Plato's Playbook

In this conversation, Alex Petkas explains how Plato strategically built his immense influence by channeling existing authorities, targeting an elite international audience, leveraging worldly ambition, creating a tiered community around his Academy, and focusing on building a network of power rather than direct commercial success.

• How Plato used worldly ambition as fuel, not a distraction
• How Plato channeled existing authority to build his own
• How Plato targeted an elite, international audience instead of a local one
• How travel and rival schools shaped the Academy’s design
• How Plato created a community with layers of access and mystery
• Why Plato kept his deepest teachings out of his books
• How Plato built a network on the ancient model of friendship
• How Plato invented “the philosopher” to out-brand his rivals
• How Plato brokered power and influence, not just money

Justin Murphy: This podcast is going to be about the life of arguably the single most influential philosopher ever in the entire history of Western thought, Plato. We, however, are going to focus on something that you’ve probably never heard anyone talk about when it comes to Plato, which is the question of how practically Plato came to power as a philosopher.

Plato, I think, understood some secrets about the nature of influence and how ideas transmit over time through networks. And Plato built his body of work and his famous academy according to a kind of unique operating philosophy that I never heard anyone explain until I met Alex Petkas, who’s joining us here today. Alex has a PhD from Princeton in Classics, and he’s an expert in ancient Greece. He hosts an amazing podcast called The Cost of Glory, which you should totally go subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. It catalogs the lives of all the great figures of the ancient world.

Alex has actually been a member of the Other Life community for a couple of years now. I got to know him pretty well at two of our annual meetups, and I’ve been wanting to record this podcast for a long time. So I’m really pleased to finally bring it to you all today. So, Alex, we’re already friends. Let’s just skip the small talk and tell us, what does the life of Plato have to do with the life of a contemporary thinker, a writer, or a philosopher today? Take us back to that time and just sketch the cultural and economic context. It’s kind of weirdly similar to the present in some ways, is it not?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. It is. And I’ll just say thanks for having me on. I’m really excited to share, partly because it’s been such an inspiring story to me, and I’m hoping that other people will find it useful.

So, I think Plato’s time is really becoming more relevant now, especially because he lives in this world of a decentralized intellectual free-for-all that is the city of Athens in the late fifth, early fourth century BC. It’s a world without formal intellectual institutions. It’s a world with customs, but no certifying bodies. There’s no academia. He kind of invents the concept, but whatever he invents, I think, is pretty different from what we normally associate with academia. So, to appreciate why Plato is relevant today, you have to understand it’s a decentralized world, and he’s creating new possibilities. And he’s also dealing with new media technology that changes the game. And he’s one of the major game-changers with this new media technology, which is writing. It’s not that new, we’ll get into this a little bit, but essentially, writing is newly relevant, and new possibilities are being unlocked with writing. It takes a while to hit its full potential in Greek culture. So that’s the big picture here. And maybe we should get into the story.

Justin Murphy: Absolutely. Maybe start with writing. What is the experience up until this point with philosophical writing?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. So writing comes to Greece through Phoenicia in the ninth or eighth century BC. Plato’s living in the late fifth, so almost three hundred years later. But what you have in classical Athens and in the democracies—Athens being the biggest one that arises in the fifth century, the 400s BC—is widespread literacy for the first time. This is one of the things about the Greek alphabet that isn’t really there with a lot of these Semitic alphabets: it’s not that hard to learn. The Semitic alphabets don’t have vowels, which makes it confusing. The Greek alphabet has all the sounds represented, every phoneme.

So, with democracy comes this widespread incentivization for more or less regular people to learn how to write and to read, especially to read. But if you want to participate in the offices of the democracy, because every citizen can run for office and become a bureaucrat for a year and do important things, you’ve got to learn how to write. So you have in Athens this unique situation for the first time in Western history where you have a reading public that can actually sustain some kind of a book trade. Now, it’s not a lucrative trade because producing a book is very expensive, and there are no intellectual property rights. So it’s a terrible way to make money, but it’s a great way to get your brand out by writing books and having people to read them.

As far as philosophical writing before Plato, there’s not a whole lot, but he does describe in the dialogues that he’s writing… He’s writing dialogues starting in his thirties, before he really starts producing them. And he’s looking back at the times of the Peloponnesian War. And there you definitely get the sense that there are books around that Socrates is buying, like Parmenides’ book. When we talk about books, we’re talking about scrolls, and they’re not that long. But some intellectual will come to town, give lectures, and put out, for us, like a 20-page summary of his thoughts. Or Parmenides has this poem in hexameters. It’s pretty short by our standards, but they want to have a token that people can have. So there is philosophical writing that’s kind of emerging. But the style is very uneven. They’re not easy to read. It’s not obvious that you should write exactly the way that you talk. People haven’t really worked out what the standard of good intellectual writing is. There are historians. Herodotus is writing around this time. People are writing histories, but there’s not a lot of prose writing. So as far as philosophical writing goes, there’s a lot of progress to be made, let’s put it that way.

Justin Murphy: Okay. So there are books, there are scrolls. And if you’re a serious thinker, of which there were some at the time, it behooved you to put down your thoughts and your theories in these books. And these books might be copied a couple of times. They might travel a little bit from this new reading public. But the books themselves would not be sold at any kind of scale because it was too difficult to do that. Right?

Alex Petkas: I mean, they would be sold. There are book sales.

Justin Murphy: But no author is making real money from selling books?

Alex Petkas: No. The person who makes the money is the person who copied the book. So that’s a different business. Right?

