Plato: “Allegory of the Cave”

About the Author

Plato (ca. 424–347 BCE) is part of a distinguished philosophical lineage that began with Socrates (ca. 469–399 BCE), his teacher, and proceeded to Aristotle (ca. 384–322 BCE), Plato's own student. Together these men formed much of the basis of scientific and philosophic thought in the West. Very little is known for certain about Plato. Most of his biographical sources from antiquity either disagree at crucial points, such as regarding his birth date, or are otherwise highly unreliable, written as they were several hundred years after Plato's death without contemporary critical assessment of their source material. Modern historians do, however, have one important primary document pertaining to Plato's journeys to Sicily (ca. 388–361 BCE), The Seventh Letter, which most scholars accept as factual though perhaps not written by Plato himself.

Plato was born in about 424 BCE in Athens or on the island of Aegina. He was part of an old aristocratic family. According to tradition, his father, Ariston, could trace his ancestry back to the last of Athens' kings, Codrus, who ruled from about 1089 to 1069 BCE, while Plato's mother, Perictione, could trace her ancestry back to the legendary Athenian lawgiver and lyric poet Solon (ca. 638–558 BCE). Two of Plato's older brothers were Adeimantus and Glaucon, who figure prominently as interlocutors in The Republic, and an elder sister was Potone, whose son, Speusippus, took over as head of Plato's Academy after his death. No records indicate that Plato ever married or had any children.

Plato's most influential teacher was Socrates, who took ancient philosophical thought in an entirely new direction by shifting the focus away from natural science toward ethics. His influence on Plato is clear in the “Allegory of the Cave.” Not only does Plato cast Socrates as the main speaker, but also he has Socrates relate the allegory in his typical style of questioning. According to tradition, after Socrates' execution in 399 BCE, Plato traveled widely around the Mediterranean world. In the midst of these travels, around 388 BCE, Plato went to the court of the tyrant Dionysius I in the western Greek city of Syracuse, on the island of Sicily. Here he befriended the tyrant's brother-in-law Dion, an enthusiastic supporter of Plato's philosophic and political ideals. Plato would return to Syracuse two more times within the next twenty-five years, in about 367 BCE and 363 BCE, while Dionysius I's son Dionysius II was ruling. Plato never succeeded, however, in what was in part his aim for these visits: to put into practice in Syracuse the ideals of government as espoused in The Republic.