Killing Tyrants & Keeping Secrets: Plato's Afterlife
How Plato's works constantly inspired assassins, utopians, subversives and radicals
On 20 July 1944, in a conference hut at the Wolf’s Lair, Claus von Stauffenberg set down a briefcase containing just under a kilo of plastic explosive, made an excuse about a telephone call and left the room. The bomb went off at 12.42, killing four men and leaving Hitler with a perforated eardrum. By midnight Stauffenberg was standing in a courtyard in Berlin, lit by the headlamps of an army vehicle, facing a firing squad. His last words could have been ‘Es lebe das heilige Deutschland’ - Long live sacred Germany, but several recorded ‘Es lebe das geheime Deutschland’. Long live the secret Germany.
In 1225 Pope Honorius III stood in the cathedral at Sens and addressed the Synod. The target of his ire was the Irish scholar John Scottus Eriugena, and his work Periphyseon, all copies of which were to be tossed into the fire across Christendom on pain of excommunication. Eriugena wasn’t to know this, he died sometime in the 870’s AD, having spent his life pioneering the Carolingian Renaissance at the court of Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald. It might be apocryphal that Eriugena was killed by one of his own pupils at Malmesbury, after spending his latter years at Oxford university - but it is certainly true that Periphyseon was lost until 1681, when the antiquarian Thomas Gale found it amongst the dusty archives of that university’s library. Again, it was immediately sanctioned and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
The secret Germany was a phrase steeped in meaning. Stauffenberg had taken it from the circle around the poet Stefan George, an esoteric brotherhood that schooled its initiates in a vision of spiritual aristocracy, pedagogic devotion and rule by the well-formed and worthy few. The Circle’s reading list was centred around two names: one was Hölderlin, the other was Plato. Peter Hoffmann, the historian of the Stauffenberg brothers, concludes that they understood themselves as heirs to a Platonic state, charged with making the ideal real.
The crime of the Periphyseon, and of Eriugena, was that it presented a brilliantly erudite synthesis of Neoplatonic and Christian thought. While Carolingian theological concerns pointed towards locating a stable orthodoxy, Eriugena was almost alone in north-west Europe in speaking Greek, thus able to import Platonised, mystical philosophy from writers such as Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius. Accused of pantheism, pandeism and “impious novelties” by Pope Honorius III, the book was described in his letter to the heads of monasteries and churches throughout Europe as “teeming with the worms of heretical perversity”.
The regime Stauffenberg died trying to destroy had its own copy of Plato on the shelf. A year earlier, a translation of the Republic had appeared in Germany with a swastika on the cover. German classicists had spent decades recasting Plato from a metaphysician into a political philosopher whose ultimate ruler was an effective Führer of the people. Jaeger’s Paideia sought to ‘form’ human beings through a state pedagogy rooted in Plato and Günther read Plato as a ‘pure-blooded’ Nordic - the ancestor of eugenic state policy. One stated aim was to create a ‘Third Humanism’, the thinking being that after the distance of the Renaissance and the moribund Goethean approach, the Dritte Humanismus could revitalise the classics and create new citizens, moulded in the values of antiquity.
Anyone who dips their toes in philosophy or political theory encounters some version of Plato - the Cave, the Forms, his alien Republic. He is considered the father of European intellectual thought, all else is a footnote as they say. This somewhat neutered vision is at odds though with the actual history of Plato’s ideas as they came down to us. His legacy is complex and multi-layered, and really there are multiple kinds of Plato, each book its own cosmos. The Plato of The Republic in particular has a history of inspiring all kinds of sedition, subversion, utopian plans and conspiracies. It also has a history of bolstering the forces of conservative defense and state power - whatever it is that Plato does to people, it goes further than pushing them in a particular direction. Better to say, I think, that it creates an intensity for whatever they already believed.
The first to explore is Plato’s reputation as a subversive, The Republic as a manual for overturning the established order - hence why insurgents and revolutionaries keep returning to it. This first essay is a gander at some of these, whether they deserve this legacy or not. The second to follow will focus on how Plato was used to shore up existing power, to create real projects which have had a lasting impact over millions of people to this very day, and schemes that defy classification - creating new souls, both radical and elitist.
