Symposium

I have been reading Plato for over a half century.  I do not read him like most people, I suspect.  His philosophy is a secondary consideration for me.  I read him as a part of my historical studies in the times in which he lived, a fascinating period in which the city state culture of Greece came to a calamitous dead end in the great Peloponnesian War  between Athens and Sparta, with the groundwork being unknowingly laid for Alexander the Great, the Diadochi and ultimately absorption by Rome of the territory, and the ideas, of Greece.  Greek of course was the main language of early Christianity, and most Christian theology is the hybrid result of the uneasy melding of Greek philosophy with Jewish revelation.  Much of what has occurred in Christianity since then have been mere footnotes on this great synthesis that we owe to Athens and Jerusalem.

Plato is difficult for most moderns, lacking as most do a decent education in either history or philosophy.  It helps however that Plato is a first class writer, which shines through in even banal translations, and most of his work is accessible to even the most ignorant who have a strong desire to learn.  (Certainly that was 13 year old me when I innocently first purchased a battered used copy of The Republic.)  I would recommend beginning with Plato’s Apology where he puts into his master Socrates an immortal defense of the life work of Socrates, at least as perceived by Plato.  (Whether Plato’s Socrates is true to the historical Socrates I regard as an open question.  Xenophon, military man and historian, who also studied under Socrates, paints a rather different picture of the stonecutter philosopher.)  For a good overview of Plato’s impact on Western history, I would recommend Arthur Herman’s recent and superb The Cave and the Light, which compares and contrasts the impact of the teachings of Plato and his pupil Aristotle down through the ages.