Facebook
Twitter
Pocket
Reddit
Email
Few figures loom larger over Western culture than Plato, whose The Republic has profoundly shaped Western thinking for centuries and is among the most assigned texts at English-speaking universities. In it, Plato describes his vision for a perfect society ruled over by what would later be described as a “Philosopher King”—an autocrat trained to wield total control with wisdom. For some 2,000 years, Plato’s notions were accepted by his acolytes with little pushback. But over the past century, his ideas have met growing criticism due to the totalitarian framework in which he situated his idealized Republic.
In his new book Plato and the Tyrant, Classicist James Romm explores a period in Plato’s life that many historians assert was influential to his conception of power. In his early 40s, before he wrote The Republic, Plato began visiting the Hellenic city-state of Syracuse in an effort to compel the first of two generations of authoritarian leaders toward just rule. By the time Plato arrived in Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder had already maintained decades of dictatorship, writes Romm, “not by turning weapons against his people but by exploiting their fears, their anger and their mistrust of traditional leaders, persuading them to vote away their own freedom.” Plato’s attempts to convince the elder to rule justly so angered him that he sold Plato into slavery, though friends later ransomed his freedom. When the Elder’s son Dionysius the Younger ascended to power, Plato tried again to influence a despot to rule with wisdom and temperance, but failed yet again. This time, his fraught relationship with the younger ruler nearly killed him. Romm argues that an intimate look at this period of Plato’s life can help us understand the man and his ideas in a more sober light, and offers insight into the ways autocracies and autocratic ideas take hold, even today.
As Romm notes in his foreword, Sophocles once wrote that tyrants become wise through the company of the wise, but Plato’s story suggests the opposite: that, “The wise can become more tyrannical by the company of tyrants.” Nautilus spoke to Romm about Plato’s dangerous flirtations with tyranny, the process of revealing history once obscured, and the alarming relevance of a millennia-old monocracy.
In the foreword for Plato and the Tyrant you discuss how you were more enamored with Plato earlier in your life, until a new generation of students began questioning his vision. How did your view of Plato change?
The Republic is about an ideal society—ideal from Plato’s perspective—and I bought into the characterization that in some ways this society was the best that could be achieved. But my students were horrified, and I started to look at it more skeptically and recognize elements of it that really look nightmarish from our point of view.
It was really about the social structures of the Republic and whether to call it a utopia or a dystopia. The life of the military class—the guardians, as Plato calls them, who are “good”—are raised from a young age without access to most literature and art, have to be fed a strict mathematical and theoretical education, and are not permitted to have the kind of personal freedoms that we take for granted in a democratic society. Their sexual lives are strictly regulated as are their material lives—they’re not allowed to own much material wealth—and they’re raised essentially as automatons to serve the state. If you look at it from my students’ perspective, it’s a kind of brainwashing—the education that Plato prescribes.
It’s very dangerous to decide that your system has failed and you need something new.
What does the story you tell about Plato’s years in Syracuse have to teach us about power and regime change?
Well, I’m hoping we’re not in an era of regime change in this country. We may be, but that remains to be seen. But we are in an era of increasing authoritarianism and the desire of a huge cadre of people to shuck the norms of democracy and move to some other model—some authoritarian model. Plato was also convinced that democracy had failed and was not a viable system, and he wanted to try something new. He described the role of the authoritarian in The Republic as being that of a philosopher king. So he distinguished very clearly ordinary strongmen, whom he called tyrants, from true kings who rule with the benefit of philosophic enlightenment. And when he went to Syracuse, he was hoping that the strongman there—first the father, then the son—could be turned in a philosophic direction. Not necessarily made into philosophers, but at least their authoritarian impulses could be tempered. They could be made just rulers rather than despots. This turned out to be an illusion—a delusion—that he quickly realized was not only hopeless, but that his intervention actually made matters much worse by provoking a factional split in the court and sending the city into a civil war.
