What kind of person was plato

The change of character in the ensuing discussion is remarkable. Not only are the two brothers not subjected to elenchos , they get ample time to elaborate on their objections a—e. Though they are not themselves convinced that injustice is better than justice, they argue that in the present state of society injustice pays — with the gods as well as with men — as long as the semblance of respectability is preserved. He will succeed at every level because he knows how to play the power game with cunning.

The just man, by contrast, pays no heed to mere semblance of goodness, rather than its substance,and therefore suffers a Christ-like fate, because he does not comply with the demands of favoritism and blandishment e. Even the gods, as the poets allegedly confirm, are on the side of the successful scoundrel, since they can be propitiated by honors and sacrifices. Instead, Socrates should show what effect each of them have on the soul of their possessors.

Plato at this point clearly regards refutation as an insufficient method of making true converts; whether he ever had such confidence in the power of refutation must remain a moot point.

But the Republic shows that the time had come for a positive account of morality and the good life. It should be pointed out, however, that in his treatment of justice Plato does not resort to the theory of Forms. Instead, he offers a political and psychological solution to the problem of justice.

This question is addressed in a quite circuitous way. A study of how a city comes to be will supposedly reveal the origin of justice and injustice a.

The minimal city is based on the need for food, clothing, shelter, and for the requisite tools. For a more luxurious city needs protection by a professional army as well as the leadership of a class of philosopher-kings and -queens.

Beyond the claim that the division of functions is more economical, Plato gives no justification for this fateful decision that determines the social order in the state, as well as the nature of the virtues. Human beings are not born alike, but with different abilities that predestine them for different tasks in a well-ordered state. That economic needs are the basis of the political structure does not, of course, mean that they are the only human needs Plato recognizes.

It indicates, however, that the emphasis here is on the unity and self-sufficiency of a well-structured city, not on the well-being of the individual c—e; c. All stories that undermine respect towards the gods are to be banned, along with tales that instill fear of death in the guardians. The imitation of bad persons is forbidden, as are depictions of varieties of character, quite generally.

Analogous injunctions apply, mutandis mutatis , to the modes and rhythms in music and to painting. Physical exercise must suit the harmonious soul and therefore must not exceed what is healthy and necessary e—b.

The supervision of education is the function of the third class, the rulers of the city b—b. They are to be selected through tests of intelligence and character from among the soldiers, to identify individuals who are unshakable in their conviction that their own well-being is intimately tied to that of the city. To ensure that members of the ruling and military classes retain their right attitude towards their civic duties, members of both classes must lead a communal life, without private homes, families, or property.

The division of functions that leads to the separation of the three classes for the purpose of achieving the social conditions for justice concludes the discussion of the social order d—c.

The somewhat peculiar manner in which Socrates further develops his explation of the nature of justice can be understood with reference to this concluding discussion. Piety, as the text indicates, is no longer treated as a virtue, for religious practices should be left to tradition and the oracle of Apollo at Delphi b—c.

The definition of justice is to be discovered by a process of elimination. If there are four virtues in the city, then justice must be the one that is left over after the other three have been identified e. There is no proof offered that there are exactly four virtues in a state, nor that they are items that can be lifted up, singly, for inspection, like objects from a basket. Instead, Socrates points out the role they play in the maintenance of the social order.

The third class, then, has no specific virtue of its own. But since Socrates does not elaborate on the dispositions of justice and moderation any further, there seems to be only a fine line between the functions of justice and moderation in the city. That there are four virtues rather than three probably also reflects the fact that this catalogue of four was a fixture in tradition.

As will emerge in connection with the virtues in the individual soul, the distinction between justice and moderation is far less problematic in the case of the individual than in that of the city as a whole, because in the individual soul, internal self-control and external self-restraint are clearly different attitudes.

As this survey shows, the virtues are no longer confined to knowledge. They also contain right beliefs and attitudes of harmony and compliance — extensions that are apt to make up for deficiencies in the explanation of certain virtues in earlier dialogues. The promise to establish the isomorphic structure of the city and soul has not been forgotten. After the definition and assignment of the four virtues to the three classes of the city, the investigation turns to the role and function of the virtues in the soul.

The soul is held to consist of three parts , corresponding to the three classes in the city. Indeed, there is no indication of separate parts of the soul in any of the earlier dialogues; irrational desires are attributed to the influence of the body.

