Author Sketch: Augustine of Hippo

Augustine of Hippo (also known as Saint Augustine, Augustinus, St. Augustine the Blessed)

Born 354 CE in Tageste, Numidia

Died 430 CE as a retired Bishop of Hippo

Works under consideration: The Confessions

Events that occurred during Augustine’s life:

Pics and Scots cross Hadrian’s Wall and attack Britain
Roman Legions begin to evacuate Britain
The Huns invade Europe
Accession of Theodosius the Great – the last Emperor of a united Roman empire
Scrolls begin to be replaced with books
Hymn singing is introduced by St. Ambrose of Milan and “Hallelujah” is born
The first written records of Japanese history
Alchemy begins with the search for the Philosopher’s stone and the Elixir of Life

Saint Augustine was born in the small village of Tageste on November 13, 354. Tageste was located in the North African Roman Provence of Numidia, present day Souk Ahras, on the eastern border of Algeria. Both of his parents were of Roman descent with possible Numidian genetic lines and Augustine is thought to have been a native Punic speaker. His father, Patricius, was a Roman administrator of Tageste but due to the village’s small size was only able to provide modestly for his family. Augustine’s mother, Monica, was a devout Christian and a constant influence on Augustine’s life. He was highly educated in the liberal arts and ultimately became not only a transitional literary and theological figure in his time but was also torn between dueling cultural belief systems caricaturized by his pagan father and his devoutly Catholic mother. Christian schools framed the beginnings of his educational influences; however, Augustine was not baptized during his early childhood. Perhaps it was the stress of living between two ideologies or the fact that, as he later believed, God allowed him to anguish upon a path of sin in order to show him the true faith, the ardent search for truth became Augustine’s life-long pursuit.

At the age of 11 or 12, Augustine journeyed 20 miles south from his birth place to Madaura where he began his study of grammar and literature. He excelled in his studies, especially Latin, and his father was so inspired by his son’s aptitude and his own hopes that Augustine would become a lawyer that he endeavored to gather the necessary funds for Augustine to continue his education. Ultimately, a local benefactor named Romanianus sponsored Augustine to study rhetoric at Carthage. During this time, Augustine read Cicero’s Hortensius which he described as the foundation upon which he built his life-long interest in philosophy. At Carthage, he became a member of the Manichean cult whose claim to “reconcile religion with philosophy” must have been very appealing to a young man of 17, caught between a mother who despaired for the salvation of his soul and his own youthful appetites, both of the body and the mind. He shared a relationship with a concubine for ten years who bore him a son named Adeodatus. By all accounts, he loved this woman deeply though they would never marry. During and after his studies at Carthage he lived his life as an “intellectual pagan” and a teacher of rhetoric.

Lamenting the lack of discipline of his students in Tageste, Augustine spent a year in Rome where he began to formally break from the Manicheans and embrace neo-Platonist concepts. He was also introduced to St. Ambrose who later performed Augustine's long awaited baptism into the Christian faith. His full conversion occurred in 386 and, after the death of his mother, he journeyed back to Africa with Adeodatus and other pupils to lead a monastic life. However, a skilled orator and prolific writer would not long live an isolated life. Also, around 391, he assumed what he called the “burden of the episcopate” when he was made a priest of Hippo. He would later hold the title of Bishop for thirty five years. He died of natural causes at Hippo in 430, in the midst of a Vandal invasion.

It is speculated that Augustine wrote over 232 separate titles not including personal letters and sermons. The Confessions and The City of God are two of his most known works but the totality of his written contribution to the western canon is quite impressive. He would later inspire such scholars as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin among others.

Author Sketch: Paul of Tarsus

Paul (the Apostle, also known as Saint Paul)
Born in Tarsus sometime shortly before or after the beginning of the Common Era
Died between 62-65 CE in Rome
Work under Consideration: Epistle to the Romans.

Other things that happened in Paul’s lifetime:

Herod Archelaus is deposed as ethnarch of Judaea and the territory, annexed by Rome.
London is founded.
Caesar Augustus dies and is succeeded by Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.
Buddhism introduced to China by the Emperor, Ming-Ti.


The writer known as Paul is one of the more elusive figures of history. Unlike our two previous New Testament writers (Matthew and Luke), there is absolutely no doubt that a man named Paul once existed and was responsible for at least some of the works credited to him as an author. Though he never met Jesus, the man who walked the Earth, Paul was instrumental in moving the gospel of his resurrection beyond its Jewish sectarian roots and into the free market of ideas wherein it eventually spread like wildfire from one end of the Roman Empire to the other.

Also unlike Jesus, Paul, as a writer, operated on the periphery of history—our image of him a composite formed from autobiography, demi-hagiography, anthropology, and good old fashioned guessing. He was born in Tarsus sometime just before or after the beginning of the Common Era. It was already an ancient city when Saul (or Paul as he would later be known) was born, with roots stretching back at least seven hundred years that had been molded by nearly every ascendant empire along the way, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman alike. It was known, in Paul’s time, as a center of learning, attracting philosophers and rhetoricians to schools that flourished against its metropolitan backdrop.

Of the many disharmonious “facts” assumed about Paul by various writers, there is little dissent on the fact that he was, indeed, Jewish, probably born into the tribe of Benjamin. Assuming that his father was a practicing Jew, we can also assume that Paul was educated in written Hebrew and, quite possibly, spoken Aramaic. He describes himself in the Epistle to the Galatians as “advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age” and “extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” [Gal. 1:14, NIV]. At some point fairly early in his life, Paul left Tarsus and came to Jerusalem, presumably to be closer to the temple to further his studies. By all accounts, including his own, he became involved in the persecution of the Nazarene sect, also referred to as The Way, which proclaimed the forgiveness of sins through the resurrection and name of Jesus the Christ. Luke suggests in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul had authority given to him by the temple to imprison followers of the Way and, is shown, at one point to be part of a mob that stoned the believer, Stephen, to death.

On a journey to Damascus to persecute followers of the Way, Paul claimed to have had an auditory hallucination wherein Jesus commanded him to go and preach his gospel to non-Jews. Paul preached the gospel of the resurrection in Christ’s name, by his own account, for three years, before returning to Jerusalem and meeting with the heads of the church there. Eventually, Paul entered into a missionary partnership with Barnabas, an elder from the Judean church, to begin spreading the gospel outside of the Jewish homeland. They found their greatest success together in Antioch where, in time, a church of sufficient size and influence to rival the original movement was founded and cultivated. Using Antioch as a base of operations, Barnabas and Paul spread the gospel through Syria and Asia Minor, creating seed churches wherever they could convert believers.

Later, Paul headed a mission of his own that spread the gospel further into Greece until he was able to establish a strong church at Ephesus. The exact details of how Paul wound up in Rome, only to be made into a scapegoat by Nero for the great fire in 64 CE and executed, are unclear. While Luke claimed that Paul was a Roman citizen, little extracanonical evidence has surfaced to support this claim. By whatever means, it is widely accepted that Paul was a part of the Roman church if not its sole and proprietary founder.

Though some of his writings are still with us today, Paul is something of a cipher onto which the reader is able to project his or her own ideas about Christianity. Some read in his writing an obviously rabbinical understanding of the Torah and cite his teachings as the clear link of continuity between Judaism and Christianity. Others, perhaps less invested in his identity as a Jew, see his mission to preach among the Gentiles as a rejection of Judaism, both as a religion and as a culture. Classicists find in his work writings an obvious synthesis of Jewish religion and Greek philosophy. It is perhaps this stereoscopic quality to his writing that has contributed to its endurance among the canon of Western thought for nearly two thousand years since his passing.

Author Sketch: "Luke"

Author Sketch: “Luke”
Work Under Consideration: The Acts of the Apostles
Place: Unknown though likely suspects include Rome, Antioch, and Ephesus
Time: widely disputed, likely coordinates include before 60 CE, after 70 CE, and the 2nd century CE

Imagine, if you will, a continuum of authorial identity among early Christian writers that begins with Matthew and Mark, about whom we know very little, stretching through to Paul, about whom we know a great deal. Smack dab in the middle of that line is the author commonly known as Luke.

What we can absolutely verify about Luke is scant and derived from the texts that he (or she) left behind. Though our interest in Luke is focused on the Acts of the Apostles, it is widely assumed even among skeptics that the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written by the same person. Both books open with a direct address to someone named Theophilus (literally, “God-lover”) and share a number of unique theological concerns including the emergence of the Holy Spirit, the universal appeal of Jesus’s message of salvation beyond the borders of Palestine and the relationship of the early church to those on the social margins of the Roman imperial culture.

Early biblical apologists usually associated the author of Luke with Luke the Physician, a companion of Paul who is mentioned explicitly in at least three passages of the New Testament. Acts, in particular, dabbles with curious modulations between the first-person, the first-person plural and third-person reportage that gives the impression, at least, that what we are reading is an eye-witness account. If true, that would clearly date the book as having been written before 60 CE when it is accepted that Paul was taken to Rome for trial. Acts’ failure to report on either Paul’s summary execution or the destruction of the temple and, indeed, Jerusalem itself are given as secondary evidence to support this position. If Luke the Physician is, in fact, the same as Luke the Author, we still know almost nothing about him as the passages wherein he is mentioned identify him only as a companion to Paul who occupied some higher echelon in the early Gentile church.

Others, though, have noted Luke and Acts’ reliance on other historical works of the time (namely by the Roman Jewish writer Josephus) as evidence that they was written considerably later and that Acts, in particular, purposefully omits those two key events in history as a means of obscuring the date of its own creation. Both the Gospel of Luke and Acts seem to grapple with nuances surrounding Jesus’s divinity that were of greater concern to the Church after Paul’s death than during his life. The Acts of the Apostles also becomes decreasingly concerned with the Nazarene sect of Judaism (primarily composed of Jesus’s actual Apostles) and more concerned with Christianity as it spread beyond the borders of Palestine. This makes a strong argument for both Luke and Acts as documents generated by the Gentile church after the destruction of Jerusalem as a means of textually strengthening their direct connection to the source of the tradition.

Author Sketch: "Matthew"

Author Sketch: “Matthew”

Only one step shy of the mystery surrounding, “Who wrote the book of Love?” is the question, “Who wrote the book of the Gospel of Matthew?” Theologians and historians have spent thousands of years arguing this very point and the answer with which one comes to a kind of peace has more to do with worldview than the imperviousness of any given body of evidence.

In the absence of an historical accord, the best we can hope for is to sketch out a continuum of the possibilities. The first set of hurdles over which we must leap is in regards to when was the gospel written? The gospel itself never claims to be a first hand account of Jesus’s life and, indeed, given marked shifts in tone between the various sections, it reads more like an accumulation of myths, second-hand accounts, and accepted teachings that might have developed within a particular sect of the early church. Some critics, perhaps more interested in the gospel’s literal veracity, might place it as being written sometime directly after the Resurrection. However, there is also considerable evidence pointing to a much later codification of the gospel, late in the first century after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. So, reasonably, we can place the penning of this work somewhere between 33 and 100 CE.

The question of who exactly is this Matthew is a thornier one altogether. Matthew’s continued usage of the phrase “kingdom of heaven” in contrast to the other gospels’ reliance on “kingdom of God” has suggested to some that its author is be, in fact, Jewish due to his reluctance to write the name of God. This suspicion is compounded by Matthew’s more frequent referencing (relative to the other gospels) of verses from the Torah to show Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy.

