealth of Plato" directly
- He pins his own hope to Plato's: that civil disorder won't end until kings turn philosopher or philosophers turn king
- The Republic's founding question — how to design a commonwealth that actually holds — is the question Leviathan picks up two thousand years later
- Nietzsche, a trained philologist, built Zarathustra as a deliberate reversal of Plato's philosopher-ruler
- The cave is the tell: Plato's rulers ascend out of the cave into the light, while Zarathustra ascends to his cave on the mountain — the same image turned inside out
- Even the detail of age echoes — Zarathustra begins at thirty, Plato's age for introducing rulers to dialectic
BoethiusAncient Rome
- Plato's ideas outlived the classical world by walking into Boethius's death cell
- In The Consolation, Boethius defends his political career by quoting the Republic outright — the maxim that states flourish only when philosophers rule or rulers turn philosopher
- Lady Philosophy, the work's central figure, takes up the Socratic role straight from Plato's dialogues: she questions, corrects, and leads the prisoner to truth
Oscar WildeVictorian
- Wilde read The Symposium in Greek at Oxford, and its ladder of love — beauty leading the soul upward toward the highest form — is the scaffolding under Basil's worship of Dorian
- Plato's eros between an older mentor and a beautiful youth becomes the Lord Henry–Dorian–Basil triangle
- Dorian Gray takes the ascent toward ideal beauty and asks what happens when it stalls at the surface
Ralph Waldo EmersonTranscendentalists
- Emerson ranked Plato above nearly every secular book — and Self-Reliance names him directly, praising Moses, Plato, and Milton for setting "at naught books and traditions"
- The Platonist core — that the visible world is a shadow of eternal Ideas — becomes the engine of Emerson's idealism in Nature
- He revered The Republic as a thing to think with, then reworked its metaphysics into an American gospel of the self
Marcus AureliusAncient Rome
via Meditations
- The ideal city the Roman emperor measured his own against — and let go of
- Marcus Aurelius names The Republic outright: "do not expect Plato's Republic, but be content if the smallest thing goes on well"
- Plato's perfect commonwealth becomes the impossible standard Marcus invokes only to set aside, so he can act in the imperfect empire he actually ruled
ErasmusRenaissance
via Praise of Folly
- Plato's most famous images become Erasmus's targets — affectionately
- In Praise of Folly, Folly herself invokes the Allegory of the Cave, and the book closes by folding the cave into her own creed: the deluded prisoners are her votaries
- Erasmus turns The Republic's grandest claims — the philosopher-king, the world beyond the shadows — into the raw material of his ironic mock-encomium
Likenesses
Portraits
The single most-reprinted likeness of Plato: a Roman marble copy (1st c. CE) of Silanion's lost bronze portrait set up in the Academy c. 370 BCE; the textbook face of Plato.
Aristotle, in blue and brown, walks beside Plato beneath classical arches; he gestures down toward the earth while Plato points up.
Raphael, 1511
In their words
Famous Quotes
“I know that I know nothing.”
“The myth of the cave: prisoners chained facing a wall, seeing only shadows, mistaking them for reality.”
“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy... cities will never have rest from their evils.”
“And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.”
Biography
About Plato
Athenian philosopher, student of Socrates, and teacher of Aristotle. He founded the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. His dialogues — The Republic, The Symposium, Phaedo, Apology — established the framework for Western philosophy and explored justice, beauty, truth, and the nature of knowledge through the dramatic voice of Socrates.
Plato, Ranked
According to 
- 16Phaedo~385 BCPlatoHard·Medium·105 pagesInfluence89Popularity41Ancient GreeceDialogueAncient Greek
- 36The Symposium~385 BCPlatoHard·Short·79 pagesInfluence88Popularity42Ancient GreeceDialogueAncient Greek
- 55Phaedrus~370 BCPlatoHard·Short·88 pagesInfluence33Popularity40Ancient GreeceDialogueAncient Greek
- 63The Republic~375 BCPlatoHard·Long·472 pagesInfluence96Popularity72Ancient GreeceDialogueAncient Greek
- 113Apology~399 BCPlatoHard·Quick·44 pagesInfluence89Popularity42Ancient GreeceDialogueAncient Greek
#