Early Life of Plato - Education

Education

Apuleius informs us that Speusippus praised Plato's quickness of mind and modesty as a boy, and the "first fruits of his youth infused with hard work and love of study". Later Plato himself would characterize as gifts of nature the facility in learning, the memory, the sagacity, the quickness of apprehension and their accompaniments, the youthful spirit and the magnificence in soul. According to Diogenes, Plato's education, like any other Athenian boy's, was physical as well as mental; he was instructed in grammar (that is, reading and writing), music,b painting, and gymnastics by the most distinguished teachers of his time. He excelled so much in physical exercises that Dicaearchus went so far as to say, in the first volume of his Lives, that Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games and did extremely well and was well known. Apuleius argues that the philosopher went also into a public contest at the Pythian games. Plato had also attended courses of philosophy; before meeting Socrates, he first became acquainted with Cratylus (a disciple of Heraclitus, a prominent pre-Socratic Greek philosopher) and the Heraclitean doctrines.

According to the ancient writers there was a tradition that Plato's favorite employment in his youthful years was poetry. He wrote poems, dithyrambs at first, and afterwards lyric poems and tragedies (a tetralogy), but abandoned his early passion and burnt his poems when he met Socrates and turned to philosophy. There was also a story that on the day Plato was entrusted to him, Socrates said that a swan had been delivered to him. There are also some epigrams attributed to Plato, but these are now thought by some scholars to be spurious. Modern scholars now believe that Plato was probably a young boy when he became acquainted with Socrates. This assessment is based on the fact that Critias and Charmides, two close relatives of Plato, were both friends of Socrates.