Guthrie : Life of Plato and philosophical influences

Citing Plato’s pupil Hermodorus, Diogenes tells that after Socrates’s death, at the age of twenty-eight, Plato and some other pupils of Socrates withdrew to Megara to Euclides.[16] Whether or not they were in actual danger at Athens, they could not remain there happily at such a time, and at Megara they would be welcomed by some of their own intimate circle. Euclides and Terpsion of Megara were present with Socrates in his last hours and Euclides was later represented by Plato as the recorder of the conversation which forms his dialogue Theaetetus. One can easily imagine the liveliness of the philosophical discussions which would be carried on there, perhaps already on the relation between unity and goodness and the existence or non-existence of their opposites.[17]

How long he stayed at Megara we do not know, but before very long he must have been summoned to active service again, for he was still of military age and by 395 Athens was once more fighting in the ‘Corinthian War’. However, of this our sources say nothing. ‘Next’ (after Megara), continues Diogenes with his usual lack of any pretensions to literary style, Plato went to Cyrene to see Theodorus the mathematician, thence to Italy to the Pythagoreans Philolaus and Eurytus, and thence to Egypt ‘to visit the prophets’. The visit to Cyrene is also mentioned by Apuleius. That Plato knew and respected the mathematician Theodorus of Cyrene appears from the role which he assigned to him in the Theaetetus; and Cyrene was also the home of the Socratic Aristippus, founder of the Cyrenaic school (νοl. III, 490-9). According to Diogenes, the order of his travels was Cyrene-Italy-Egypt, but Cicero (Rep. 1.10.16, Fin. 5.29.87), who does not mention Cyrene, twice makes him visit Egypt before Italy and Sicily. The order of his travels can never be known, and some, as might be expected, have consigned them all, with the exception οf Italy and Sicily, to the realm of legend. In themselves they are natural enough. The Greek colony of Cyrene was in the fourth century a centre of mathematicians and philosophers, and Plato had personal reasons for a visit. A trip to Egypt, where was the flourishing Greek commercial city of Naucratis, ‘pour un Athénien n’avait rien d’une aventure’, as Robin says (Ρl. 7). Plato’s own interest in Egypt and its myths and stories[18] is of course no proof of his having been there, as Wilamowitz, who castigates the sceptics, freely admits (Ρl. I, 245 n. 1); but neither is it evidence against it. It is of interest that Strabo (17.29), an earlier source than any of our lives of Plato though still writing over three hundred years after his death, on a visit to Heliopolis in Egypt was shown the places where Plato and his pupil Eudoxus οf Cnidus were said to have lived.[19] To those accustomed to the ways of tourist guides this may not seem compelling evidence, but at least it testifies to a strong tradition among the Egyptians themselves that Plato had visited their land. The fact itself has no legendary suggestion, nor do the sceptics seem to be chiefly influenced by certain incredible accretions such as the presence with Plato of Euripides (D.L. 3.6), who was dead before 406, but rather by not very strong circumstantial considerations, e.g. that there is no mention of voyages to Cyrene or Egypt in Plato’s dialogues (!) or the Platonic epistles, and that the earliest mention of them is in Cicero: the oldest life of Plato, parts of which have been found on a burned papyrus from Herculaneum, mentions only the journeys to South Italy and Sicily.[20]

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

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