Robin Waterfield's "Plato of Athens"

Robin Waterfield is an independent scholar and translator living in southern Greece. Among his numerous translations of Greek works are Plato's Symposium, Gorgias, and Republic. His previous works of history include Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece and Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece.

Waterfield applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy, and reported the following:

By this stage of the book, which is a biography, we find Plato at the start of his writing career in the 390s and 380s BCE. Page 99 begins with a paragraph that concludes a section pondering why Plato chose the written word when he was aware of the possible pitfalls, and why he wrote dialogues in particular. “He wrote dialogues because many of Socrates’s ideas, and those that he would later put into Socrates’s mouth, are radical; it helps if we can see the thinking behind them, spelled out in conversations with interlocutors who are in relevant ways like ourselves.” Then the rest of page 99 begins a section in which I describe the nature of the dialogues that Plato was writing in this first phase of his career.

Does the content of page 99 reflect the content of the book as a whole?

Well, there’s little overt biography on page 99, but both its parts address issues that are central to the content of the book as a whole. Plato was a writer, so naturally discussion of his writings plays a major part in his biography. Elsewhere in the book I return to the question of why Plato chose the dialogue form, suggesting inter alia that it was supposed to stimulate us, the readers, to engage with the texts in a secondary dialogue of their own. And I discuss the dialogues of each period of Plato’s life at the appropriate points of the book – the early dialogues here, and later in the book the middle-period and later dialogues. We have little information about the details and minutiae of Plato’s life, so I spend quite a bit of the book on such discussion. Not that I think that the lack of information about his life means that much has been lost. Apart from the few highlights – the visits to Syracuse, the foundation of the Academy – I think the lack of information is a true reflection of Plato’s life. His was largely the quiet life of a thinker and a writer. Plato’s fundamental importance was that he more or less invented the discipline that we now call philosophy; that is by far the most important and interesting aspect of his life.

Visit Robin Waterfield's website.

The Page 99 Test: Taken at the Flood.

The Page 99 Test: The Making of a King.

--Marshal Zeringue