Biography | Plato — The Island Court at Syracuse Where the Philosopher Met a Tyrant

People treat the Republic as a book written only in an Athenian grove.

The first live test was this island.

In 388 or 387 BC, when he was about forty, Plato crossed to Sicily and entered the fortified court of Dionysius I on Ortygia, the limestone island that still forms the old town of Syracuse.

The Seventh Letter, whether by Plato or a close imitator, dates the landing by that age. Later lives add a tourist motive: he had come to see the craters of Etna.

He met Dion, the tyrant's young brother-in-law, and formed a friendship that lasted until Dion's murder in 354.

The relationship with Dionysius did not. Later lives say the tyrant had him shipped off and sold on Aegina. Friends ransomed him.

The Seventh Letter is the main contemporary-feeling account of the later two visits, in 367 and 361, under Dionysius II. Those belong to other pins.

Dionysius I kept civilians off Ortygia and used the island as a barracks and palace compound. The standing Doric columns at the north end are the Temple of Apollo, begun in the sixth century and already old when Plato landed.

The palace itself is gone. The island is the pin.

He returned to Athens from this voyage and bought land in the precinct of Akademos. That purchase is the next chapter, already published in this collection.

What a visitor finds on Ortygia now is a dense baroque town on the same rock, with the Apollo columns still at the landward end. The court rooms are not there. The island that held them is.

Photo: James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons