Plato

Karl Jaspers will call this the Axial Age, in which a number of widely separated cultures in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world pivot from systems of ritual and sacrifice to systems of religious and philosophical belief in a striking parallel development.

Similarities include an engagement in the quest for human meaning and the rise of a new elite class of religious leaders and thinkers in China, India and the Mediterranean.

These spiritual foundations are laid by individual thinkers within a framework of a changing social environment.

Jaspers will argue that the characteristics appeared under similar political circumstances: China, India, the Middle East and the Occident each comprised multiple small states engaged in internal and external struggles.

The three regions all give birth to, and then institutionalize, a tradition of traveling scholars, who roam from city to city to exchange ideas.

Taoism and Confucianism emerge in China after the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period.

In other regions, the scholars are largely from extant religious traditions; in India, from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism; in Persia, from Zoroastrianism; in the Levant, from Judaism; and in Greece, from Sophism and other classical philosophies.

The Spartan forces of King Agis crushingly defeat the alliance of Athens, Argos, Elis, and Mantineia at the Battle of Mantineia (418), in which the Athenian commander, Laches, is killed. (A dialogue of Plato's, on bravery, is known by his name.)

The Sophists begin their grammatical analysis of Greek around 400 or a little earlier.

Contrary philosopher-educator Socrates, about seventy in 399, is accused by the Athenian government of impiety and of corrupting the youth of the city by questioning tradition.

The example of undisciplined and restless ambition displayed by the charming, brilliant, but unscrupulous Alcibiades, who could not practice his master's virtues, strengthens the charge.

On trial for his life before an Athenian jury, Socrates (according to Plato's later Apology, whose title is from the Greek word for defense) declares himself thoroughly innocent of the charges against him, countering that his accusers are motivated by resentment caused by his deflation of their pretended wisdom.

His own wisdom, he says, consists of knowing that he is not wise, and his relentless questioning of people's assumptions is prompted by an inner voice, a “daimon,” which must be obeyed, regardless of the consequences.

Instead of being punished by the state, it should reward him for acting as its "gadfly."

The unexamined life, says Socrates, is not worth living. (Xenophon offers a different account of the defense in his Apology of Socrates.)

The government convicts Socrates and orders him to take his own life by poison.

Following the trial, his friends arrange for him to escape, but rather than do wrong to the city by flouting its laws he remains in prison and suffers the death penalty. (Plato's Phaedro records the philosopher's death scene.)

Socrates' famously shrewish wife, Xanthippe, dies about the same time.

Plato, whose parents were both from distinguished Athenian families-his stepfather, an associate of Pericles, had been an active participant in the political and cultural life of Periclean Athens-had apparently been destined for an aristocratic political career.

The excesses of Athenian political life seem to have led him to abandon these ambitions, however.

Socrates, who had been a close friend of Plato's family, had a profound influence on the young man (as his writings will later attest).

Following Socrates' ingestion of a lethal dose of hemlock, his twenty-nine-year-old pupil retires from active Athenian life to begin traveling around the Mediterranean.

Plato travels in about 388 BCE to Italy and Sicily, where he forms a friendship with Dionysius of Syracuse and his brother-in-law Dion.

Pythias of Syracuse, implicated in a plot against the tyrant, is sentenced to death.

Before the execution, he receives permission from Dionysius to set his affairs in order, on the condition that his best friend Damon take his place as a pledge against his return.

Pythias is delayed and returns only moments before the execution of Damon is to take place.

This display of devotion so impresses Dionysius that he pardons Pythias. (The two comrades, celebrated for their loyalty to each other, will come to symbolize friendship.)

Plato, upon his return from Syracuse to Athens in 387 BCE, establishes the innovative Academy, an institution devoted to research and instruction in philosophy and the sciences.

He plans to have a single center for teaching and research that will draw together experts in all branches of learning and that will include younger scholars to give continuity to its work.

According to tradition, Akademus, a local hero of the Trojan War, had owned the garden long ago.

His former garden, or olive grove, was therefore called “akademia” before Plato established his Academy there.

In addition to Plato, the mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus is a senior member of the faculty.

Plato emphasizes geometry in and uses the five regular polyhedrons to explain the scientific phenomena of the universe.

The Academy, where scholars conduct rigorous research with their students, may be considered among the first universities.

Plato advances many of his principal ideas concerning government and justice in his Republic, written about 370.

Set forth as a debate between Socrates and five other speakers, the work describes an ideal state (based on Sparta), which Plato argues should be ruled by philosopher-kings.

Plato regards the philosopher as best suited to govern because he perceives the natural harmony between the principles of justice that govern the state and those that rule the individual.

Plato presents his concept of the ideal Forms in Book Seven’s allegory of the Cave—the world of illusion and ignorance—beyond which only the philosopher has ventured to perceive the ideal models of justice.

His doctrine of Forms postulates a realm of pure ideas, or essences, that exists above and beyond the illusory sensory world.

Plato's nephew and disciple, Speusippus, around 370 devises an encyclopedia-like work to record permanently the master's lectures on mathematics, natural history, and philosophy.

Cotys, king of Thrace, opposes Ariobarzanes of Phrygia, and his ally, the Athenians, on their revolt  from Persian rule.

He goes to war with the Athenians soon after for the possession of the Thracian Chersonese.

Athens, now that she cannot trust Iphicrates to protect her interests, organizes a rebellion against Cotys, led by his treasurer Miltokythes.

Iphicrates, having retired to Thrace, fights also for the Thracian king against Athens: with the help of Charidemus, a Greek mercenary leader from Euboea who had served under Iphicrates at Amphipolis, he bribes the Athenian military and naval commanders to suppress the rebellion.

Charidemus, captured by the Athenians, is taken into their service and receives their citizenship, but in 362, he is discharged.

After participating in the revolt of satraps in Persia, he again joins Cotys, and returns to Athens in 361 with a treaty from Cotys, proclaiming him an ally.

Cotys has successfully retained his kingdom.

By 359 BCE, Cotys controls the whole Chersonese peninsula.

During the same year he makes an alliance with the new Macedonian king, Philip II.

In 358 BCE, he is murdered by two of Plato’s students from Aenus, Python and Heraclides.

Thought previously as advisers to the King, they murdered him during a feast in his palace, under the pretext that he had wronged their father.

Upon their return to Athens, they are proclaimed honorary citizens and rewarded with gold wreaths.

On Cotys' murder, Charidemus becomes guardian to the dead king's young son, Cersobleptes, in conjunction with Berisades and Amadocus II, who are probably his brothers.

He is very young at this time, and the whole management of his affairs is assumed by Charidemus, who is connected by marriage with the royal family.

The area controlled by Cersobleptes is east of the river Hebrus.

The Odrysian empire splits itself in three smaller kingdoms, of which this one, with the capital at Seuthopolis, is to survive the longest.

Dionysius II, Dionysius' son and successor as tyrant, halts the conflict in 367 on the same unfavorable terms established after his father's defeat in the third war with Carthage from 383 BCE to about 375 BCE.

Dion, a former minister and a relative of the older Dionysius by marriage, had invited Plato back to Sicily in order to undertake the philosophical and scientific education of the young Dionysius and generally to educate him to become a constitutional king.

Plato had accepted.

Perhaps he intended to foster the establishment of a philosopher-king, as set forth in his "Republic."

However, Plato's experiment ends in failure the following year with the dismissal of both counselors; Dion goes into exile and Plato returns to Athens.

Dionysius, weak and ineffectual, lacks the vigor to maintain the military autocracy he has inherited, ruling precariously in Syracuse and southern Italy.