Conversely, while there is no original manuscript to confirm this, many also suspect that Matthew was originally written in Greek which tells us something not only about its author but its intended audience. Though it was likely written by a Jew (or Jews) with an intimate understanding of Temple Law, that person (or people) was also educated in the universal language of scholarship, Greek, and transmitted the beliefs contained within to a group of people expected to have both a knowledge of the law and Greek writing.

That same author expresses obvious prejudices towards various groups while painting others with a less critical brush. The Kings Herod and the Pharisees are made the clear villains of the piece while the Romans, who actually crucified Jesus, are shown at every turn to be, at worst, unwitting participants in a tragedy beyond their understanding or, at best, actually sympathetic to Jesus’s teaching and, in some cases, his ministry. From this, we may infer that Matthew’s writer was still under threat of Roman persecution and did not (unlike Paul) wish to portray Christianity as critical of or subversive to Roman authority.

Short of the invention of time-travel, we will likely never know with complete certainty who wrote the book of Matthew or fully under what circumstances it was created. Still, the version of Jesus’s life that it tells is the first one to greet us as we approach the New Testament and approximates, if not perfectly reports, a good deal of what we know about Jesus’s own beliefs and teachings. Though we place a high premium on certainty in this empirical day and age, what, after all, is the fun of a mystery religion without a little mystery?

Author Sketch: Plutarch

Plutarch

Born circa 46 CE in Chaeronea in the province of Boeotia
Died circa 120-125 CE probably in Chaeronea

Other things that happened in Plutarch’s lifetime:

Paul begins his travels as a missionary.
The Eastern Han dynasty rules China and introduces Buddhism as the state religion.
Jerusalem destroyed by Rome after Jewish uprising.

At first glance, the transition from Aristotle to Plutarch would seem to indicate a clear shift from the Hellenic world to the Roman one. Just as Aristotle, who was not born in Athens but is most associated with it, can be seen as a transitional figure so can Plutarch, who was not born in Rome, did not write in Latin but whose writing is lumped in with Roman writers all the same. The keys to this misidentification come in the form of his extensive writing on the history of Rome (and Greece among other places), his eventual audience, and his position in time as witness to the golden age of Roman emperors.

Plutarch was born in Chaeronea in the Greek province of Boeotia. Though Chaeronea was a small city by any standard, it was just a little over twenty miles from the Oracle at Delphi where Plutarch would serve in his later years as a priest to Apollo. It had also been the host of a number of fundamental battles as the winds of empire had shifted first one way and then the next over the centuries. While legend about Plutarch is abundant, the details of his actual life alternate between sparse and mundane. It is widely assumed that he spent at least two years studying at the Academy in Athens and journeyed to key spots around the Mediterranean in his younger years. His adult life appears to have been consumed by occupying various civic and religious roles specific to Chaeronea as well as Delphi and composing the works that represent him today.



It has been said that though Plutarch benefits from proximity to at least some of the subjects of his biographies, he exhibits a deep piety that sometimes equivocates myth with history. Though both components are valuable, parsing one from the other in his accounts of famous persons’ lives is a good part of the active work that goes into reading his writing. It is also valuable to note that his choice of subjects and analyses of their lives are not without the taint of his own, more provincial interests, often fueled by a unspoken but powerful urge to place the events from the fall of Greece to the rise of Rome into some kind of meaningful, ordered context that demonstrates that civilization, wherever it may rise, has a plan that transcends the understanding of the individual.

1. Chaeronea

2. Delphi

3. Thebes

4. Athens

5. Rome

Click on map to enlarge

Author Sketch: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Politics)

Aristotle-

Born: 384 BCE in Stagira
Died: 322 BCE in Chalcis

Other Things That Happened in Aristotle’s Lifetime:
The 30th dynasty rises in Egypt, the last native house to rule.
Rome builds wall around the city.
Alexander the Great creates an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus River.
China was reaching the end of the Warring States period under three Zhou emperors, Anwang, Liewang, and Xianwang.

Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC



Works under study: Nicomachean Ethics (Book One), Politics (Book One)

Unlike Plato, who was born and lived almost exclusively in Athens, Aristotle lived and taught all over the Mediterranean. In this sense, he is a model for the Hellenic age that followed the Peloponnesian War and the decline of Athens as a military power. While Athens was still a major seat for the accumulation and dispensation of knowledge, the events that unfolded on the world stage in Aristotle’s lifetime dwarfed the city-skirmishes that largely characterized Greek politics prior to the 4th century and drew nearly every civilization within reach of the Mediterranean into a single culture unified by Alexander.

In the spirit of his times, Aristotle was born in Stagira, a Greek colony not far from the southern border of Macedon and lived apart from the intrigues of Athens until the age of seventeen when he moved there to study at Plato’s Academy. There is ample evidence suggesting that Aristotle was a remarkable student and can be considered, in his transmission of Platonic thought, an accurate and insightful source. After Plato’s death, Aristotle moved his operation to the city of Assus where he and three other former students of the Academy advised a local ruler named Hermias and opened their own school. This arrangement must have been a fruitful one for Aristotle married Hermias’ adopted daughter, Pythias. Three years later, he moved his new family to the city of Mytilene on the nearby isle of Lesbos where he engaged in most of his observations of nature and biological processes.

In 342 BCE, Aristotle was summoned to the court of Phillip II of Macedon that he might tutor his son, Alexander. A mere two years into this relationship, Phillip left Macedonia to wage war and Alexander was installed as regent to rule in his stead. With Alexander mostly distracted by his duties, Aristotle was free to open a school and concentrate on his own studies as well as act as an advisor to the regent prince when asked.

Aristotle Tutoring Alexander by J.L.G Ferris, 1895

When Alexander assumed the throne after his father’s assassination in 336, Aristotle left Macedon and returned to Athens to teach. There is compelling evidence to suggest that Aristotle’s connection with Alexander gave him new authority in Athens and he used it to establish the Lycaeum where he would walk with his students as he lectured. It is widely assumed that the written works associated with Aristotle are something like transcriptions of his lectures at the Lycaeum. In this sense, they are not the work of one particular period of his life but the sum of his learning up to that point.

When Alexander died thirteen years later, having brought what the Greeks would have thought as the known world under one flag, Aristotle’s reputation and fortune in Athens seem to have diminished with his passing. As the political waters around him began to fill up with ever more sharks bent on his death, Aristotle either fled or was exiled from Athens in 323 BCE. He, along with his second wife and two children, returned to his mother’s ancestral lands near Chalcis and, within just a few months, died in 322 BCE at the age of sixty-two.

Though Socrates and Plato are considered the source for much of his philosophy (though he differed with them in some ways), Aristotle, by virtue of his life’s course, was able to bring those ideas to bear on the flow of history in a way that neither of his predecessors could imagine. Meticulous and observational by his nature, Aristotle can seem a colder intellect than those who came before him but, whatever we can glean from his character some 2400 years later, one must respect the comprehensive nature of his learning, his relentless quest to synthesize and codify existing knowledge as well as his influence on knowledge for centuries after his death.

Map Legend:

1. Stagira
2. Athens
3. Assus
4. Mytilene
5. Macedon
6. Athens
7. Chalcis

Author Sketch- Plato (Part 2)

The first part of the Author Sketch for Plato can be read here

Plato-

Works Under Consideration: The Republic: Books One and Two

Place: Athens, Greece

A mere seven years after Aristophanes daydreamed about a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War in Lysistrata, Athens found itself facing utter ruin and, ultimately, surrendered to Sparta and her allies in 404 BCE. Stripped of its former glory and wealth, Athens began a slow descent that merely scouted ahead on the route of Greece’s overall decline in importance in relation to world affairs, ceding its sovereignty first to Alexander and later, to Rome.

Herma of Plato, Musei Capitolini, Rome
taken by Ricardo André Frantz


This is the Athens in which Plato would write his works; still benefiting from the concentration of learning and inquiry present in the first decades after the fall but marginalized by the ever-escalating tensions and complexities of civilization as it waded into every inlet and onto every isthmus of the Mediterranean.

