Hot on the heels of Robin Waterfield’s Plato of Athens, published in 2023 and presenting itself as the first ‘biography’ of Plato in English since 1839, comes another ‘life’ of Plato, this one by the Cambridge historian Carol Atack.[1] The two works inevitably cover much common ground (about Plato’s family, the regime of the Thirty, the trial of Socrates, the founding of the Academy, and so forth), but they frequently differ over points of detail. Atack, unlike Waterfield, does not accept the authenticity of the Seventh Letter and is consequently hesitant over some of the particulars of Plato’s visits to Sicily (179). Atack is certain that Plato was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries and was actively influenced by Orphic mystery religion; Waterfield does not even mention either subject. Atack thinks she knows what Plato took from Gorgias’s On Nature, again something never mentioned by Waterfield. While Waterfield believes that the story of Chaerephon’s consultation of Delphi about Socrates is a Platonic fiction (borrowed by Xenophon), Atack accepts it, at least as a story in general circulation. Beyond such details, the biggest general difference between the two books is signalled by the contrasting emphases of their subtitles, Waterfield’s ‘A Life in Philosophy’ and Atack’s ‘A Civic Life’. Broadly speaking, Waterfield’s book is more of a guide to the dialogues themselves, and attempts to find the life of the author’s mind implicitly inscribed in them, whereas Atack, an accomplished scholar of politics, is somewhat more interested in the things that were happening around Plato in his world and seeks hints in the dialogues of how these events impinged on his thinking. Both books are attractively written and accessible to a wide readership, though Atack’s endnotes, unlike Waterfield’s deliberately sparse footnotes, provide full documentation of both primary and secondary sources. Despite their various differences, Atack shares with Waterfield a tendency to succumb to the temptations of free surmise and even wishful thinking.
After an Introduction which deals with matters of methodology and the sources for Plato’s life, as well as illustrating the more-than-philosophical influence of Plato by touching on the divergent responses to him of C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, Atack’s book is divided into seven chapters, the last of them devoted to Plato’s ‘legacy’. The six main chapters chart a chronologically sequential course, even though Atack is generally rather non-committal about the chronology of the dialogues themselves. It also tells one something about the balance of historical material on which Atack relies that the first three of her chapters deal with only the first quarter-century of Plato’s life, down to the death of Socrates, and the other three with the remaining half-century. (The proportions of Waterfield’s narrative are less lopsided.) The first chapter, ‘A Wartime Childhood’, scene-paints the general context of the Peloponnesian war. It also places some emphasis on Plato’s mother, Perictione, and on his stepfather, Pyrilampes (whom Perictione married, in the mid-420s, after the death of her first husband, Ariston, Plato’s father). Atack makes various conjectures about how Plato’s early feelings about democracy may have been coloured by his relationship with Pyrilampes, who had been closely associated with Pericles and named one of his sons Demos; oddly, however, she does not mention the dialogues’ actual references to Pyrilampes.
The second chapter, ‘Education in a Divided City’, contextualises Plato’s life further against the faultlines emerging in Athenian culture between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of education, borrowing the broad terms of the agon in Aristophanes’ Clouds. Plato’s own ‘traditional’ tastes, and his dislike for the so-called ‘new’ music, as well as his aversion to sophistic rhetoric, are seen as rooted in these early years. As we reach the life-changing encounter with Socrates, Atack highlights the likelihood that this was initially mediated through his older brothers, whom he will have eventually followed into ‘the homosocial space’ and pederastic arena of the gymnasium (44). Even so, to say of the famous episode of Socrates’ glimpse inside Charmides’ cloak that Plato here ‘seems [sic] to have been thinking of his own experiences’ (62) is to strain after biographical access where none is available. Atack appears to accept the tradition that young Plato also wrote poetry in several genres (48), though the reservation that ‘the details are suspect’ is held back, like a number of other such qualifications, for an endnote (208 n. 27). Later in the book the intensity of Platonic engagement (and rivalry) with poetry, as repeatedly manifested in the fabric of the dialogues, not least the Republic, receives rather less attention than one might have hoped for.
Chapter 3, ‘The Trial and Death of Socrates’, traverses Plato’s transition to adulthood (Atack thinks the arrangements for rural garrisons at Laws 6.760-2 reflect his own experiences as an ephebe). Equal coverage is given to his expanding intellectual horizons as he became exposed to thinkers other than Socrates (here the account of Plato’s philosophical development is necessarily anchored in Aristotle’s Metaphysics), and to his disenchantment with contemporary politics brought about by the double (and linked) traumas of the Thirty, who included some of his own relatives, and the trial of Socrates, which he witnessed at first hand and was long haunted by.[2] Atack handles her material, as throughout, with a steady touch, but some of the connections she divines between texts and life are less straightforward than she takes them to be: do the supposedly Eleusianian overtones of the afterlife hypothesised at Apology 40e-41a really provide support for the inference that Plato himself (as well as Socrates) was an initiate (93)? More circumspectly, near the end of the chapter Atack notes the apparent fact that Plato never married, but she declines to draw any psychological conclusions from that.