Justin Murphy: Right. That’s the work. So writing a book back then was basically, as you said at the beginning, a matter of brand, really. You put your ideas down, and if they have currency, if they are important to people, then there will be word-of-mouth, basically, from the people who read the book down to everyone else.

Alex Petkas: Essentially. And that’s a way you can build other income streams. So, if you’re a philosopher with a better brand, you can charge more for pupils if you want to charge for pupils. And so there’s a way that you can convert that, but it’s not a direct conversion.

Justin Murphy: So what was Plato’s big idea here then? He’s looking at this scene. What is he seeing and what is he thinking about, like, “Okay. I’m going to insert myself in a novel and more powerful way?”

Alex Petkas: Well, I think to get to this, we have to start to tell a little bit of the beginning of his story and why he turns to philosophy in the first place. There’s a good chance that people don’t really know this story today, even if you’ve taken a course on Plato in college or have been reading the popular works on your own. Plato doesn’t start off as an 18-year-old thinking, “I’m going to be an intellectual. I’m going to be a philosopher just like Socrates.”

The reason that we don’t hear the story is because he tells it in this famous, problematic text called today the Seventh Letter. I’ll make it brief, but basically, the authenticity of the Seventh Letter is debated today. In antiquity, it was held as genuine. There are a lot of letters from philosophers and intellectuals floating around in antiquity, and it was proven in the eighteenth century by this famous guy, Bentley, that a lot of them, maybe all of them in his opinion, but certainly a lot of them are spurious. You could call them forgeries or playful literary fictions, depending on the case.

So Plato’s letters have come under this suspicion, and there are 13 of them. It’s my opinion that the 12 other ones are spurious, but it’s also my opinion, and not just mine, that the seventh is actually genuine and possibly is the very letter that started the trend of people writing letters and ascribing them to philosophers to tell a kind of lurid, fascinating story and give the character of the philosopher. I’d say today’s scholars are maybe sixty-forty against the Platonic authorship of the Seventh Letter. But I think they’re wrong, and I have some pretty serious names on my side, like Charles Kahn and A.E. Taylor. There are a lot of serious people that take the Seventh Letter seriously. We could get into the authenticity debate, but in a nutshell, you can’t prove authenticity; you can only disprove it. And the arguments that you can come up with against the Seventh Letter’s authenticity, they’re hard arguments, but there are about as many against the Republic.

Justin Murphy: Right. We’ll stipulate it. I consider it stipulated. For people who don’t know, I believe your dissertation was actually about Greek letter writing in particular.

Alex Petkas: So, yeah, I’ve studied it. Great.

Justin Murphy: Stipulate it.

Alex Petkas: Let’s not get into the weeds there. But I just want to clear the air. This is not some cockamamie theory of some pseudo-intellectual. This is real. And here’s why it’s important. It’s a long letter, about 30 pages long. He writes it at the end of his life. It’s a retrospective on his whole involvement in this political drama at Syracuse in Sicily, the greatest city of Sicily, a Greek city. But at the beginning of it, he gives an autobiography. He gives his account of why he got into philosophy, and it’s fascinating. And people don’t read it because it’s like, “Oh, maybe Plato didn’t write it.” This is the only time in all of Plato’s writings where he speaks in his own voice, and he tells his story from his perspective. It’s amazing.

So here’s the story that he tells. When he was a young man, he wanted to do the thing that all the other people of his class in society wanted to do. And his class is really the political class in Athens. He’s from a very, very prominent family. His uncle is Critias. Charmides is another cousin of his. He’s related to Pericles by marriage on his mother’s side. He’s a descendant of Solon. He’s just super blue-blood Athenian. And what changes his direction—he wants to go into power and politics, become a general someday, that was a clear path for him—is two things.

First of all, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, which was 431 to 404 BC… The war ends in 404 BC. He’s 24 years old. This is a story that I tell on The Cost of Glory podcast in the life of Lysander, if you want the background. But the Spartans win this great epic war with the Athenians, and they install a pro-Sparta government in Athens. It’s called the Thirty. The Thirty Tyrants, it’s called today, from the anti-Thirty perspective. Plato starts off thinking, “Oh, great. This is going to be good government at last,” because his family is very much the aristocrats, and they think maybe democracy is not the greatest system. It definitely got us into this war. There were all kinds of abuses and demagoguery. Maybe this will be the way that we should run our state, the Spartan way, which is oligarchy.

The Thirty comes to power. His uncle Critias is the number one guy in the Thirty. His cousin, Charmides, is another member of this regime. And then the Thirty ends up being pretty bad, actually. They end up being abusive. They have all these threats to their power. They end up executing citizens for their money. It’s a mess. And they try to get Socrates involved because Socrates has a lot of friends in the Thirty, and he kind of gets tarred by that. The Thirty lasts about a year before there’s an overthrow of that regime. Everybody wants to distance themselves from the Thirty Tyrants and especially from Critias. Critias dies in the revolution. And basically, Plato’s very uncle becomes, as some people have pointed out, the Hitler of the fourth century, the worst possible example of oligarchic excess. Anything that smells like Critias is bad. Critias is like the Hitler and Plato is his nephew.

So Plato tells a story very briefly in the Seventh Letter. He’s like, “I realized maybe I didn’t want to get into politics at that point.” And what happened after that was even worse because within a few years, there are all these legal recriminations and infighting among the Athenian political classes. This is how Socrates ends up getting executed—because he was associated with the regime of the Thirty. “Corrupting the youth” is kind of a metonym for being associated with the young, fascist-leaning youth that were supporters of the Thirty. And so maybe it was because he was teaching impiety or maybe it was just because he was associated with the wrong people that Socrates gets executed by a court of his own countrymen.

Plato says after that, this was a wake-up moment for me. There’s a passage in there where he says something in the Seventh Letter very similar to what he says in the Republic: that was when I decided that woes will never cease for mankind until either the rulers come to love philosophy or philosophers come to be rulers. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of what he says. And essentially he says, “From then on, I was on a quest to figure out what the alternatives were.” As he says, I’ll just read a sentence or two right here:

The older I grew, the more I realized how difficult it is to manage a city’s affairs rightly. … For I saw it was impossible to do anything without friends and loyal followers, and to find such men ready at hand would be a piece of sheer good luck since our city was no longer guided by the customs and practices of our fathers while to train up new ones was anything but easy.

So maybe you find the right system, but you put the wrong people in charge of that system. To me, this sums up why Plato turns to philosophy. This is his big idea as far as the motivation for the whole project of what he does: to find such men that are so difficult to find. It’s one thing to come up with the system, but then you have to either locate, gather, or create the people that can be the ideal rulers of the state. And that’s his retrospective, as he’s aged 70 looking back on a crisis.

How Plato used worldly ambition as fuel, not a distraction

So I think if you look at that, he spends the next maybe ten years starting to write. That’s when he starts writing the dialogues. And one takeaway just from that at the very beginning is, here’s an intellectual, a writer who had real, worldly ambition that really fueled him. It wasn’t a lack of concern for practical affairs that fueled a man like Plato. He’s channeling that into his work. And I think if you have that ambition, there are definitely ways to see that as fuel rather than a distraction to your intellectual project, which kind of goes against some of the received wisdom that you might get in an academic context.

Justin Murphy: Yeah. There’s this impression a lot of people have that a life of academic humanism must be a life that rejects worldly affairs and ambitions. And you’re showing that no, at the very founding of Western philosophy, the opposite was the case.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Definitely. So he’s looking at the scene, he starts writing, and here are the playbooks. There are three basic playbooks that he can see.

First of all, there’s the traditional one: the poet. The poet is the Greek intellectual par excellence of the archaic period, the pre-classical world of Greeks, maybe pre-democratic. This is an ancient Indo-European role, of course, the epic bards, Homer and the Vedas. But in Greek culture, the poet is composing mythic poems, retelling stories for occasions. They’re sometimes local, sometimes itinerant. The really good ones are probably going around from city to city collecting big fees and prizes. These are really producers for leisure events. They’re party performers, and yet they are seen as edifying, educational figures. And they can make money. It’s the patron model for the most part, but a really well-respected poet, you will find them tutoring sons of wealthy men, and maybe they’ll have a farm or something. They’re probably from the upper crust of society. There’s a big range in poets too, but there’s definitely a model there for converting your entertainment creds into more stable income through tutoring, teaching kids to memorize Homer and other poems. So that’s a traditional model. They call it musike, music, the stuff of the muses, which is not just music, it’s also poems, the stuff of memory.

Model two, more recent: the logographer, the speechwriter. This is really important in Athens because in their legal system, you can’t hire a lawyer. If you want to prosecute somebody or defend yourself from a prosecution, you have to speak in your own person. So you can get somebody to write a speech for you that you can perform. Nobody has to know that you bought a speech and memorized it. There’s definitely a market for that. That’s a great way to make a steady income. The most famous figures associated with this are Lysias, and Isocrates actually did this earlier in his career. Isocrates goes on to be a big competitor of Plato’s. Antiphon, the teacher of Thucydides the historian. And there’s a way to parlay that speechwriting platform into political theory. This is what Antiphon does. Thucydides is in this world of logographer, speechwriter, political theorist. They bleed over really easily and nicely.

And the third model is the Sophist. If you’ve read any of Plato’s dialogues, you probably know about figures like Gorgias or Protagoras, these great public intellectuals who are often itinerant, but Athens is like the New York City of the Greek world. They’re coming in, and they’re probably bringing some books with them to Athens, but it’s really a modification of the poet model where they’re public entertainers first and foremost. Then they gather students together. They teach you about a range of issues, and they had different methods than the poet. They talk about teaching arguments, and they’ll also teach you about the myths. They have a whole range of things. It’s not just their practice; they’re not just promising to teach you how to speak.

But there’s not really a distinction in the minds of your normal citizen between those guys and somebody like a Parmenides or Empedocles or Heraclitus, who we would think of as the philosophy department, and then Gorgias and Protagoras, that’s like the English department. We see this clear distinction in our mind because Plato made the distinction for us. There’s not really a distinction before Plato between the sophists, the rhetoric professors, and the more metaphysical, physiological thinkers.

How Plato channeled existing authority to build his own

These are the models that Plato is looking at, and he ends up doing something different. I don’t think he’s really figured out what it is in the beginning, but he starts writing these dialogues. I think it’s really interesting to look at the early dialogues to see what exactly he does. This is a lesson that I’ve tried to apply with my own podcast, and I think it’s something that Plutarch really picked up on. Start by channeling the authority of people that are already familiar to your audience. Look at who the characters were in the early dialogues: Gorgias, Laches and Nicias (famous generals), Ion (a famous poet), Protagoras (a famous sophist). Plato is essentially writing historical fiction about these people, these dialogues, famous figures with Socrates interacting with them. He’s telling stories about people that everyone’s already interested in. There’s a lot of name recognition that we don’t really see, but they would have seen. I think that’s a really important part, that he’s channeling that authority.

And we talked about how you don’t make money off of books, but it’s a way of brand building. He’s leveraging this technology of writing to the max. He’s not just writing for an Athenian audience. I think you can really see this at the very beginning of his dialogues. He’s really writing for this pan-Hellenic audience because the Greek world is all of these independent city-states from Sicily, from Marseille in France, all the way to Phocaea and Cyprus. It’s all over the Mediterranean, and there are wealthy, well-connected people in all these places. There’s a reading public there that you can’t make money off of by selling books to them, but you can definitely get your brand and your ideas out. People are looking for good books. So you write the absolute best possible thing you can write.

Plato’s dialogues have this combination of seeming familiar and colloquial, like you’re there with these guys, and it’s really smooth. Even the technical stuff is not that hard to understand. But it’s not actually as colloquial as it seems in Greek. It gives the impression of being colloquial, but he writes in a style that actually doesn’t have all of these local Attic slangs and phraseologies that you would only know if you were an Athenian. It’s a very polished, international Greek, and you can contrast it with the plays of Aristophanes. Plato is really writing for this international or interstate audience, brand building on a large scale.

Justin Murphy: Okay. Interesting. So just to pause on those two points. First one is that when you’re first starting out as a writer or thinker, no one cares about you, but they care about the big, famous names they’ve heard about that they have a kind of respect for already. And so if you’re just channeling them, they’re going to listen to you because you’re channeling these names that people already respect. That was one, it sounds like, one of Plato’s key insights that helped him be successful. But it sounds like the other is that whereas minor writers or less great writers such as Aristophanes were writing in a local dialect for a local audience, using the language and the norms and the points of interest to a smaller audience, Plato said, “No. I’m going to go as general as possible. I’m going to try to produce the most significant, truthful things I can that are really relevant to the maximum number of people ever.” And that’s another choice he made that you think led to his great success. Is that understanding it correctly?

How Plato targeted an elite, international audience instead of a local one

Alex Petkas: I think that’s fair. Another way to think about it is, the man on the street can just go to the plays of Aristophanes and laugh his ass off because there are fart jokes and they’ll talk about that special Athenian sausage. For a long time, I’m sure that Aristophanes just… that’s a way to immediately reach a big audience, popular fun stuff. But Plato goes not so much general, but he targets the upper crust across the Mediterranean. It’s a small number of people who can actually read these things and who are actually interested in reading these things. He’s aiming at those people from the get-go. And that’s a longer game. That’s a far-seeing game. Like, “I want whatever this project ends up being, I want to get the best people interested in this from the get-go. The smartest, most ambitious people that I can find in the Greek world.”

Justin Murphy: And just to pause on that, not to belabor a point, but to make it super clear, this is really relevant to people in our orbit in the Otherlife community or just people like us, people in our networks because this is essentially what’s at stake in the current strategic question one has to answer for oneself about: are you going to try to build a big audience fast, or are you going to try to do really sophisticated, original work and build a smaller but more elite audience over a longer amount of time? This is still a trade-off that we face today. And it sounds like, learning from the life of Plato, you lean towards this view where it’s like, don’t go for the lowest common denominator trying to write in an accessible vernacular that’s going to be really cool and fun for a specific type of larger, mass audience, but rather do the most sophisticated work possible, so your work will spread among the small number of elite people who are interested and capable of understanding that.

Alex Petkas: That is really what I think Plato’s playbook is. And that’s not an easy niche to address. There are plenty of niches where you could signal and go viral within these various verticals of internet writing. But how well is that going to translate? Think of your internet vernacular niche as one city, but can you target the people across a number of different cities while staying true to what you think is the essence of whatever community you associate the most with? Something like that, maybe.

Justin Murphy: Right. Yeah. In other words, if you could be admired and respected as a thinker by 500 billionaires and millionaires and powerful, educated, sophisticated people, you would much rather have just an email list of those 500 people following you than an email list of what, probably 100,000 normal people. The first one is literally more valuable and more influential and more powerful according to the practical worldview of Plato’s model.

Alex Petkas: That’s right. Yeah. And I think that as you go on through Plato’s career, you really see this playing out. I’m kind of retrojecting, but I think it’s there from the beginning.

Justin Murphy: No, that’s fantastic. Let’s just play it forward. Tell us about, maybe… well, if you know the best way to take it, feel free to override my suggestion. But maybe the one next question would be, what was his first big break? He starts off writing these dialogues. Does he immediately have currency and significance because of how he’s sociologically positioned, or is he toiling in obscurity for a little while and then has a big break? How does his rise unfold?

How travel and rival schools shaped the Academy’s design

Alex Petkas: Yeah, it’s hard to say whether it was a break or not, but the first moment where he enters the stage of history is when he’s 40. He’s born in 428 BC, so he’s 40 years old. He’s probably been writing dialogues for a good ten years. He goes west to the Italian Greeks in Southern Italy and to Sicily. This is something that he talks about in his Seventh Letter. Another great text on this, while it’s on my mind, is Plutarch’s Life of Dion, and we’ll talk about Dion a little later, an associate of Plato.

So Plato goes, and we’re not really sure why he goes west for certain, but there’s a pretty good guess we can make. The one reason that the sources agree on is that he wanted to see Mount Etna. The Greeks don’t have active volcanoes in Greece, but Mount Etna is an active volcano. Empedocles supposedly threw himself into it when he decided his time was up. If you want to see Mount Etna, it’s a scientific interest, maybe. But at some point on this trip, he ends up visiting Syracuse for the first time, his first visit of three. And he actually somehow gets welcomed into the court of maybe the most powerful man at the time in the Greek world, Dionysius the Tyrant of Syracuse, who is this great legendary Mussolini-kind of figure who seized power in this democracy and just out of sheer competence built up this really impressive empire on the island. Most of the Greek cities in Sicily are subject to Dionysius and several of the cities in Southern Italy. The coastline of Southern Italy and Sicily is heavily, heavily Greek, and has been for centuries at this point.

So Plato gets invited, he makes friends with Dionysius, and there are stories about their interactions. Maybe they were kind of testy on both sides. Some of these stories are apocryphal, but essentially Plato says in the Seventh Letter, “I was not that impressed with Dionysius’ court. It was not a healthy place.” Dionysius is known as a lover of culture, but it was a lavish place. Socrates would have been bored and disgusted, is the impression that he gives. But he got invited, and he hung out there. So, he was interested. This might have had something to do with the fact that he had an international reputation. Maybe it was his family connections. I mean, I’m sure you go to Dionysius, and you’re like, “Hey. This is the nephew of Critias.” He’d be like, “Whoa. Bring him in.” So maybe it was family connections.

Justin Murphy: But Critias was like Hitler. Yeah. I mean, these are powerful men who don’t much care about these social stigmas, presumably. Right? If you’re a Mussolini figure and you’re dominant and in control, in power, you’re not going to be scared away by the fact that it happened to be Hitler’s nephew.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. So that might have been part of it. The other thing that Plato’s doing over there is he’s getting to know the philosophers in Southern Italy. And there are some really interesting things going on, and it’s a shame we don’t really have great sources on this. But in Tarentum, which is in the instep of the boot of Italy, an old, powerful Greek city, one of the big ones, it’s starting to look like philosophers are running the place. This is where Pythagoras ended up in Tarentum. He was from back east, but he ended up founding communities around Tarentum. The most famous Pythagorean of this period is Archytas of Tarentum, who is one of the closest things you get to a philosopher-king looking figure in this period. Archytas is not actually a king; he’s like a first man in the state, kind of like a Pericles. And again, it’s a democracy, a collective government. But Archytas is famous for mathematical theories, and he’s also a general and a politician.

The Pythagoreans of Tarentum are actually starting to be very influential. This is a story I tell in the Life of Agesilaus that I just finished. Agesilaus’ great nemesis is this guy Epaminondas of Thebes who was trained by a Pythagorean named Lysis, who was an exile from Tarentum. So the Pythagorean philosophers are starting to get a lot of influence. And this Epaminondas is probably around Plato’s age, maybe a little younger. He’s living as a vegetarian. He doesn’t take a wife. He’s the real deal, a philosopher-leader. So this is kind of where it’s happening, Tarentum. The West is where you’re getting maybe a solution to Plato’s problem that he began with: how do you associate philosophy and power and have a better state run by better people? And they may have figured it out.

So he learns, he makes friends there. It’s not really clear on the details, but whatever he learns, he takes back. Scholars typically divide his dialogues into the early period, the middle period, and the late period. The visit to the west is the dividing point between the early period and the middle period. Plato comes back with lessons from the Pythagoreans, and this is when he writes his most iconic, famous dialogues probably. The Republic is a middle period dialogue, the whole idea of a philosopher king. He’s thinking of people like Archytas, maybe a Dion. He writes the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, Symposium—all of these dialogues that have… well, there are Pythagorean elements all over these things. The importance of mathematics, like, Plato has this conviction that rulers, people who are destined to rule, need to study objective math. And this is a lot of what they do in the Academy.

This is basically around the time that he founds his school. Probably once he returns from Southern Italy is when he founds his school. You have to imagine this. He’s built a mode of a reputation, and he has students willing to join him in this endeavor. This is when he founds the Academy, which is outside the walls of Athens. It’s named after this outdoor gymnasium called the Academia in Athens. He buys a little plot of land there, and he starts doing whatever he does at the Academy. It seems math is an important part of that. And it’s not just astrology and numerology, it’s real geometry. Euclid kind of comes from the Platonic tradition in the next generation. So he comes back, he founds a school, and I think the idea of the school is one of the big takeaways that he had from the Pythagoreans. They were real innovators in terms of building communities around philosophy that last generation to generation, these aesthetic brotherhoods that you have in the early Pythagorean communities that we don’t know a whole lot about, but this is something that Plato probably took from them.

Justin Murphy: Yeah. You mentioned earlier, Pythagoras going around and founding communities. I was curious when you said that what that meant exactly. Give us just real quick a sketch of what these communities are. So I get the impression, are these really determined, committed men who are almost leaving society to pursue the truth in weird, vegetarian habitats, like living in caves or something? That’s kind of the impression I get, but am I wrong? What are these communities exactly? How do they work?

Alex Petkas: That’s the basic idea. Pythagoras is a real guru figure, and he has all these weird rules that you have to follow. Like, when you get up out of your bed, don’t leave an impression on your bed. It’s like it’s haram to leave an impression on your bed. Don’t eat beans. You can’t eat beans besides animals, maybe because beans have souls. It’s not really clear.

Justin Murphy: These men were not forming families and living normal civic lives?