Yet, even as its fortunes in world affairs begin to diminish, Greece would remain a dominant force in culture for centuries to come. Around 385 BCE, Plato founded a school just outside of Athens in a place sacred to Athena and, in so doing, laid the foundation for The Great Conversation to truly develop beyond its mostly Greek origins. The final incarnation of the Academy would not be shuttered until nearly 800 years later, having attracted minds from all over the known world in pursuit of knowledge.



Plato’s trilogy about the trial and execution of Socrates (comprised of Apology, Crito, and Phaedo) are among his earliest and most accessible works. Perhaps it is for this reason that Plato is often read (or misread) as merely the ideas of Socrates, an oral teacher, into writing. Of course, Plato doesn’t discourage this notion by using Socrates, as a character, at the core of his most widely read works including the one under discussion here, The Republic. This device, however, should not tempt us into overlooking at least two other streams important to Plato’s contribution to the Great Conversation.

The Republic is, at its simplest, an attempt to use philosophy as the means to discover the best ways for humanity to govern itself. While Plato no doubt drew upon the teachings of Socrates, most notably in his method of inquiry, he was not, as it turns out, the first person to try this sort of thing. For that honor, we must turn to the first philosopher, Pythagoras who, himself, founded a school of learning that outlived him by several centuries and, indeed, used the principles of his philosophy to intervene into politics with somewhat disastrous results. Because Pythagoras, like Socrates after him, also insisted on the primacy of oral teaching but did not, like Socrates, have someone like Plato to write some of his ideas down after his death, history offers very little credible information about what exactly Pythagoras himself may have believed or taught. His influence must be reverse-engineered from the transmission of that influence through the course of ancient philosophy until it runs, smack dab, into Plato in the early 4th century BCE.

There is every reason, however, to suspect that, in his time, Plato was perceived as a Pythagorean and his writing was read in context of that tradition. The Republic, in this sense, can be seen as Plato, still devastated from the loss of his teacher and the defeat of his city, returning to first principles and working out the fundamental relationships between people and the city-nation-states that develop in their massing just as Pythagoras had before him.

Their efforts are differentiated (as Plato and Socrates are differentiated) by the contrast between abstract philosophical inquiry, captured for posterity in the act of writing, and applied philosophical inquiry, as practiced by Socrates and Pythagoras that would ultimately get them both killed. The third important influence within the Republic is that of Plato himself, having seen the dangers in the applied school of political philosophy in action and deciding that there had to be a better way. While it may be nigh impossible to truly parse what ideas belonged first to whom, it is in this melding of three minds that we see the potential for the Great Conversation develop and, ultimately, blossom into something unlike anything that world had ever known.

Author Sketch: Aristophanes (The Clouds, Lysistrata)

Aristophanes
455 – 380 BCE


World Events during Aristophanes’ Lifetime:
- Siddhartha Gautama dies – 480 BCE
- the wall of Jerusalem was built by Nehemiah and Ezra
- Xerxes II becomes the King of Persia and is quickly succeeded by Darius II
- Indian Civilization in Mexico declines
- The Fourche Maline culture reaches its apex in North America
- The 30th dynasty becomes the final native house to rule Egypt

Very little is known about the life of Aristophanes outside of the information that may be gleaned from his eleven comedic plays still extant. An Athenian by birthright, Aristophanes enjoyed a very long life and he, like Socrates, lived during a time of dramatic political change and upheaval. It is important to keep in mind that Greek theatre was a competitive sport and, at this, Aristophanes can be seen as a great success. His first play (The Banqueters) won second prize when he was only 18 years old. Embedded within the chorus’ dialogue (usually understood to be the voice of the author) we can hear that Aristophanes himself was understandably concerned with the success of his plays. The course of Aristophanes’ lifetime ran parallel to The Peloponnesian War, two oligarchies and two democratic “restorations”. One might ask how it was that Aristophanes could have possibly lived such a long life utilizing his satiric wit in the Old Comedic tradition that involved public ridicule for many local Athenian peoples of prestige.




