Biography | Plato — The Deme of Kollytos Below the Areopagus

People look for Plato's first address on Aegina.

The civic register said Kollytos.

Diogenes Laertius records that Antileon, in a book on chronology, placed him in this urban deme of the tribe Aigeis, south of the Areopagus and southwest of the Acropolis, inside the Themistoclean wall.

His father was Ariston. His mother was Perictione, from a family that claimed descent from Solon.

Diogenes traces that claim through Dropides, Critias the oligarch, and Charmides. The same pages name two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone, later the mother of Speusippus.

The birth year is disputed. Apollodorus fixed it in the 88th Olympiad, 428 or 427 BC, in the archonship of Ameinias, the year Pericles died.

A minority of scholars, following Debra Nails, prefer 424 or 423. The conventional date is the one this pin uses.

Some late sources say he was born on Aegina, in the house of Phidiades son of Thales, while Ariston held a cleruchy there. Favorinus is the name Diogenes cites for that version.

The Spartans later expelled the Athenian settlers. The deme affiliation is the fact that can be pinned.

Kollytos was not a village. It was an intramural deme on the south and southwest slope of the city, between the Areopagus, the Pnyx, and the road that is now Apostolou Pavlou.

No house survives. The ground is a mix of excavated bedrock, later housing, and the walk that carries visitors from the Acropolis down toward the Agora.

The hill of the Areopagus is the landmark a visitor can still stand on. The room itself is gone.

What the deme gave him was a civic identity, not a surviving doorframe. Later lives would dress that identity in Apollo and Solon. The register is colder.

Photo: O.Mustafin, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons