Plato
a Greek philosopher; born in Athens, or in Ægina, in May, 429 в. c.
He was son of Ariston and Perictione, and was named Aristocles. The name Plato was afterward applied to him in allusion to his broad brow, broad chest, or fluent speech. Endowed with an imaginative and emotional nature, he early began to write poems, and studied philosophy, and at 20 became the disciple of Socrates. He burnt his poems, remained PLATO PLATTE and the first attempt toward a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. devotedly attached to Socrates for 10 years. After the death of Socrates, he went to Megara, to hear Euclid; thence It is difficult to say what idea Plato to Cyrene, and perhaps to Egypt and S. had of the Deity. It seems, however, Italy. On his return he began to teach that his idea of the good and Him were gratuitously at Athens, in the plane tree identical. Plato distinguishes two comgrove of the Academia; and had a great ponents of the soul the divine or ranumber of disciples. Among them was tional, that which partakes of a divin Aristotle, distinguished as the "Mind of principle, and participates in the knowlthe School," and perhaps Demosthenes. edge of the eternal; and the mortal or Women are said to have attended. In irrational, that which participates in the his 40th year, Plato visited Sicily, but motions and changes of the body, and is he offended the tyrant Dionysius by the perishable. The two are united by an political opinions he uttered, and only escaped death through the influence of his friend, Dion.
PLATO Plato never married, took no active part in public affairs, lived absorbed in the pursuit of truth. His works have come down to us complete, and are chiefly in the form of dialogues. They are singular in their union of the philosophic and poetic spirit-the depth of the philosopher and the rigorous exactitude of the logician with the highest splendor of imagination of the poet. We owe to him the threefold division of philosophy into dialectics, physics, and ethics; the first sketch of the laws of thought; the doctrine of "ideas," as the eternal archetypes of all visible things; intermediate link, which he calls thumos, or spirit. He believes in future retribution; exonerates God from responsibility for sin and suffering, and sets forth in elaborate myths the blessedness of the virtuous and the punishments of the vicious. His birthday was long observed as a festival. He died in the act of writing, it is said, in May, 347 B. C.
For biography see Adams' "Religious Teachers of Greece" (1909) and for doctrine Fowler's "Loeb's Classical Library" (1913). an