Plato Among the Tyrants: On the Making of 'The Republic'

James Romm, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece. Norton, 2025. $31.99. 368 pp.

“I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston…” So opens one of Plato’s best known dialogues, The Republic. All but one of Plato’s dialogues involve Socrates, Plato’s revered teacher, conversing at length on a particular topic with several other individuals. The people, places, and settings sound plausible. And yet, composed decades after Socrates’s death in 399 BC, but set ostensibly decades earlier, Plato’s works generally have a fantastical whiff to them. They exist in an Athens that sounds very much like the one we know (cue the road to Peiraeus), they involve real people whose history we know as well, somewhere in Athens in the 410s perhaps, yet these conversations themselves never happened, or at least not in this format. The people are merely a conduit to the ideas.

These ideas about justice and the ideal state have held sway for two and a half millennia now. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Plato’s Republic for Western civilization and philosophy. “It stands at the center of the Western cultural canon; a 2016 survey of college syllabuses found Republic to be the most widely required text at top American schools. Its historical influence has been immense.” But are this dialogue’s ideas all there is to it? 

It is easy to read philosophy as existing outside of time and space. We should study Plato’s ideas about justice, consider the merits of his proposals, and leave aside the ostensible historical context. It’s all garnish, right? Except, what if it isn’t? What if we accept that philosophers are people too? And then, what if we entertain the possibility that Plato’s Republic—the master teacher’s most famous exploration of the ideal state, its rulers, and the pursuit of justice—was the product of its author’s real experiences and investigations over the course of decades? And what if this historical baggage that accompanied the real live Plato as he was writing these ideas, influenced the work he produced? Shouldn’t this inform how we read it today? That is the argument classicist and ancient historian James Romm presents in his wonderfully researched yet no less accessible exploration, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece. 

At the heart of this project is a set of texts that most historians have considered “too hot to handle”: Plato’s letters. Wait, Plato wrote letters? They don’t teach you this in classics graduate school, I can confirm. My reading list for the PhD exams was extensive and included Republic in its entirety... in Greek. That same list did not include any of Plato’s letters.

And yet, thirteen letters that are attributed to Plato survive. Romm accepts five of them as genuine, because they “are long, yet remarkably true to the language of Plato’s time and to known historical facts. We can either imagine a forger who possessed AI-level skills, or, more plausibly, believe that the letters’ author was Plato.” Crucially, while the letters offer particularly powerful personal evidence, much of the information they include is attested elsewhere, including in Plutarch. As a result, the story Romm tells is not all hanging on this one source of evidence.

With this evidence in mind, instead of strolling down to the Peiraeus with Socrates, we’re off on a ship with Plato himself, sailing from Athens to Syracuse, the majestic Sicilian city, ruled by the tyrant Dionysius I, who (those closest to him believe) is much in need of a solid philosophical education. And Plato was in need of further field research on different sorts of government, so the timing was perfect. 

Plato had just begun writing the Republic before his first visit to Syracuse in 388 or 387 BC. He would continue writing and revising this treatise for decades—much of the rest of his life. “The ideas it explored, about the kind of government Greek cities needed, were informed by Plato’s contact with the greatest city of his day. But these ideas had also led him to make that contact, in a search for new models of rule. Plato’s evolving political theories, and his role in political practices in Syracuse, are strands that intertwined through much of his life, each crossing over the other.” 

In Syracuse, Plato got to observe first-hand a form of government much despised throughout the Greek world—tyranny. While kings were rulers who had inherited power legitimately, tyrants were rulers who had come to power in some extra-legal way—whether via a more peaceful coup or the assassination or ousting of previous rulers, for instance. Athens had its own brief experience with tyrants—Peisistratus and then his two sons in the second half of the 6^th century BC. It didn’t end well—a monument glorifying the tyrant-killers was set up in the Agora as a memento that the Athenians definitely didn’t want to go there again. But what if somewhere else the tyrant might be more enlightened? What if a tyrant were willing to submit to quality geometric education of the sort Plato considered foundational for character formation? Might not the story turn out differently? It seemed worth investigating, at any rate. Besides, at home, democracy wasn’t looking too stable or just. 

The Athens of Plato’s own day was a direct democracy that had weathered some oligarchic challenges over the previous few decades. Towards the end of the fifth century BC, during the Peloponnesian War, the democracy was overthrown not once but twice. Each time, the oligarchic coup was very short-lived, and democracy was restored by the people. But Plato’s unease with democracy is palpable throughout his body of work—and his oligarchic family connections are no secret. Critias, one of the bloodthirsty Thirty Tyrants (the leader of the second of the two coups that briefly overthrew the Athenian democracy), was Plato’s cousin—“the son of his grandfather’s brother.” He was also a student of Socrates—and the association likely played a part in the willingness of the Athenians to sentence the seventy-year-old Socrates to death in 399 BC, just four years after the restoration of democracy. 

