Plato: A Civic Life by Carol Atack

Plato: A Civic Life

by Carol Atack

Reaktion Books 2025

“Plato's tendency to keep himself in the background meant that there were plenty of tempting and intriguing gaps to fill,” writes University of Cambridge fellow Carol Atack in Plato: A Civic Life, the latest entry in the Great Lives of the Ancient World series from Reaktion Books. She's nodding in the direction of the vast shrubbery of quasi-biographical speculations that sprang up around Plato within a century of his death, everything from a long discourse in Diogenes Laertius to commentaries on the dozen or so letters once traditionally attributed the Plato himself. Scholars have almost always been too generous with the depth and sheer dimension of that “quasi,” and considering the fact that Atack not only seems to think that any of those letters are genuine but also includes in these pages a genealogical chart of her subject, she's certainly in that proud number. One of the foremost questions going in to any book like Plato: A Civic Life is always the same: how much “quasi” will the author chop up and dump in the gumbo?

More or less the standard recommended daily allowance, it turns out. Since very little reliable is known about Plato's life, and since such an unholy tonnage of twaddle has been written about his writings, any book purporting to be a biography will have liberal amounts of surmise and supposition. This is true in Atack's book as well, where passages like this necessarily abound, or the thing would be 15 pages long: “There is no firm evidence that Plato served his city as a hoplite, but it is inconceivable that a physically able citizen with the means to equip himself as a soldier could have avoided doing so,” or “Plato's early childhood had been marked by repeated loss – of his father, then his stepfather.” (“But that was in the wider context of the aftermath of the plague and the demands of war, which had left few Athenian families unaffected,” she adds, in a neat little inversion, since it's through the broader lens that we infer the more narrow one, not vice versa). “Plato's experience as a wrestler would have prepared him well for those hoplite encounters,” she merrily goes on, “which at a certain phase were more like rugby scrums than pitched battles.” Why, you're practically there.

Unlike Alexander the Great or Jesus Christ, however, the subject here wrote a great deal of stuff, quasi-autobiographical or otherwise, and how an author deals with that body of literature will always be a measure of any Plato biography. Here Atack excels, contextualizing the dialogues smoothly and authoritatively, with neither the gatekeeping condescension of the expert nor the oversimplifying condescension of the pedagogue. “Plato's encounter with Socrates would be a defining moment in his life,” we're predictably told (we can't know it's true, but it sure as Hell seems likely), but Atack doesn't rest on such assumptions; rather, she uses the philosophy to flesh out an actual life in an actual world.

“The combination that resulted in the Athenian is baffling to us,” wrote wise old Edith Hamilton nearly a century ago, noting this same juxtaposition, “lovers of beauty who held poetry and music and art to be of first importance – in their schools the two principle subjects the boys learned were music and mathematics – and at the same time, lovers of fact, who held fast to reality.” This combination (or is it a division?) animates Plato: A Civic Life. As a primer to the man, his works, and his time, the general-interest reader could scarcely ask for something better.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News