PLATO AND THE TYRANT

There’s no talking sense into tyrants.

“Back from Syracuse?” quipped a colleague when Martin Heidegger resigned his rectorship at Freiburg in 1934. Plato’s legendary attempt to influence the political affairs of the most powerful state in the Hellenic world failed spectacularly and became shorthand for why a philosopher might attempt to shape a regime and how the regime shapes the philosopher. That Plato made three trips to Sicily to meet Syracusan tyrants was accepted fact in antiquity. Yet the best source for biographical detail is the Platonic letters whose authenticity is disputed. Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College, finds key letters authentic and deploys them to mark out a pathway into the Republic “by way of its political themes and its connections to Plato’s life.” On his first visit, Plato befriended Dion, brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius, in whom he saw philosophical potential. Yet he was disgusted by the sexual excess and daily gorging at the “Syracusan tables.” Back in Athens, having barely escaped with his freedom, Plato continued to develop his political philosophy when, 20 years later, the exiled Dion urged him to return to advise the young Dionysius II. Hoping to change the world, Plato twice more went to Syracuse to educate the tyrant in just rule. But the tyrant proved himself a poseur, and court intrigue again put Plato’s life in peril. Upon completing his education in the Form of the Good, the Republic’s philosopher-king reluctantly returned to the cave to engage in the affairs of men. Romm speculates that Plato’s impotence in the face of decades of political violence in Syracuse and the abject failure of Dion’s reign soured his views and led to increased political realism in his later works. Those who, like Platonist Harold Cherniss, believe “a work of art exists independently of its author” will be skeptical, but Romm delivers on his promise of “intriguing possibilities.”

A gripping, provocative, and deeply researched account of Plato’s failed experiment in enlightened autocracy.