An Academy for Assassins
Let’s imagine a prestigious university in the current year, a Cambridge or Yale, their philosophy department. Its charismatic and infamous head gives lectures outside in the open air, attracting the best and brightest with a unique style and clarity of vision. Then let’s imagine that a wave of political assassinations across the country and further afield begins to land the institution in a different spotlight, as one after another it is revealed that the assassins themselves were all trained under the same philosopher and justify their actions with his ideas. That’s the situation Plato’s Academy found itself in.
Chion of Heraclea studied under Plato in Athens, soaking up the teaching on virtue and the soul. He went home to Heraclea Pontica and stabbed the tyrant Clearchus to death at a religious festival. His fellow students Python and Heracleides, also Academy men, assassinated Cotys - king of Thrace - and were honoured for their actions in Athens. The ancient sources present these examples as men simply acting on what they had learned, men who understood killing a tyrant as a form of philosophical duty they contracted in the classroom. As an aside the tyranny at Heraclea didn’t collapse - Clearchus was succeeded by his brother, the assassins were ruthlessly hunted down.
Dion of Syracuse was Plato’s friend, his host on the disastrous Sicilian visits, his most devoted disciple. He had taken to heart the Republic‘s conviction that a state should be governed only by those who know the Good, so in 357 BC he attempted to supply Syracuse with just such a government, landing with a mercenary army and taking the city. The Syracusans had expected a liberator, so they couldn’t fail to notice they had swapped one tyrant for another. Dion opened his tenure with the murder of a political rival, then was himself assassinated a few years later. The man who arranged it was an Athenian named Callippus - another member of the Academy.
Zooming back we can see that the Academy had accidentally started a new tradition, one that other schools would continue. By melding intellectualism, an ethical imperative, a sense of entitlement and a potential imagined better future, the Academy produced a new character type - the educated killer who acts on the authority of a book.
The best known of these killers was perhaps Brutus. Although popularly associated with Stoicism, his real allegiance was to the Academy. He studied under Antiochus of Ascalon, who had made it his life’s work to revive Plato’s original teachings. Plutarch says Brutus championed the Academy above the other philosophical schools. He justified the killing of Caesar by libertas, by the memory of the Tarquins, by the ancestral Brutus who had expelled the kings. Like any real flesh-and-blood human being, Brutus was a multitude of things and influenced by many - but to anyone tracing this line from Plato down through the centuries, we have another political assassin closely connected with the Platonic Academy.
Fifteen centuries later the young Florentine Pietro Paolo Boscoli, a republican who had loved Savonarola and hated the restored Medici, joined a ramshackle plot to kill Giuliano and Lorenzo in 1513. The whole squalid affair was a mess, the game given away by a scribbled list of names. Boscoli was arrested and beheaded at the Bargello at dawn alongside his fellow conspirator Agostino Capponi. A bystander named on the same list, Niccolo Machiavelli, was tortured and then released. Boscoli’s last confession was written down by one Luca della Robbia and is easily one of the strangest and most confusing in the history of political murder. Boscoli apparently wanted to die as a Christian, but he found himself tormented and unable to feel God’s grace because his head was too full of Brutus. He had marinated himself so thoroughly in the ancient republican martyrs that on the scaffold he could not swipe them aside and find God, he begged his confessor to help him clear his mind of the pagans so he could meet his death as a believer.
Boscoli was no more a pure, committed Platonist than Brutus was, his heroes were Roman and his tyrannicidal justifications came largely from Thomas Aquinas. The man who actually worked hardest to license the spasms of Renaissance regicide was a Spanish Jesuit called Juan de Mariana. He too argued from scripture and from natural law. He did know his Plato though, and used Plato’s portrait of the tyrant alongside other intellectual streams. Mariana’s 1599 treatise De rege et regis institutione was blamed for the actions of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV of France who stabbed the monarch to death in 1610. Ravaillac was a solitary religious fanatic, but the French authorities pointed to the Platonic-Scholastic works of Mariana, the threat of the Jesuits and on June 8, 1610 the Parlement of Paris issued an official decree condemning De rege. Copies of Mariana’s book were handed over to the public hangman and publicly burned in front of the Parvis of Notre-Dame Cathedral, hardly a surprise given the author’s support for the slaying of Henry III and implicated involvement in the regicide of his successor.