In each of the following three chapters Atack continues to build up her broadly chronological picture while integrating into it partial perspectives on individual dialogues as examples of Plato’s development as both writer and thinker. Hard evidence is in short supply. Chapter 4, ‘Plato outside Athens’, is largely built around a reconstruction of Plato’s philosophically motivated visits to the dialecticians of Megara and, subsequently, to the Pythagoreans of Magna Graecia; along the way, it outlines Plato’s place in the growth of the new genre of ‘Socratic’ literature. Among other things, Atack stresses salient differences between Plato’s and Xenophon’s (later) Socratic writings, using the Ion as a specimen of a distinctively ‘unsympathetic’ depiction of Socrates, and the Gorgias for its richer literary handling of characters and themes in conveying a ‘bitter’ assessment of the dangers of political rhetoric. Atack supposes that Plato’s (first) Sicilian visit must have impressed on him the stark contrast between tyrannical decadence and Pythagorean austerity. She also accepts, with some caution, the tradition that Plato was temporarily enslaved on his return from Sicily, but she ignores the fact that the earliest sources for enslavement, embedded in Philodemus’s Index Academicorum, point to a pre-Sicilian date.[3]
Chapter 5, ‘Establishing an Academy’, situates Plato’s establishment of a philosophical institution, in a familiar but still instructive manner, in relation to its educational ‘competitors’, not least Isocrates. At the same time it analyses Plato’s maturing skills as a writer (the Protagoras’s theatricality is a case in point) as well as an increasingly religio-metaphysical thinker (as exemplified by the Phaedo). The Republic is approached as a major expansion of the pre-existing ‘pamphlet’ genre of the politeia (cf. Xenophon’s Politeia of the Spartans); the Noble Lie and the Cave are among the topics selectively cited, but there is also an oblique nod to the Straussian view that parts of the work may be ‘a joke’ (149; cf. ‘some fun’ on the same page). In the remainder of the chapter, both the Symposium and the Phaedrus receive attention, but we are given insufficient reason to accept that the former dialogue conveys something of the ‘homoerotic space’ of the Academy itself (154), or that the latter reflects Plato’s own relations with Dion as well as Socrates (155-6).
Chapter 6, ‘The Academy Flourishes’, is an exercise in extreme compression, given its task of dealing with Plato’s life during a period that included the writing of Parmenides, Philebus, Timaeus, and Laws. The chapter traces both the increasing success of the Academy as a panhellenic magnet for intellectuals and Plato’s increasing distance from his Socratic origins, not least in his evolving interest in mathematics (partly under the influence of Eudoxus). Plato’s later dialogues do not lend themselves easily to an attempt to detect the forms of authorial experience which lay behind the works, but Atack probes as best she can. One characteristic but precarious reading of this sort is the claim that Socrates’ role in the Philebus as more of an ‘adjudicator’ than a full participant in the argument reflects Plato’s own sense of being ‘no longer at the cutting edge of the philosophical debate’ (178). And while the Laws is saturated with a ‘cultural conservatism’ that can hardly not be ascribed to the author himself, it seems a little arbitrary, as well as sentimental, to say that in the old Athenian’s system of public choruses Plato had ‘put his love for music into this work’ (184).
Atack’s envoi, Chapter 7 (‘Plato’s ‘legacy’), makes the point that Plato was crucial for the lasting prestige of Athens as a cultural centre long after its political decline. She might have added that Plato, as a kind of prose Homer (cf. pseudo-Longinus on Plato’s ceaseless rivalry with Homer), had a much wider educated readership, i.e. of non-philosophers, than any other ancient philosopher. The chapter sketches the history of the Academy from Plato’s death to the time of Cicero, and touches briefly but deftly on examples of later Platonic influence: on Christianity, on Neoplatonism, on Renaissance Italy (including its homoerotic sensibilities), on the genre of utopia-writing, and on modern political debates (in e.g. the contrasting readings of Grote, Popper, and Leo Strauss).
All in all, Atack’s book is crisply written, shrewd, and well-informed, with many interesting aperçus which I have not had space to mention. Errors, including typos, are few and far between but would be worth correcting in a paperback: on p. 31, Nicias, instead of Cleon (and Demosthenes), is credited with the capture of Spartans at Pylos in 425; the rhapsode of Plato’s Ion is wrongly called Ion of Chios (110 plus index); Antiphon (of Rhamnous?) at Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.6, is not a ‘Socratic’ (142); the method of collection and division is slightly misrepresented on p. 164; p. 208 n. 33, read ‘Laws’ for ‘Republic’; p. 215 n. 48, read ‘Philolaus’ for ‘Archytas’; p. 218 n. 64, the Burnyeat reference should, I think, be to Explorations vol. II, 289-304; p. 218 n. 64 is irrelevant to the point in the text; and it is not clear, pace p. 222 n. 1 (cf. 187), that the Thracian slave who supposedly played at the dying Plato’s bedside is using a ‘ratttle’. The book is well-produced, though the index has a few imperfections (e.g. the omission of the Euthydemus figure discussed on pp. 63 and 107). Readers of many kinds are likely to derive both pleasure and profit from reading this book. But they may nonetheless be left with a lingering sense that, despite Atack’s best efforts, much of Plato’s ‘life’ ultimately eludes the clutches of biography.
Notes
[1] See my review of Waterfield’s book in BMCR 2024.02.05. Atack herself pays Waterfield the compliment of calling his book ‘important’ (p. 10).
[2] Atack reproduces the orthodox view that Plato’s Apology treats Aristophanes’ Clouds as ‘a first attempt at prosecution [of Socrates]’ (87) without considering a more subtle alternative: see S. Halliwell, Greek Laughter (Cambridge, 2008), 254-5.
[3] See the discussion by Kilian Fleischer, Philodem: Geschichte der Akademie (Leiden, 2023), pp. 298-311, with Greek text on pp. 169-70. Waterfield p. 121 n. 33 had dismissed the possibility of an earlier date, but his argument is a non-sequitur (since the evidence in question disconnects the event from a Sicilian context).