Guthrie : Life of Plato and philosophical influences

In connexion with Plato’s life and teaching mention must be made of Isocrates, a man about eight years older than Plato who nevertheless outlived him, dying in 338 at the age of 98. The two were professional rivals, since Isocrates too had his school at Athens, founded a few years before the Academy, and both claimed to be teachers of philosophia while giving very different content to the word.[45] Isocrates’s writings contain obvious attacks on the Socratic and Platonic conceptions of philosophy, and replies to these, or independent attacks, have been seen in Plato. Usually they avoid mentioning each other’s names, though Plato once, in the Phaedrus (279a-b), speaks of Isocrates rather curiously. Taking advantage of the dramatic date of the dialogue he makes Socrates praise him as still a young man with the promise of a great future ahead of him, and a mind not devoid of philosophia. Nothing but later anecdotes is known of their personal relations, and anything else can be left until we come to the dialogues (chiefly Gorgias, Euthydemus and Phaedrus) where allusions to his teaching have been found.

In 367 Dionysius Ι died, and his son, whom he had kept in the background and treated like a child, suddenly found himself raised to the position of supreme ruler over the empire which his father had won in Sicily and Italy. His uncle Dion, having considerable influence over the malleable young man, persuaded him to send for Plato,[46] and himself sent a letter emphasizing the bent of the young Dionysius for education and philosophy and suggesting that here was the opportunity to realize the ideal of the Republic and create a ruler who was also a philosopher. In that work Plato admitted that those in high places are particularly open to corruptive influences, so that the chances of success were indeed small. But, he pleaded, is it inconceivable that the son οf a king or tyrant might have a philosophic nature, and once in the whole course of time might be enabled to preserve it? One would be enough, so we must not despair and dismiss the whole thing as pure fantasy (Rep. 494a-502c). It was not hard for Dion to shame the author of these words into returning to Sicily to help in the work of moulding the young tyrant’s mind, but it is quite unfair to Plato to say that ‘his chief motive was to put his philosophical precepts into political practice’.[47] That is not the impression given by the Seventh Letter, our only evidence for his state of mind. He was now about sixty, and had spent the last twenty years in philosophical inquiry and teaching. He was, says the letter, full of apprehension. He mistrusted the youthfulness of Dionysius, knowing, as he says (328b), the conflicting and changeable impulses of the young;[48] as well he might, having himself insisted in the Republic (498b) that immature minds were unsuited to the serious study of philosophy. On the other hand he had great faith in the judgement of Dion, now a mature man whose intellect he admired and who had shared his own inmost thoughts and aspirations. Perhaps Dion was right, and this was the only chance to train the ‘one man who would be enough’ (for the letter repeats these words of the Republic) before the flatterers and tempters of a tyrant got hold of him.

W.K.C. Guthrie, Life of Plato and philosophical influences

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