Later Plato-inspired or aware works which looked to the murder of a supposed tyrant included: George Buchanan’s 1579 De Jure Regni apud Scotos, which philosophically justified the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots; John Milton’s 1649 tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which defended the execution of Charles I - arguing for popular sovereignty, natural human equality and the right to depose or kill tyrants and Algernon Sidney’s political treatise Discourses Concerning Government (1681-1683), which argued that legitimate rulers serve the public good, a text later used by the Crown to convict him of treason following the Rye House Plot of 1683. This line of argument for tyrannicide was broken after 1945, when Karl Popper redefined Plato as part of the soul of fascism, rather than an inspiration for liberty - but we get ahead of ourselves.
Castles In The Sky
Not every reader of the Republic wanted to stab their leaders - many read the text and became inspired to build the ideal city instead, which turns out to be its own very distinctive kind of trouble-making.
The first to try this was Plotinus, the great mystic of the third century, whose entire philosophy pointed away from politics toward the soul’s ascent to the One. Late in his life he persuaded the emperor Gallienus to let him refound a ruined town in Campania as a philosophers’ city, governed by Plato’s laws, to be called Platonopolis. The court intervened and the project sadly crumbled away - even the most otherworldly and dreamy Platonist in history, given a sympathetic emperor and a spare ruin, could not resist one attempt at a city on the hill.
After that the ideal city became a literary touchstone for writers and thinkers of all stripes. Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of Henrician England, imagined an island where private property was abolished, where houses were reassigned by lottery every decade and gold so despised it was made into chamber pots and the chains of slaves. How exactly More came to read Plato’s long-forgotten text shows us how Plato came back to Europe in the first place. The Timaeus had never left, Eriugena had been sharpening his vision of Christian cosmology against these dialogues under the Carolingians. The Republic would have to wait until Petrarch, Salutati, Boccaccio and Dante laid the foundations of Greek literacy in the West, then for Byzantine scholars and pioneers such as Manuel Chrysoloras and the endlessly fascinating Georgios Gemistos Plethon to build the bridge and write the first translations. Gemistos Plethon deserves his own article, a scholar of such brilliance he was described as the reincarnation of Plato himself by his pupil Cardinal Bessarion. He also developed his own highly idiosyncratic form of Zoroastrian-inspired paganism towards the end of his life.
Cardinal Bessarion and another Byzantine intellectual, George of Trebizond, locked horns over how the Christian West should understand Plato, and whether Plato’s or Aristotle’s ethical vision of life was more conducive to the good life in Christ.
Among the acrimonious retorts to which Gemistos’ manuscript gave rise it was not published until 1532, some eighty years after his death - Georgios Trapezuntios’ defense of Aristotle in 1455, Comparationes phylosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis, which in turn elicited Bessarion’s Platonic counteroffensive, created the greatest stir in that close circle of scholars living in Italy. Written in Latin, Trapezuntios’ apologia (though it, too, was published posthumously) reached a larger number of readers than Gemistos’ Greek treatise. It used heavy ad hominem arguments against Plato’s person and derided the hollowness of his rhetoric. Trapezuntios found the Trinity in Aristotle, while he contested Plato’s supposed belief in the immortality of the soul. From the Phaedrus he drew inferences about the indecency of Plato’s love life and then leveled a barrage against the most vulnerable sections of the Republic, which dealt with the role of women and their “prostitution.” The Laws showed Plato corrupting the youth in drunken debauches, rousing their lusts with exercises in the nude in which both sexes participated. Trapezuntios denounced Plato for glorifying sins of the flesh and encouraging gluttony. And he mocked him for trying to preserve his wretched little state with inadequate means: Restricting offspring to two would have led to catastrophic depopulation in the event of plague. Trapezuntios’ tract in large measure determined the subjects around which discussion of the moral and political works of Plato would revolve for many years.
-Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), Frank E. Manuel & Fritzie P. Manuel
To cut a much longer story short, Medici patronage of Greek manuscript sourcing and translation led to Marsilio Ficino producing an authoritative Latin version of Plato’s entire corpus in 1484, Platonis Opera Omnia. Ficino’s Plato stood for over a century as the foundational resource throughout Western Europe, reaching Thomas More despite his own skill in reading and writing ancient Greek. The less savoury aspects of Plato’s vision had to be smoothed over and explained away, but even the Christianised, chaste and ascetic Plato was more radical and inflexible than Aristotle - a thinker who always allowed for human change throughout life and forgave the drives for sex and greed. Aristotle also championed true and loving friendships as foundational for a virtuous polity. More’s 1516 Utopia followed the acceptable Plato line, and became the most important of all European utopian movements with the most impact, not least by gifting the name ‘utopian’.
We need to carefully excise Plato from the wider set of utopian thoughts during the Renaissance and early modern period. More’s vision of a perfect city was certainly inspired in no small part by Plato, but northern Europe was being utterly transformed in the bubbling, boiling tempest that was Protestant utopianism, and this drew on more than ancient Greece. Anabaptists, Zwickau prophets, Batenburgers, millenarian preachers and spontaneous communes, Hutterites, Dissenters and Diggers. Much of this was popular Biblical primitivism in nature, disinclined to glance at a translation of Neoplatonic heresies - but the more elite and learned within the Reformation certainly utilised Plato in some interesting ways. The Protestant and potential founding figure of Rosicrucianism, Johann Valentin Andreae, built his own eternal polis with words, dubbed Christianopolis (1619), a walled city run by the learned. Francis Bacon wrote New Atlantis (1626) in which the land of Bensalem is governed by a college of scientists he called Salomon’s/Solomon’s House. Although inspired by Plato, Bacon’s pioneering experimental natural science and empirical methods dismissed the philosopher’s metaphysics, but kept the institutional shell - the founders of the Royal Society partially adopted Salomon’s House as their model, Plato had leapt off the pages into the real world.
The man who took it the furthest however was Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar in Calabria who knew his Plato and detested Aristotle. Campanella was an extraordinary character, a child prodigy of immense intellectual ability and a complete inability to fall in line with the conformities of his day. Plagued by doubts and despair over the state of his church, he gained admirers in some circles but was dogged by accusations of atheism and heresy all his life. In 1599 Campanella organised an armed conspiracy to overthrow Spanish rule in Stilo and install a communitarian Christian society, in line with the apocalyptic Joachim of Fiore. The plot was betrayed and Campanella was tortured, interrogated and only narrowly escaped execution by convincing his interrogators he was insane, and spent 27 years in Neapolitan dungeons. He wrote The City of the Sun during his imprisonment, a highly detailed vision of his ideal city, drawing from More and Plato.
The Secret Circles
We’ve seen Plato’s attraction to idealistic assassins and intellectual utopians, but Plato also draws those who prefer silence and secrecy. This strand of his influence runs underground, through brotherhoods and initiates and doctrines held in reserve, some of which surely history has never come to know.
We return to Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine scholar who helped reintroduce Plato to Western Europe and later abandoned Christianity altogether. His vision of the imperial world required a refreshment from the ancients, such as the Byzantine empire restructuring itself as a Hellenic cultural power - complete with Helots, a barter system and native-born military power. Later he created his Nomoi or Book of Laws proposing to build a new society on Plato’s principles. This new society would revert to a revived pagan polytheism, complete with liturgy and a reformed calendar. He kept the book secret, shared only with his inner circle, knowing full well that advancing the cause of Zeus would cost him everything. When he died and the manuscript surfaced, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios Scholarios, read enough to grasp what it was and burned it. We only know of its existence because some fragments survived, including an index and refutations. Gemistos’ philosophy was too idiosyncratic to flesh out here, readers are encouraged to find out for themselves, the book included references and syntheses of Zoroastrianism, Stoicism, the Olympian gods, reincarnation and the spiritual orderliness of bees.
Another literary-political secret circle was founded centuries later around the poet Stefan George, whose circle of disciples in early twentieth-century Germany cultivated an esoteric cult of spiritual aristocracy and pedagogic devotion. As with Plethon, Plato was near the heart of the project. They spoke of a ‘secret Germany’, the hidden nobility of the worthy few throughout time which the circle felt was their heritage to protect and sentiment to carry forward. The brotherhood’s private Platonic ideal produced a would-be assassin, many extremely competent intellectuals and a legacy of works covering Shakespeare, Frederick II, Winckelman and many others.