In the Republic , by contrast, the soul itself becomes the source of the appetites and desires. The difference between the rational and the appetitive part is easily justified, because the opposition between the decrees of reason and the various kinds of unreasonable desires is familiar to everyone d—e.

But the phenomenon of moral indignation is treated as evidence for a psychic force that is reducible neither to reason nor to any of the appetites; it is rather an ally of reason in a well-ordered soul, a force opposed to unruly appetites e—c.

This concludes the proof that there are three parts in the soul corresponding to the three classes in the city — namely the rational part in the wisdom of the rulers, the spirited part, which is manifested in the courage of the soldiers, the appetitive part, which is manifested in the rest of the population, whose defining motivation is material gain.

This presupposes that the two upper parts have been given the right kind of training and education in order to control the appetitive part d—a. The three other virtues are then assigned to the respective parts of the soul. Courage is the excellence of the spirited part, wisdom belongs to the rational part, and moderation is the consent of all three about who should rule and who should obey. Justice turns out to be the overall unifying quality of the soul c—e.

For, the just person not only refrains from meddling with what is not his, externally, but also harmonizes the three parts of the soul internally. While justice is order and harmony, injustice is its opposite: it is a rebellion of one part of the city or soul against the others, and an inappropriate rule of the inferior parts. Justice and injustice in the soul are, then, analogous to health and illness in the body.

This comparison suffices to bring the investigation to its desired result. If justice is health and harmony of the soul, then injustice must be disease and disorder.

Hence, it is clear that justice is a good state of the soul that makes its possessor happy, and injustice is its opposite. Just as no-one in his right mind would prefer to live with a ruined body so no-one would prefer to live with a diseased soul. In principle, the discussion of justice has therefore reached its promised goal at the end of Book IV.

That the discussion does not end here but occupies six more books, is due most of all to several loose ends that need to be tied up. This gap will be filled, at least in part, by the description of the communal life without private property and family in Book V.

More importantly, nothing has been said about the rulers and their particular kind of knowledge. A short summary of the upshot of the educational program must suffice here. The future philosophers, both women and men, are selected from the group of guardians whose general cultural training they share. If they combine moral firmness with quickness of mind, they are subject to a rigorous curriculum of higher learning that will prepare them for the ascent from the world of the senses to the world of intelligence and truth, an ascent whose stages are summed up in the similes of the Sun, the Line, and the Cave a—b.

This study is to last for another five years. Successful candidates are then sent back into the Cave as administrators of ordinary political life for about 15 years. At the age of fifty the rulers are granted the pursuit of philosophy, an activity that is interrupted by periods of service as overseers of the order of the state.

That is no mean feat in a society where external and civil wars were a constant threat, and often enough ended in the destruction of the entire city.

That human beings find, or at least try to find, satisfaction in the kinds of goods they cherish is a point further pursued in the depiction of the decay of the city and its ruling citizens, from the best — the aristocracy of the mind — down to the worst — the tyranny of lust, in Books VIII and IX.

A discussion of the tenability of this explanation of political and psychological decadence will not be attempted here. It is supposed to show that all inferior forms of government of city and soul are doomed to fail because of the inherent tensions between the goods that are aimed for.

He clearly goes on the assumption that human beings are happy insofar as they achieve the goals they cherish. Why, then, reduce the third class to animal-like creatures with low appetites, as suggested by the comparison of the people to a strong beast that must be placated a—c? This comparison is echoed later in the comparison of the soul to a multiform beast, where reason just barely controls the hydra-like heads of the appetites, and then only with the aid of a lion-like spirit c—d.

Is Plato thereby giving vent to anti-democratic sentiments, showing contempt for the rabble, as has often been claimed? Plato seems to sidestep his own insight that all human beings have an immortal soul and have to take care of it as best they can, as he not only demands in the Phaedo but is going to confirm in a fanciful way in the Myth of Er at the end of Republic Book X.

The life-style designated for the upper classes also seems open to objections. Theirs is an austere camp-life; not all of them will be selected for higher education. Their intellectual pursuits are also not entirely enviable, as a closer inspection would show.

This is indicated in the injunctions concerning the study of astronomy and harmonics a—d. The universe is not treated as an admirable cosmos, with the explicit purpose of providing moral and intellectual support to the citizens, in the way Plato is going to state in the Timaeus and in the Laws.