Alex Petkas: No. Some of them were. He wasn’t totally against marriage and procreation, but there’s definitely a sense that they were living apart, and they were persecuted too. I don’t know the history all that well, it’s not on the tip of my fingers, but they do get driven out of communities for being weird. And maybe it’s because they have political ambitions, and they’re starting to try to get influence in the state, and this is something that their enemies can leverage against them. They’re weird.

Justin Murphy: And how are they making money? A, how are they making money? And B, what types of productions are they actually doing? Are they just drawing symbols on the floor in dust, or are they producing books as groups? Are they going on lecture tours? What are they producing exactly, and how are they making money?

Alex Petkas: I don’t know. I think this is really the patronage model. The evidence is so spotty and anecdotal. But maybe I’ll research that and get back to you on that.

Justin Murphy: Sure. But the point is that Plato sees there’s power here. He sees these Pythagoreans are doing something, and they’re gaining currency. They’re gaining influence. They’re making a dent in how people think about the world. And so what does Plato take from that? What is Plato’s vision, and how does he begin building it?

Alex Petkas: One thing that scholars think he was very inspired by from the Pythagoreans is the importance of mystery. Remember I talked about Pythagoras, there’s a sense that it’s a religious cult, that there are layers of commitment and you don’t see everything if you’re on the outer layer, but as you work your way in, you get more and more forthright revelation. Maybe you didn’t find out about the beans thing until you got into the fourth circle. And that’s one of the reasons why they’re so secretive about their teachings.

How Plato created a community with layers of access and mystery

Mystery cults are a much wider phenomenon in the Greek world, of course. The Eleusinian mysteries famously at Athens… Mystery just means “secret” in Greek. So they’re secret cults that you have to be initiated into to get into the protected space and the inner sanctum, to see whatever it is you were supposed to see and then not tell anybody about. This is a powerful aesthetic that you see in the Republic. For example, the myth of Er at the end, there’s a culmination point. Obviously in the story of the cave, it’s kind of an inverted mystery cult, because you want to get out into the light. The Symposium is very much… there’s all this sense that you have to penetrate deeper into the nature of reality to really see what the gods see, and that it takes asceticism. It takes a moral seriousness to get there. It takes an intellectual seriousness and that there’s some kind of vision that is salvific. I’m not saying that that’s his doctrine, but that’s definitely an aesthetic of these stories that he tells in the dialogues, especially at this period.

You can hypothesize at this point that this was a dynamic of his school, but definitely from the Platonic schools of late antiquity that I studied much more directly in my work, and what we have a ton of evidence about, this is the way that philosophical schools, especially Platonic philosophical schools, which continued for about a millennium after Plato died… the way that it works is you have layers of commitment at the school. You have the hearers. The philosopher will give a public lecture on some kind of anodyne but entertaining subject. And that’ll be used to edify you and maybe tempt you, hopefully, into wanting to learn more. And as you spend more time, maybe you increase your financial commitments in some very polite, gentlemanly way that is not a transaction, a gift maybe, but the levels of commitment correspond to your level of initiation, access to the master, and access to the truths contained within Plato. Plato wrote his texts in such a way that it suggests that there’s a deeper meaning to the dialogue that you don’t get on a first reading. This is the thing that people are already doing with the myths of Homer and Hesiod. They’re already talking about allegory and deeper meanings to the myths. So he’s drawing on a lot aesthetically, and I think that this corresponds even at this stage, certainly at a later stage, to the way that the school itself is structured, that there’s a hierarchy.

Justin Murphy: So he’s using mystery strategically to create a larger structure that pulls people in and makes people curious and motivated to go deeper. And if the text isn’t giving you everything on the surface of the text, well, I guess I have to go to Plato’s Academy physically to try to figure out what’s really going on here.

Why Plato kept his deepest teachings out of his books

Alex Petkas: This is really key, and this dynamic is very clear in the Seventh Letter. It’s one of the things that modern philosophy department people don’t like about it. They don’t want Plato to be like that. But it’s very clear in the Seventh Letter.

Justin Murphy: Why don’t they like that?

Alex Petkas: Okay. Let’s talk about the Seventh Letter for just a sec here. I think the bias against it comes from two sources. One, the fact that Plato is getting involved with tyrants in Sicily and supporting a totalitarian regime or something. And he’s also very explicit in his belief that the Greeks should drive the Carthaginians off the island of Sicily. There’s this long conflict between Greeks and Carthaginians on Sicily. He’s like, “Let’s drive the barbarians away.” So he’s kind of an imperialist, just like Dionysius was and most Greeks of this period were, but that’s distasteful to some, obviously.

The other thing that people don’t like about it is arguably he undercuts the entire project of academic Platonic philosophy as it’s practiced today because he says, “In my writings, I never put the essence of what I teach in my school into my writings. It would be silly to do so. And I’ve never written down my doctrines actually.” So it doesn’t totally undermine everything that philosophy departments do, but essentially, he says you can’t get the real thing from a text. This is certainly an impression that you already get from the Republic, that there’s something more there. You just want him to speak straight with you maybe if you want to know what it really means. But this mystery function has a tempting effect too. Just like the earlier dialogues, he’s trying to entertain and channel authority, I think, in the so-called aporetic dialogues. But in these middle dialogues, especially, he’s really turning up the seduction.

One example of this is the description of the ideal philosophical character in Book Six of the Republic. He describes… he and Glaucon, I think they’re having this discussion with Socrates about what kind of character would be suited to eventually become a philosopher king. And what does he look like? He’s smart, he learns quickly, he’s strong of body, curious, sensitive, probably from a wealthy family, well-bred. He’s essentially describing his ideal student. And he says characters like that, the people who have the potential to do the greatest good, also have the potential to become the worst people, and so they need the proper training. It has a function within the argument of the Republic, but it also is like, “Hey. You get this far in the book, you’re probably one of these people, and you’re probably going to be like, ‘Maybe I should meet this Plato guy or at least find somebody who knows about him.’” So in a way, it’s a calling card for his students as they go out and make connections and start spreading the network. It’s a tool for that too.

Justin Murphy: Talk more about networks now. Talk about how the ideas and the books produce disciples and readers and how Plato uniquely and intelligently fomented this network structure. What was the shape of that network structure? How did he facilitate it? What do we know about his viewpoints regarding that network structure? Just try to unpack that.

How Plato built a network on the ancient model of friendship

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, there are two ways to go about that. One is to look at actual people. Another is to look at passages that talk about this. Let’s talk about some people first. There are lists in antiquity of all of Plato’s students who went on to get involved in politics. I could name some names, like this passage from Athenaeus: “Euphraeus sojourned with King Perdiccas in Macedonia, and Philip of Opus seized power in his own state. Parmenio the Macedonian caught him and put him to death.” And there are risk-takers: Calippus the Athenian, this is a guy who Plato maybe sent to help Dion stage a coup in Syracuse later, and he ended up murdering Dion, very embarrassingly to Plato. Euaeon of Lampsacus. There are all these names of Plato’s students going on and doing stuff in their cities. If you look at the list of the names, they’re from all over the Greek world, especially cities that were allied with Athens in the second Athenian league. But they’re not necessarily from Athens. Timaeus of Cyzicus, he made himself a tyrant in his own city in Asia Minor. They’re definitely getting involved.

A lot of what we know about how networks work in practice comes from later sources, the way that they write letters to each other and their practices around writing letters. But there’s definitely a lot of economic connection, people sailing here and there and carrying letters back and forth. This ties in with a very ancient Greek institution of friendship, of guest friendship, of hospitality. Plato and Greeks in particular, all Greeks, are very much believers in this idea that your network is your net worth. It’s something that you even see in the Homeric poems, where your power in your own city has a lot to do with who your friends are in other cities. Because in this Greek world, it’s just a very decentralized and yet highly, highly interconnected world. This is one of the reasons that they care so much about guest friendship and gift-giving, and they talk about this obsessively. It’s another reason why the Greeks are so obsessed with their culture, with being Greek, because this is the common ground that they build their power, their personal fortune of friends, on. It’s this common culture that they can relate on: poetry and music. So there’s something really deep that he’s tapping into, but he’s making it specific with this brotherhood of philosophy, this shared participation in the mysteries of knowledge of the Forms or whatever it is that you learn of geometry. It’s a common culture that he’s building through long, long contact in person.

Justin Murphy: Okay. So let’s drill down into that, though, and really sketch for us the diagram, if you will, the engineering diagram. What types of things is he doing, and how are they connecting? So for instance, is he giving lectures? Is he touring and giving lectures in different areas? Is he charging money for these lectures? When he publishes a book, where is it going exactly? Where is the academy meeting? How often is it meeting? Try to get into some of these details of what the Platonic machinery looks like as a whole.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, a lot of it’s conjectural. Our sources are kind of thin, but it’s clear that they spend a lot of time studying, like literally, how do you determine the length of a hypotenuse if you know the legs? And how do you get the area of a circle and stuff like that? They are definitely doing a lot of what you see in the Platonic dialogues, like interrogating concepts through dialectic. I think that they’re also doing a lot of really regular stuff. Plato probably has some kind of exoteric teaching that he lectures on regularly to do the whole public-facing thing. There’s no evidence of when he does that or how often or what exactly the contents are, but that’s probably happening in addition to the esoteric stuff that only the inner circle gets.

The presumption of the whole project is whatever you can get from an Isocrates, from a Gorgias, from a Lysias, you can get at Plato’s school. You are going to learn how to speak in public. You are going to learn to be a leader, to be a person in society. It’s not all math and abstruse, annoying, Socratic bickering that you see in some of these aporetic dialogues. There’s some of that, but it’s only a part of it. He is really staking everything on this being the best leadership training. It’s got to work for ambitious people, and it’s got to be plausible. I think that’s important to keep in mind that it’s not just like getting a master’s in philosophy.

Justin Murphy: Okay. And how was it intertwined with these powerful figures, the wealthy people, the tyrants, and so on? Are these people donating to the academy to keep it going? Are they giving land? What are they doing? And also, maybe in the same breath, connect that to the other kind of economics. I know Socrates, I think, was not charging for students, but Plato… or, Socrates was. So explain the underlying economic model.

How Plato invented “the philosopher” to out-brand his rivals

How Plato brokered power and influence, not just money

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Plato talks in so many of the dialogues about how Socrates doesn’t charge for lessons. This seems to be a hint that he’s saying, “I’m not like Isocrates over there. I’m not like all these other guys that are charging big fees.” You look at somebody… Plato’s greatest competitor is Isocrates. He’s about the same age, starts off as a logographer, ends up becoming just a trainer of rhetoric, but he calls himself a philosophos. So they’re in the same category in people’s minds. The whole distinction between Isocrates and Plato as one being a philosopher and one a rhetorician is completely invisible to contemporaries. Isocrates has very wealthy students.

Justin Murphy: And just to be clear, this concept of the philosopher, this is brand new, right? This is unprecedented.

Alex Petkas: It’s around as an adjective.

