A portrait of the philosopher Plato, showing how the ideas in his work, Republic, were tested by violent events in the most powerful Greek city of the era.
In his excellent new book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, the classicist James Romm brings Plato down to earth ... A deft and engaging work of history, philosophy and biography, as well as a meta-commentary on the perils of regarding canonical thinkers as disembodied minds ... Plato and the Tyrant is full of something that I do not readily associate with the distinguished poster child of Western philosophy: gossip and intrigue. The story of Plato’s stint in Syracuse is as rife with human interest as any melodrama ...
Romm relates this history—and introduces readers to a colorful cast of sycophantic courtiers, eccentric philosophers and defiant poets—with flair. He is an equally admirable guide to the many controversies in which the affair is mired ... Nowhere is he more in his element than when he wades into the vicious, centuries-long conflict over the authorship of the 13 'Platonic' letters.
Completely captivating ... This tone, knowledgeable but not servile, free of the 'spell,' permeates Romm’s book, which is mercifully less about dissecting every nonexistent nuance of Republic and much more about reconstructing the extent and nature of Plato’s worldly hypocrisy ... The Plato found in these pages, wonderfully evoked by Romm’s tense, insightful prose and massively substantiated by an extensive bibliography, is the very opposite of marmoreal in every way. In a world where a four billion dollar podcast-bro ecosystem worships the marmoreal on a daily, hourly basis, that alone makes the book extremely welcome.
Finely sifted ... He includes abundant historical and social context. He collates different versions of important events carefully and is frank about the limits of his evidence. Not a Plato specialist himself, he generously cites the literature, tracking shifts in opinion about the Republic and its author. Sometimes, however, his narrative bogs down in the shuttling among Sicily, Athens and the text of the Republic, only to be prodded along with portentous phrases such as 'but soon, a new crisis made him a hero again' and 'but fate had a strange resolution in store for him yet.'
Still, Mr. Romm’s portrait of Plato as a scheming, often bumbling political player will be intriguingly new to most readers.