The system resembles a well-oiled machine where everyone has their appointed function and economic niche; but its machine-like character seems repellent, given that no deviations are permitted from the prescribed pattern.

If innovations are forbidden, no room seems to be left for creativity and personal development. It states that every object, animal, and person has a specific function or work ergon. His aim is rather more limited: He wants to present a model , and to work out its essential features. Rather, he wants to explain the generation and decay typical of each political system and the psychopathology of its leaders. It is unlikely that Plato presupposes that there are pure representatives of these types, though some historical states may have come closer to being representatives than others.

Was Plato aware of the fact that his black-and-white picture of civic life in his model state disregards the claim of individuals to have their own aims and ends, and not to be treated like automata, with no thoughts and wishes of their own? These works are the Symposium and the Phaedrus. For though each dialogue should be studied as a unity of its own, it is also necessary to treat the individual dialogues as part of a wider picture.

The Symposium and the Phaedrus are two dialogues that focus on the individual soul and pay no attention to communal life at all.

Instead, they concentrate on self-preservation, self-improvement, and self-completion. The Symposium is often treated as a dialogue that predates the Republic , most of all because it mentions neither the immortality nor the tripartition of the soul.

But its dramatic staging — the praise of Eros by a company of symposiasts — is not germane to the otherworldly and ascetic tendencies of the Gorgias and the Phaedo. Contrary to all other speakers, Socrates denies that Eros is a god, because the gods are in a state of perfection. Love, by contrast, is a desire of the needy for the beautiful and the good c—c.

Human beings share that demonic condition; for they are neither good nor bad, but desire the good and the beautiful, the possession of which would constitute happiness for them. Because all people want happiness, they pursue the good as well as they can a—b. In each case they desire the particular kinds of objects that they hope will fulfill their needs.

And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it leaves behind a new young one in place of the old. In the case of human beings this need expresses itself in different ways.

Starting with the love of one beautiful body, the individual gradually learns to appreciate not only all physical beauty, but also the beauty of the mind, and in the end she gets a glimpse of the supreme kind of beauty, namely the Form of the Beautiful itself — a beauty that is neither relative, nor changeable, nor a matter of degree. There is no talk of a painful liberation from the bonds of the senses, or of a turn-around of the entire soul that is reserved only for the better educated.

Second, this drive finds its expression in the products of their work, in creativity. There is no indication that individuals must act as part of a community. Though the communitarian aspect of the good and beautiful comes to the fore in the high praise of the products of the legendary legislators e—a , the ultimate assent to the Beautiful itself is up to the individual. The Lysis shares its basic assumption concerning the intermediary state of human nature between good and bad, and regards need as the basis of friendship.

The idea that eros is the incentive to sublimation and self-completion is worked out further in the Phaedrus. Although the close relationship between the two dialogues is generally acknowledged, the Phaedrus is commonly regarded as a much later work.

But this difference seems due to a difference in perspective rather than to a change of mind. The discussion in the Symposium is deliberately confined to the conditions of self-immortalization in this life, while the Phaedrus takes the discussion beyond the confines of this life.

They explain, rather, the different routes taken by individuals in their search for beauty and their levels of success. The misuse of rhetoric is exemplified by the speech attributed to the orator Lysias, a somewhat contrived plea to favor a non-lover rather than a lover. Once restored to his senses the lover will shun his former beloved and break all his promises. To explain the nature of this madness, Socrates employs the comparison of the tripartite soul to a charioteer with a pair winged horses, an obedient white one and an unruly black one.

That is what first makes the soul grow wings and soar in the pursuit of a corresponding deity, to the point where it may attain godlike insights.

The best-conditioned souls — those where the charioteer has full control over his horses — get a glimpse of true being, including the nature of the virtues and of the good c—e. Depending on the quality of each soul, the quality of the beauty pursued will also determine the cycle of reincarnations that is in store for each soul after death c—c. The individual does not find her or his fulfillment in peaceful interactions in a harmonious community.

Instead, life is spent in the perennial pursuit of the higher and better. But in that task the individual is not alone; she shares that task with kindred spirits. The message of the the Symposium and the Phaedrus is therefore two-pronged. On the one hand, there is no permanent attainment of happiness as a stable state of completion in this life.

