Plato Biography Essay

Plato was born between 424 and 428 B.C. and died between 347 and 348 B.C. He had powerful parents, with his father, Ariston, being a descendent of the last king of Athens, and his mother, Perictione, was descended from the great lawmaker Solon. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried a man named Pyrilampes. Plato had a large family, with two brothers, a sister, and a half brother. He was originally known as Aristocles, but he chose Plato as a wrestling stage name, and the name stuck. In his earlier years, Plato wanted to become a wrestler, but was never able to make it to the Olympics. Then, he attempted to become a great poet, but could not impress judges in major competitions. By failing to win an Olympic medal or carry off the Greek equivalent of the Nobel Prize, he was forced to become a statesman, or politician, but failed to pursue that further. As a last resort, he decided to try his hand in philosophy and …show more content…
Plato remained in Megara for three years, and then traveled to Cyrene, a city in Africa to study with Theodorus the mathematician. Plato’s early works were heavily influenced by Socrates. After more than a decade of traveling, he went to Sicily. There, Plato made contact with the followers of Pythagoras. Here, Plato learned of Pythagoras’ discovery of the relation between number and musical harmony, and that correlation led him to believe that numbers were the key to understanding the Universe. He thought that everything could be explained in terms of numbers, which existed in its purest forms beyond the corporeal reality. Pythagoras’s theory had a significant effect on Plato who came to believe that the ultimate reality was abstract. What began as numbers with Pythagoras became forms and pure ideas in Plato’s philosophy. The central feature of Plato’s philosophy is his theory of ideas or forms which he continued to develop all of his