According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in The History of Herodotus, Leonidas was in command of the now famous 300 Spartans who were sent, in advance of the main Spartan body of troops, to engage the Persian horde in order to arrest and defeat its intended invasion of Greece. […]
Read more Critical Essays Leonidas: Portrait of a SpartanCritical Essays When Plato Was a Child
In 416 b.c., an Athenian fleet augmented by allies from Chios and Lesbos attacked the people on the island of Melos. The Athenians maintained that it was not their intent to ravage the island; instead they wanted to court its allegiance to their cause; hence, before the Athenians devastated the […]
Read more Critical Essays When Plato Was a ChildCritical Essays Plato’s Flyting
I have been teaching Plato’s dialogues to first-year American university students since 1960, and I have watched and listened, like Er between heaven and hell, as generations of students have read Mr. Buchanan’s sentence and responded with cynical silence or rueful laughter. I have met young men and women in […]
Read more Critical Essays Plato’s FlytingPlato Biography
If Athens represented a degree of humanistic civilization that had not been seen before in European and Mediterranean culture — and strong arguments can be made that it did — still it was in many ways different from what we today are likely to think of as an enlightened culture. […]
Read more Plato BiographyCharacter Analysis Thrasymachus
As a sophist, Thrasymachus seems to serve as a kind of adversarial “straw-man” to Socrates’ probing philosophy, but a fair analysis does show him to be a typical sophist. When we analyze his argument and his general way of comporting himself in debate, we can appreciate why the ancient Greeks […]
Read more Character Analysis ThrasymachusCharacter Analysis Socrates
As noted at various points in the commentaries, Socrates implements the entire arsenal of Western logic and rhetoric to accomplish his end of rarifying and finally fixing the point of a given dialogue. If we may adopt the Shakespearean metaphor of art as a mirror held up to nature, it […]
Read more Character Analysis SocratesSummary and Analysis Book X: Section III
Part of Er’s fate is that he will tell men yet alive his story of life after death. Er is a brave soldier who dies in battle. Ten days after his death, his body is taken home and laid on the funeral pyre, but there Er comes back to life […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Book X: Section IIISummary and Analysis Book X: Section II
There are all sorts of illnesses that can and do attack the body and bring about its demise. Every material thing we understand falls prey to its own unique “evil”: wood rots; iron falls prey to rust; the body dies of the illnesses that attack it; and so on. But […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Book X: Section IISummary and Analysis Book X: Section I
Socrates begins by seeking an agreement on definition; he posits the idea that artists are said to create things; hence, it is commonly held that they are creative artists. Thus, Socrates argues, it follows logically that we might argue an example of something an artist produces; we may argue the […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Book X: Section ISummary and Analysis Book IX
Socrates takes as his first example the tyrant. It might appear to an immature thinker, or a child, that the tyrant, exercising despotism as he does, is surely a happy man; after all, it is plain that the tyrant can live surrounded by pomp and ceremony and all that wealth […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Book IX