The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World by Daniel J. Boorstin Page B

States, or those in power in the States by some dispensation of providence become true philosophers.”
    What Plato, now in his forties, found in southern Italy and Sicily excited his “strong disapproval of the kind of life which was there called the life of happiness, stuffed full as it was with the banquets of the Italian Greeks and Syracusans, who ate to repletion twice every day, and were never without a partner for the night. . . . For with these habits formed early in life, no man under heaven could possibly attain to wisdom—human nature is not capable of such an extraordinary combination.”
    The fateful event of this first visit to Syracuse was meeting an attractive and impressionable young man, whose fortunes and misfortunes would draw Plato into Sicilian politics for the rest of his life. Dion became his eager disciple. At first Plato did not realize that Dion, son-in-law of the reigning “tyrant,” Dionysius I, was contriving the overthrow of the ruling tyranny. Could this be a time and a place for testing Plato’s vision of the philosopher-king? “For Dion, who rapidly assimilated my teaching as he did all forms of knowledge, listened to me with an eagerness which I had never seen equalled in any young man, and resolved to live for the future in a better way than the majority of Italian and Sicilian Greeks.” Dion’s reformed ways made him unpopular among his contemporaries. Numerous stories recount the efforts of Dionysius I to be rid of Plato. One tells that Dionysius I had Plato kidnapped and handed over to a Spartan admiral, who exposed him for sale as a slave at Aegina, but Plato was luckily ransomed by an acquaintance from Cyrene.
    It was probably on his return to Athens (about 388 B.C.) that Plato founded his famous Academy. Some would call Plato’s Academy the ancestor of the modern university, and so have distinguished Plato as “the first president of a permanent institution for the prosecution of science by original research.” But it could not have been more Athenian. The site he chose—about a mile out of Athens—was a garden next to a grove sacred to the Hero Hekademus or Akademus, from whom it took the name “Academy.” It was reputed to be a delightful, quiet place with shaded walks and a gymnasium. Plato had a small house of his own nearby. He soon acquired fame as a lecturer and attracted pupils from other Greek cities. There was no admission or tuition fee, but he did receive handsome presents from the pupils and their rich families. The comedies of the time ridicule the students for their fine and delicate garments and their elegant affectations. This was a far cry from the atmosphere surrounding Socrates’ conversations, open to the public as he passed his days in the marketplace or in the public porticoes. The rural atmosphere of the Academy attracted and held students for three or four years. Athens’ fame as the school of Hellas was gained and sustained here in Plato’s Academy.
    Isocrates’ competing institution was a school for practical success in the Athens of the day; Plato believed in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. And while Isocrates taught rhetoric and the arts of persuasion, Plato focused on mathematics.
    Exactly how, when, or why Plato
wrote
the dialogues that became the foundation of Western philosophy remains a mystery. Perhaps his most famous Socratic dialogues were written before he was forty, and so before he founded his Academy. A few works, including his
Laws,
are usually ascribed to his old age. What might have been the course of Western philosophy if Socrates had never had a disciple in Plato?
    Plato at the Academy—from the age of sixty till his death at eighty—busied himself organizing the school and lecturing. What Plato wanted was not written “works” of philosophy but active “discovery” in the company of other discovering minds. Aristotle describes Plato’s teachings at the Academy as “unwritten doctrine,” and he observes