Maybe Critias didn’t learn justice from Socrates, but this didn’t stop Plato from continuing to advocate for the master’s educational model or something inspired by it in Republic. True philosophers learn over a lifetime to behold the Forms as they truly are. It all starts, though, with a solid fifteen-year curriculum that Plato outlines: “Their advanced education would start at age twenty with mathematics, geometry (both planar and solid), and theoretical astronomy, subjects to be pursued for ten years. At age thirty, they would move on to dialectic, the capstone of philosophic study, which would occupy five more years.” If they keep up with self-education, by age fifty they will be able to behold the Forms. 

Has Plato already articulated these basic ideas by the time of his first visit to Syracuse, to the elder Dionysius? Perhaps. At any rate, Dionysius did not prove a receptive student, although he appreciated the prestige that hosting a famous philosopher of Plato’s caliber brought upon him. This initial visit, though, was volatile, and possibly concluded with Dionysius briefly selling Plato into slavery—as one of the letters suggests. At any rate, witnessing first-hand the injustice of life under the rule of a capricious and violent tyrant brought back memories of the Tyranny of the Thirty in Athens to Plato. This experience is perhaps reflected in Republic—indeed, several of the characters in the Republic are individuals who (Plato’s readers would have known) had been killed by the Thirty. In other words, “Plato deliberately stocks the cast of Republic, an inquiry into justice, with future victims of extreme injustice.”

Once the elder Dionysius had departed this world in 367 BC, though, there was a new hope: what if his son and namesake would prove more virtuous? Plato returns probably twice more to Syracuse, as a result, to try and educate this younger tyrant. Alas, the son proves even less friendly to the study of philosophy than the father. He appears not to have been a fan of geometry either, poor chap. Furthermore, the younger Dionysius takes umbrage at Plato’s closeness with the Syracusan Dion, his uncle. Dion earns an exile from Syracuse for a long time, and when he returns, it is as part of a complicated scheme of civic strife and a general attempt at restoration of semi-popular rule in the city. Plato somehow finds himself embroiled in all this unpleasant business, and it continues to affect his reworking of the Republic. 

In Socrates’s vision of the ideal city, “A philosopher might become king, or a king might become a philosopher. Only in these two ways, Republic asserts, can the troubles of the human race be cured.” In Syracuse, Plato clearly had hoped to see a king become a philosopher—although perhaps the king suspected that the philosopher was aiming at his own powers as king. In any case, the result, as Romm tells it, is a reminder that history can be more dramatic than any fiction we could possibly imagine. I will not spoil the story for you. Suffice it to say, there is plenty of sex, drunken orgies, political intrigue, and murder—all the unfortunate alternatives to the study of geometry and the better things to which it leads the virtuous mind after a decade of earnest effort.

All of this meant, needless to say, that the philosopher didn’t become a king at the end—and the king definitely didn’t become a philosopher. By 354 BC, a disillusioned septuagenarian Plato was working on the final magnum opus of his life, Laws. There he “turned away from his idealistic belief that knowledge of Justice could make people want to be just, even if the rewards of injustice were greater. He focused on making better laws than better souls.”  

This conclusion of a brilliant life seems anticlimactic, yet that is in part the point. Studying Plato’s ideas with two and a half millennia of distance, we tend to flatten the thinker’s processes. We forget that real people evolve over the course of a lifetime, that they may change their ideas, and that more often than not, it is personal experiences that shape these switches of positions. At the same time, there is a discouraging reminder here that public intellectuals can only have so much sway over those in political power. Here was Plato, hoping to influence first one tyrant and then his son. And in both cases, to no avail. But was this work a total waste of time?

Perhaps in his most negative moments, Plato thought so. Yet the unusual conclusion of Republic perhaps makes much better sense after reading Romm’s backstory to the making of the book. Republic concludes with an unusual tale: Socrates relates the Myth of Er about the journey of the human soul. Er was an Athenian soldier who was killed in battle, and on the day of his funeral, his soul was sent back to the land of the living with a message of encouragement to them to persevere in the virtues, no matter what. With a reiteration of this same advice, Socrates concludes the dialogue: 

Wherefore my counsel is that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.

Justice and virtue are transcendent goods that are good in an ultimate sense. This much Plato could see, and after intellectually wrestling with tyrants for nearly four decades, in this he found comfort. Seven-hundred years later, Christian Neoplatonists and other Christian readers of Plato will find fruitful ground to build on here.