Aristotle and Plato

Hey, remember project #EuropeanBios? Well I do! I finished Alexander the Great today and it was excellent. But first, for completeness, I need to do a tiny thread about Plato and Aristotle. I read a single, not very good bio that covered them both.

The most surprising fact I learned about Plato is that his real name wasn't Plato. His birth name was Aristocles, and Plato was a nickname given to him as a kid because of either his broad build or possibly his broad forehead, because "platus" meant "broad".

As you've probably heard, Plato was a student of Socrates, but there is not a lot of original writing of Socrates around that has survived, so most of what we know about Socrates is stuff that Plato said he said.

To make his stuff sound more authoritative, Plato would sometimes make up conversations where Socrates agreed with him or backed him up and then report it as stuff Socrates said. We really only have Plato's word for it most of the time.

Plato spent a lot of time thinking about forms of government but was super not into democracy. He was pretty much in favor of a totalitarian dictatorship at the city level, and didn't really consider how to govern a country because the concept didn't really exist at the time.

Finally — and this is going to come up a lot while we're in the Greek section — the ancient Greeks were extremely gay, Plato included. Or rather, they had a lot of same-sex intercourse and no hang ups about it. Sounds fun apart from all slavery and death etc.

Aristotle was a student of Plato. It is kind of weird to think that three of the most famous philosophers of all time were not just contemporaries but intimately acquainted and then there's hundreds of years before there's another European philosopher of note.

The other very notable thing about Aristotle was that he was the tutor to a minor Macedonian Prince who later grew up to conquer most of the known world and would eventually be known as Alexander the Great.

Aristotle was Greek and Alexander Macedonian; when Alexander conquered Athens there was a lot of anti-Greek sentiment in the city. Eventually, Alexander threatened Aristotle's life, so he fled Athens rather than be killed and died in exile.

Other than that — and of course all his philosophical positions which have influenced all European thought since then — there was not a lot in the way of fun facts about Aristotle.