In the ups and downs of life and of the afterlife , humans are in constant need of beauty as an incentive to aim for their own completion. Humans are neither god-like nor wise; at best, they are god-lovers and philosophers, demonic hunters for truth and goodness. To know is not to have; and to have once is not to have forever.

Plato does nothing to encourage the reader to view these works as a distinctive and separate component of his thinking. On the contrary, he links Sophist with Theaetetus the conversations they present have a largely overlapping cast of characters, and take place on successive days no less than Sophist and Statesman.

Sophist contains, in its opening pages, a reference to the conversation of Parmenides —and perhaps Plato is thus signaling to his readers that they should bring to bear on Sophist the lessons that are to be drawn from Parmenides. Similarly, Timaeus opens with a reminder of some of the principal ethical and political doctrines of Republic. It could be argued, of course, that when one looks beyond these stage-setting devices, one finds significant philosophical changes in the six late dialogues, setting this group off from all that preceded them.

But there is no consensus that they should be read in this way. Resolving this issue requires intensive study of the content of Plato's works. So, although it is widely accepted that the six dialogues mentioned above belong to Plato's latest period, there is, as yet, no agreement among students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his philosophical development.

In fact, it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of Plato's works into three periods—early, middle, late—does correctly indicate the order of composition, and whether it is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought See Cooper , vii—xxvii.

Of course, it would be wildly implausible to suppose that Plato's writing career began with such complex works as Laws , Parmenides , Phaedrus , or Republic. In light of widely accepted assumptions about how most philosophical minds develop, it is likely that when Plato started writing philosophical works some of the shorter and simpler dialogues were the ones he composed: Laches , or Crito , or Ion for example.

Similarly, Apology does not advance a complex philosophical agenda or presuppose an earlier body of work; so that too is likely to have been composed near the beginning of Plato's writing career. Even so, there is no good reason to eliminate the hypothesis that throughout much of his life Plato devoted himself to writing two sorts of dialogues at the same time, moving back and forth between them as he aged: on the one hand, introductory works whose primary purpose is to show readers the difficulty of apparently simple philosophical problems, and thereby to rid them of their pretensions and false beliefs; and on the other hand, works filled with more substantive philosophical theories supported by elaborate argumentation.

Plato makes it clear that both of these processes, one preceding the other, must be part of one's philosophical education. One of his deepest methodological convictions affirmed in Meno , Theaetetus , and Sophist is that in order to make intellectual progress we must recognize that knowledge cannot be acquired by passively receiving it from others: rather, we must work our way through problems and assess the merits of competing theories with an independent mind.

Accordingly, some of his dialogues are primarily devices for breaking down the reader's complacency, and that is why it is essential that they come to no positive conclusions; others are contributions to theory-construction, and are therefore best absorbed by those who have already passed through the first stage of philosophical development.

We should not assume that Plato could have written the preparatory dialogues only at the earliest stage of his career. For example although both Euthydemus and Charmides are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they might have been written around the same time as Symposium and Republic , which are generally assumed to be compositions of his middle period—or even later.

No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are such. But it is an open question which and how many of them are. Plato uses this educational device—provoking the reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the contradiction unresolved—in Protagoras often considered an early dialogue as well. So it is clear that even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is the presentation of unresolved difficulties.

And, just as we should recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple enough to have been early compositions: Ion , for example, affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and Crito sets out the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey civic commands.

Neither ends in failure. If we are justified in taking Socrates' speech in Plato's Apology to constitute reliable evidence about what the historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato's other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely attributed to Socrates. So understood, Socrates was a moralist but unlike Plato not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist.

That fits with Aristotle's testimony, and Plato's way of choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates. The number of dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small: Phaedo , Republic , Phaedrus , and Philebus. All of them are dominated by ethical issues: whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of pleasure.

Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to do with the ethical life of the individual.

The political aspects of Republic are explicitly said to serve the larger question whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be just. When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea Sophist , Statesman ; when they become cosmological, he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in Laws , to a visitor from Athens and he then eliminates Socrates entirely.

In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological, or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from entering these domains.

This may be part of the explanation why he has Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the theory advanced in Crito , which reaches the conclusion that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison. Perhaps Plato is indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by the conversation of Socrates.

Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write one kind of dialogue negative, destructive, preparatory and to write only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also question whether he went through an early stage during which he refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas if he had any , but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist, representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates.