I don’t know if I can draw any specific lessons other than: It’s very dangerous to decide that your system has failed and you need something new. What you get may be very much worse than what you had. With all of its problems, the fantasy that you can just wipe away democratic traditions and get something in its place that will solve the problems of democracy is a very dangerous one that Plato fell victim to, and that caused terrible chaos in Syracuse as a result.
What do Plato’s maneuverings in Syracuse tell us about his legacy?
Plato is deeply revered in modern academia. He’s thought of as a kind of a godlike figure. And I think a close look at his interventions in Syracuse, his relations with Dionysius, his Thirteenth letter, his love affair with Dion—if that’s what their relationship was—it humanizes him. It makes him a more approachable figure, a more flawed figure, and also a more human figure.
In the 1940s, Karl Popper wrote a book called The Spell of Plato, and I discuss it in my introduction. Popper thought it was deeply dangerous and delusional for Western societies—Western democracies—to idealize Plato and not take a hard look at these more disturbing flaws and failings in his career. He wrote at the time of World War II, when fascism was very much threatening to take over the world, and he felt that if we can’t come to a reckoning with who Plato really was—where these ideas about autocracy really came from—then we risk going down the wrong path. I think he was right about that.
As you note in the book, modern technology has played a vital role helping us uncover previously obscured aspects of history. What role did it play in Plato and the Tyrant?
One of the documents that I rely on is a scroll by a man named Philodemus, who wrote a history of the Platonic Academy starting from Plato’s time, and that work is lost except for a scroll that was recovered from a house in Herculaneum that was destroyed in the volcanic eruption that also buried Pompeii. The library of that house was charred such that the scrolls looked like lumps of ash. They don’t look like anything you could read, but you can read them if you can unroll them—or at least this was always the case, that you needed to unroll them, which required just painstaking care, because otherwise they just fall to pieces. In the 18th century, a technique was developed to unroll a scroll very slowly and carefully, and this was used on the Philodemus scroll. It did damage the scroll, but enough of it was preserved that we could recover substantial amounts of text about Plato’s own life and the founding of the Academy.
In this century, a technique has evolved where, by using essentially a CAT scan coupled with AI software, you can get the text from the scrolls without unrolling them. So far, it’s a very slow and expensive process, and very little has been recovered, but it keeps advancing by leaps and bounds, and probably within my lifetime there will be whole texts recovered from these Herculaneum scrolls. There’s over 1,000 of them—or I think almost 1,000 of them preserved—that we don’t have any idea what the contents are. Perhaps there are many lost works in there—works of Sophocles, works of Euripides. There could be treasure troves of classical literature that can be recovered using these new techniques. So that’s very exciting.
Your book deals with themes of freedom versus authoritarianism, justice versus injustice, and the like, which are very much in the news these days. Do you think you were drawn toward these topics by our present day circumstances or did it happen incidentally?
It was incidental at first, because I began this book years ago, before the second Trump term was even a possibility. But as it became clear that we were under the threat of an authoritarian regime, I saw that this story really had a lot of relevance—not just because of Plato, but because of the way that the Dionysius regime got started in Syracuse. I devote a lot of my first chapter to exploring the ways in which a tyranny gets founded out of what was a functioning democracy.
Syracuse was quite a vital democracy in the late fifth century and had instituted various safeguards to preserve the democracy and keep strongmen from taking power. And yet, when a strongman came along—a charismatic demagogue who was able to breed mistrust among the populace, tell them that the rich and the elites were screwing them, were doing them dirty and colluding with their enemies, the Carthaginians—they bought it hook, line, and sinker. And then the tyrant Dionysius was able to build up his power base, install his loyalists, his troops, his security forces, and make himself impregnable. The financial angle—the fact that Dionysius was able to convince his countrymen to accept bronze coins at the value of silver, and those kinds of shenanigans, the use of cons and lies to build up power—it’s a fascinating process that has all too much resonance with what is happening around us today. 
Lead image: rudall30 / Shutterstock