His life was not void of political danger, however, and most notably he was put on trial by Cleon for allegedly committing slander against the Polis who were the only people who were “off limits” in Greek Comedy. Aristophanes was cleared of all charges but made Cleon a comedic target for many years to come. Cleon’s political life, ironically, was as long as Aristophanes’ 40 year long career as a poet and playwright and neither of them seemed to suffer from their extended “war of words”. One argument that scholars have put forth is that Aristophanes’ long life can be attributed to his willingness to be censored by whatever ruling political party happened to be in power at the time. This theory may explain why only eleven of his supposed 40-60 plays are still extant today. It may also explain the typically hard line conservative voice that seems to emanate from his written works. We will never know whether these views were actually his own or merely a reflection of his audience.

The fact that Aristophanes is a transitional figure between the traditions of Old and New Comedy should not be forgotten by the reader. Old Comedy is more localized and distinctly Athenian whereas New Comedy has a broader perspective and is suggestive of an emergent and distinctly Greek worldview. I have found that these transitional authors are among the more interesting to read, mostly due to the fact that the writing is in the voice of the declining and ascendant traditions at the same time. Unfortunately, because we do not have access to the whole of Aristophanes’ works, we cannot know the degree of fluidity with which this transition was made. We do know that his last play (which is lost) was written in the tradition of New Comedy but we do not know if it was a success or even if it was any good. His sons continued their father’s legacy as playwrights in the tradition of New Comedy and achieved marked competitive success.

Author Sketch: Plato (Apology, Crito)

Plato-


Born c. 428 BCE, Died c. 348 BCE (lived to be approximately 80)
Born and lived mostly in Athens, Greece

Other Things That Happened in Plato’s Lifetime:
The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta
King Weilieh of Chou became the Thirty-first Sovereign of the Thousand Year Chou dynasty (China)
Egypt regains its sovereignty from the Persian Empire
Many Jews had recently returned to their homeland after the Babylonian exile
The Celts established settlements in the British Isles


Works under study: Apology, Crito

The Great Works reading list kicks off with this pair of works from Plato. There is a staggering amount of historically verifiable information about Plato still known to us today and to write even a condensed version of his biography and historical impact would take up more space than I want to devote to these author introduction pieces. The biographical note from the Great Books edition (presumably written or, at least, editorially directed and approved by Adler himself) divides Plato’s adult life into roughly four periods and both of these are set during the first of them. As a citizen of Athens, Plato’s first decade of adulthood was a socially and politically chaotic one. He ambitiously pursued a career in politics until the execution of Socrates which, along with other political shifts taking place in Athens concurrently, ushered him not only out of politics but away from Athens for over a decade.

As a prolific writer well into his later years, Plato wrote on many topics, producing works of varying length and density on topics that range from fundamental (Apology) to awkwardly tangential (Lysis). One element that characterizes nearly all of Plato’s work is the dialogue form he uses, resulting in a document that reads much like a play with perhaps fewer blocking notes in the margins. What sets the tone of Apology and, to a lesser extent, Crito apart from most of Plato’s other work is the directness with which he addresses the audience to the story he is telling. The Apology is essentially an extended monologue by Socrates as he is on trial; a soliloquy delivered, at once, to the jury that will ultimately sentence him to death, but, also, to the reader who continues to find truth in his defense some twenty-five hundred years later. The effect is dramatic and challenges the reader throughout to remember that these words are not a journalistic account of Socrates’ trial, but a fictionalized distillation of his very essence as captured by a student and a dear friend. Both of these pieces, along with the unassigned third part to this sad story, Phaedo, are filled with the urgent passions of a brilliant young man who had yet to become one of the world’s most venerated and influential writers and thinkers but was well on his way.



Map of Athens, from The Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography, by Samuel Butler (1907/8).