A different version played out in America, where the emigrant philosopher Leo Strauss taught his graduate students that the great texts were written on two levels, an exoteric surface for the public and an esoteric teaching for the few. His views on Plato’s Republic were nuanced, arguing for a subtle approach when approaching strange or bizarre sounding ideas - that the truths Plato was trying to transmit came wrapped in irony, playfulness and obfuscation. Strauss appeared to some as endorsing the ‘noble lie’ of Plato (a lie or myth/fantasy that elites use to keep their society functioning harmoniously), introducing institutional paranoia and mistrust amongst commentators. This became increasingly prominent as some of his students, and even their students, ended up in and around government. The legacy of Strauss’ influence has led to numerous waves of panic: in 1985 M.F. Burnyeat described him as a ‘Sphinx without a secret’ , in Peter Minowitz’s 2009 book Strassophobia, he opens with just some of the choice quotes about how the American ‘thinking’ class received his work:
Was he an “obscurantist authoritarian” (Sidney Blumenthal) who conveys “a pervasive and obfuscatory theoretical dogmatism” (Richard Wolin) that exudes “German windbaggery” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)? An “utterly mad historian of political thought” who unleashed “paranoid theories of textual interpretation” upon the academic world (Robert Paul Wolff)? The “éminence grise” who inspired neoconservatives to “forfeit no deceit, no calumny, no subterfuge” in opposing “every sign of postcolonial political autonomy” in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East (Stanley Aronowitz)? A “sworn enemy of freedom and democracy” who dwelled in “the most fearful depths of depravity” and promoted the “fascistic glorification of death and violence” (Shadia Drury)? A “right wing fundamentalist seeking to undermine liberal freedoms in the U.S. and instigate an old world ‘war culture’ at the core of U.S. foreign policy” (Jim George)? Or an enthusiast for acquisitiveness who believed that “unlimited appropriation without concern for the needs of others is true charity” and who opposed “any restraint on individual liberty” (Will Hutton)? A fanatical elitist who declared that “the entire Western world” (except for himself) was “depraved and diseased” and that the lives of most people are “utterly valueless and unjustifiable” unless they serve to “make philosophers more comfortable and secure” (Stephen Holmes)? An ex-Trotskyite devotee of “Jewish Bolshevism” (David Duke) who insisted that “religion is nothing more than a lie that ‘breeds deference to the ruling class’” (David Luban)? Or a believer who “viewed the status quo as an expression of divine will” (Brent Staples)
Although fear of Strauss’ web of thought reached a dramatic peak during the G.W Bush administration and the Iraq War, with its murky aims and objectives and the documented circle of ‘neo-conservative’ players around the Presidency, it has yet to die down: in July of this year, the online magazine UnHerd ran a piece entitled The deep-state cult of Leo Strauss: The esoteric philosopher has powerful disciples. The truth here might simply be that, in any relatively open liberal society, frank discussion of the noble lie and esoteric politics breeds conspiratorial thinking.
The most famous Platonic brotherhood of all is arguably the Florentine Platonic Academy, certainly one of the most contested and mysterious. If there’s one family guaranteed to provoke conspiracy and speculation, it’s the Medici. When Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the Medici Bank in 1397 he had no way of knowing his son, Cosimo de’ Medici, would go on to patronise some of the most important works of the entire Renaissance. Cosimo spent a fortune commissioning artists and scholars, including Donatello; Fra Angelico; Filippo Lippi; Andrea del Castagno; Benozzo Gozzoli; Filippo Brunelleschi; Michelozzo di Bartolomeo; Niccolò Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini. His funding and oversight of the first public library, at San Marco, housing Niccoli’s vast collection of humanist and classical works, was a landmark achievement for the era - giving new scholars and intellectuals access to ancient works. It seems strange today, to imagine the ultra-wealthy financing projects such as the translation of Roman and Greek texts, but these were the fuel for the furnace of the Renaissance. Amongst the developments we take for granted are listed new styles of architecture, poetry, painting, sculpture, the creation of opera, commedia dell’arte, humanism, naturalism, the man-of-genius, new forms of scientific knowledge, engineering and medicine - to name but a few.