It is unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato, who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties he was around 28 when Socrates was killed , would have started his compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing himself to think for himself only later.

What would have led to such a decision? We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues, even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic inventions—derived, no doubt, by Plato's reflections on and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes to Socrates in Apology.

That speech indicates, for example, that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too attributes this to his Socrates.

But what of the various philosophical moves rehearsed in Euthyphro —the dialogue in which Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety is? We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court.

It is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of Socrates' conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it is to reach an understanding of the central concept that Socrates' fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to death.

The idea that it is important to search for definitions may have been Socratic in origin. After all, Aristotle attributes this much to Socrates. But the twists and turns of the arguments in Euthyphro and other dialogues that search for definitions are more likely to be the products of Plato's mind than the content of any conversations that really took place.

It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading public with the exception of Apology in the form of a dialogue. The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight from the mouth of its author?

This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato's reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. For example, the use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience.

The enormous appeal of Plato's writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Even treatise-like compositions— Timaeus and Laws , for example—improve in readability because of their conversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato's evident interest in pedagogical questions how is it possible to learn?

Even in Laws such questions are not far from Plato's mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving upon each other's social and political institutions. In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato's goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the dialogue form is being used for this purpose.

The Parmenides is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato relentlessly rubs his readers' faces in a baffling series of unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions.

But several of his other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for example, Protagoras can virtue be taught? Just as someone who encounters Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he means what he says or whether he is instead speaking ironically , so Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to infer from the arguments that have been presented to us.

But Socrates does not always speak ironically, and similarly Plato's dialogues do not always aim at creating a sense of bafflement about what we are to think about the subject under discussion. There is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works.

We will best understand Plato's works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly. Rather than impose on our reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing because he has done such a thing elsewhere , we should bring to each dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it.

That would be the most fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy. The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Plato's central doctrines 2. Plato's puzzles 3. Dialogue, setting, character 4.

Socrates 5. Plato's indirectness 6. Can we know Plato's mind? Socrates as the dominant speaker 8. Links between the dialogues 9. Does Plato change his mind about forms? Does Plato change his mind about politics? The historical Socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues Why dialogues? Where do souls go after death? The warrior Achilles is one of the great heroes of Greek mythology. One of the greatest ancient historians, Thucydides c.

Hercules known in Greek as Heracles or Herakles is one of the best-known heroes in Greek and Roman mythology. His life was not easy—he endured many trials and completed many daunting tasks—but the reward for his suffering was a promise that he would live forever among the gods Live TV.

This Day In History. History Vault. Platonic Academy Around , the year-old Plato returned to Athens and founded his philosophical school in the grove of the Greek hero Academus, just outside the city walls. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Julius Caesar. Mummy Mania. Peloponnesian War. As with many young boys of his social class, Plato was probably taught by some of Athens' finest educators.

The curriculum would have featured the doctrines of Cratylus and Pythagoras as well as Parmenides. These probably helped develop the foundation for Plato's study of metaphysics the study of nature and epistemology the study of knowledge.

Plato's father died when he was young, and his mother remarried her uncle, Pyrilampes, a Greek politician and ambassador to Persia. Plato is believed to have had two full brothers, one sister and a half brother, though it is not certain where he falls in the birth order.

Often, members of Plato's family appeared in his dialogues. Historians believe this is an indication of Plato's pride in his family lineage. As a young man, Plato experienced two major events that set his course in life. One was meeting the great Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates's methods of dialogue and debate impressed Plato so much that he soon he became a close associate and dedicated his life to the question of virtue and the formation of a noble character.

The other significant event was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, in which Plato served for a brief time between and B. The defeat of Athens ended its democracy, which the Spartans replaced with an oligarchy. Two of Plato's relatives, Charmides and Critias, were prominent figures in the new government, part of the notorious Thirty Tyrants whose brief rule severely reduced the rights of Athenian citizens.

After the oligarchy was overthrown and democracy was restored, Plato briefly considered a career in politics, but the execution of Socrates in B. After Socrates's death, Plato traveled for 12 years throughout the Mediterranean region, studying mathematics with the Pythagoreans in Italy, and geometry, geology, astronomy and religion in Egypt.

During this time, or soon after, he began his extensive writing. There is some debate among scholars on the order of these writings, but most believe they fall into three distinct periods. The first, or early, period occurs during Plato's travels B.