PLATO, a Greek philosopher; born in Athens, or in )Egina, in May, 429 B. 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 im aginative and emotional nature, he early began to write poems, and studied phil osophy, and at 20 became the disciple of Socrates. He burnt his poems, remained devotedly attached to Socrates for 10 years. After the death of Socrates, he went to Megara, to hear Euclid; thence to Cyrene, and perhaps to Egypt and S. Italy. On his return he began to teach gratuitously at Athens, in the plane tree grove of the Academia; and had a great number of disciples. Among them was Aristotle, distinguished as the "Mind of the School," and perhaps Demosthenes. Women are said to have attended. In his 40th year, Plato visited Sicily, but he offended the tyrant Dionysius by the political opinions he uttered, and only escaped death through the influence of his friend, Dion.
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 philo sophic and poetic spirit—the depth of the philosopher and the rigorous exacti tude 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; and the first attempt toward a stration of the immortality of the soul.
It is difficult to say what idea Plato had of the Deity. It seems, however, that his idea of the good and Him were identical. Plato distinguishes two com ponents of the soul—the divine or ra tional, that which partakes of a divine principle, and participates in the knowl edge of the eternal; and the mortal or irrational, that which participates in the motions and changes of the body, and is perishable. The two are united by an intermediate link, which he calls thumps, or spirit. He believes in future retribu tion; 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 doc trine Fowler's "Loeb's Classical Li brary" (1913).