One of Cosimo’s investments was in a young scholar named Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Ficino, as we’ve already seen, went on to produce the first complete translation of Plato - but he also gathered around himself and Cosimo an informal group of immense power. Peering into the murky disputed world of Ficino and Cosimo is a challenge, some say they re-founded the Platonic Academy, while others insist this was a loose assembly of friends and scholars who read together. It seems Ficino’s love for Plato went beyond the normal bounds of curiosity however:
The passages from these authors illustrate Ficino’s growing interest in Plato and the Platonists. Even where, as in the tract to Michele Mercati of ca. 1455, he relied on Aristotelian categories, he described the studies as those “which Plato ordered.” His enthusiasm for Plato was now great—too great, as we said in the last chapter, for his scholastic mentor and a friend of Lorenzo Pisano, the Florentine cleric Antonio degli Agli. In Agli’s De mystica statera of about 1455 (or a few years later), Agli warns Ficino to adhere to the “mystical balance” of divine law and to “leave Plato and others of his sort” behind…
… Too often, Agli wrote, men seek after the beauty of the world and not that of their own soul. For if you, “Marsilio,” could only perceive that “you were born for greater and more difficult undertakings,” you would then strain to become and be recognized as a “son of God,” not a “Platonist.” And if you do not step back, with Plato you will be hurled “into outer darkness.” Through this world ruled by desire, passion, and love, Ficino looked beyond these theological and scholastic admonitions toward the “Platonic” and philosophical truths. And he would use philosophical guides wherever he found them. (If you are going to quote Plato to me, Agli told Ficino, you may as well quote Epicurus and Brahmins! )
-The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (1988) Arthur M. Field
The historian James Hankins has since argued that there was no Platonic Academy as an institution, no membership, no formal academy at all - only Ficino and his shifting group of contacts and acquaintances:
We can now summarize briefly the results of this inquiry. First, Ficino’s “academy” was not a “lieta brigata di platonici,” nor a “libera societa di eruditi,” nor again a “Platonic confraternity” meeting at Careggi under the patronage of the Medici. It did not include among its membership all the leading philosophers and literary men of Florence. On the most plausible interpretation of the contemporary evidence, his “academy” was simply a private gymnasium loosely associated with the studio, similar in kind to the private gymnasia run by Giorgio Antonio Vespucci or Ugolino Verino…
… Second, there is no compelling reason to qualify Ficino’s academy as a “Platonic” academy. No contemporary source does so. And indeed, one would not expect a private gymnasium to limit itself to readings of Platonic philosophy, though such readings certainly took place. In fact, the most detailed portrait we have of Ficino’s gymnasium shows it engaged in rhetorical practice on a subject having nothing to do with Platonism…
…Third, Ficino’s gymnasium was not a creation of Medici patronage, and no member of the Medici family was ever part of it. Neither Cosimo nor Lorenzo is ever, to my knowledge, described as an “academic” in Ficino’s works or other contemporary sources. To be sure, the Medici were the chief, if not the exclusive, patrons of Ficino’s “academy,” if that word is taken in the sense of “translations of Plato and the platonici.”
-The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence (1991) James Hankins
In a way the swirling currents around the Medici and other wealthy patrons during the Renaissance are far more interesting and colourful than clear-cut reinventions of ancient forms. These men did not aim to just recreate the past, which would have little value in a world of popes and cardinals and condotierri and Byzantine scholars fleeing their legendary city. What they took from their studies of Neoplatonic, Stoic, Epicurean thought served them in the present as much it satisfied their restless intellects. For those who engaged in any extended study of Plato, to be remembered to history with overtones of secrecy, brotherhoods, mystique seems fitting. In reality Ficino, like many artists and thinkers, lived at the caprices of fortuna - his extended network of fellow literary men was a liability as much as a blessing, as when the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 put him within several degrees of connection to the assassins. What could be more in the spirit of Plato’s afterlife than a man of genius creating a mythical Platonic academy, translating the philosopher’s ancient works, receiving money from some and esoteric Hermetic insights from others, ultimately being shunned by his patron for his links to a classical republican-tyrannicide conspiracy?
The next instalment of this history will cover real-world scenarios where Plato’s influence can be directly felt, along with the inverse use of his thought - where defenders of authority and power instrumentalised Plato to bolster and stabilise. I’m also tempted to do a deep dive into the very strange subject of how the Royal Society came to be founded, we’ll see how well these essays are received.