Justin Murphy: But it’s not a lifestyle. It’s not a known vocation or a known way of actually living out a whole life with this as your profession.

Alex Petkas: It’s a synonym for sophist, if anything. A less common synonym for sophist. That’s more like an adjective: a lover of wisdom. What’s that supposed to mean?

Justin Murphy: But I guess just trying to make clear for readers and listeners, the term sophist is often thought of as a pejorative term. It’s referring to someone who will teach you to do anything with words to get your way, essentially. And this idea of the philosopher as discovering the objective truth of reality, and that distinction between the philosopher and the sophist, that’s what’s at stake here. That’s what’s being invented, essentially. Am I understanding that right?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. That’s correct.

Justin Murphy: And basically, Plato is discovering the economic machinery to make the philosopher powerful and sustainable and for the philosopher to exist in a real, economic, material way. Right?

Alex Petkas: Right. So what ends up becoming the standard model for philosophers later is you teach rhetoric, and you get paid to teach rhetoric. That pays your bills, and then you have a few students that will do philosophy with you. And that is the moral mission that gives you this added credibility. It’s a way to up your game as a rhetorician to say that you can offer something more serious. But the money really comes from teaching young men how to speak and write.

Now, what Plato is doing… it’s not clear that he’s charging for anything like that. He’s well off. His students, I think he probably is operating more on a gift-giving model where the real economic machine, if there is one, to support the work of philosophy is the network of wealthy people that is more about power than it is about money, if that makes sense. You can leverage connection with powerful people for financial gain, but it’s indirect.

Justin Murphy: How would he talk about getting it, though? How does he indirectly solicit it? Is he going on a donation tour asking and inviting? Is it all backdoor, like you’re not supposed to ask, you’re supposed to just wait till it’s gifted? Tell us about how it actually works.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. We can speculate. But basically, I think the way that it works is he has this big tour to the West. He probably makes other tours that we don’t know about. But the standard thing would be, you make some tours, you talk to some powerful people, you recruit some students, and then you have your students, once you train them up, do the same thing when you get older and you can stay in place and have your people go out and make connections on your behalf.

But there’s an interesting… so in Greek, the word for honor, timē, is also the word for price. This is very important in Homer, for example. What Plato is trying to do, and he talks about this all over the place in the Seventh Letter, is he’s very concerned about the timē of philosophy, the honor of philosophy. There are other words that talk about financial price, so it’s not like there’s an ambiguity there. He is talking about honor, but they do think of honor in very concrete terms as the price that you’re worth, that you would be ransomed for, for example. So there is this more archaic, gift-giving culture that has an economy, but it’s hard to quantify. Part of the point of it is that it’s harder to quantify because once you quantify it, you almost set a cap to it. I would call it more of a power network than an economic network. But other people at the same time are using philosophy as the extra that they can offer to get a one-up on these regular old teachers of rhetoric and public speaking. And philosophy definitely is starting to get that honor, that credibility that makes it a prestige educational brand.

Justin Murphy: Does that make sense? Yeah. That makes sense. So Plato’s Academy is basically offering all of the practical things you would get from the other rhetoric teachers or the sophists, but also this other special thing, this new thing of philosophy, which is somewhat enigmatic but also more prestigious.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. He invents the idea of philosophy as a prestige brand for education. It wasn’t prestigious before then.

Justin Murphy: I’m still just trying to fill in a few gaps in understanding how this magically produced big backers that were actually sending resources to make this thing run. I’m trying to… maybe we just don’t have that on record, but you did talk a little bit about Plato going to Syracuse and these kinds of stories. Just try to fill that in a little bit more if you could.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I think people probably end up paying their own bills. They’re probably wealthy enough to just support themselves, and Plato is wealthy enough that maybe they’ll make a donation when they get there so that you get free meals if you come. But it’s not a capital-intensive sort of thing.

Justin Murphy: Okay. So basically, a big background variable here is that Plato was born into money and had a certain base level of resources that he could live on and coast on.

Alex Petkas: Yes. And his students too. Important. And the people he’s going after.

Justin Murphy: Yeah. Okay. Great. So that’s fair enough. That explains my confusion around that. But nonetheless, what he’s doing is he’s basically brokering power, not money. That’s what you meant by that. The money itself is kind of taken care of. That’s sort of in the background, abstracted out because we’re talking about essentially privileged people. But what he’s doing brilliantly is building relationships with powerful backers on the one hand. And then through his writing, he is basically selecting for the cream of the crop in terms of students. The students come into the academy, and then he gives them this sophism-plus package, if you will, and that sends them off into the world to have much more success than they would have otherwise. And he actually succeeded in this. And then those people presumably give back to the academy in certain ways. And that’s the machinery. That’s the power machinery in a nutshell. Or what am I missing?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Time would fail us. There are a lot of examples of people doing this in antiquity and in the Renaissance. And yeah, I think it’s a fascinating and extremely fruitful model.

Justin Murphy: So, yeah, let’s do it. Dude, it’s really almost bizarre how much it maps onto the contemporary situation. So I think there’s a lot here for people who are trying to find their own way in this new independent, decentralized marketplace of ideas. I never would have thought really until I met you that the ancient world has so much to teach on precisely this challenge that people like you and I are trying to figure out. So I think this will be very useful for a lot of people in our orbit.

Alex Petkas: And your community has been a real inspiration to me in wanting to get this idea out more urgently, for sure. So keep doing it. I’m along for the ride.

Justin Murphy: Thank you so much for those kind words. And thank you for coming on today. I appreciate it. And like I said, check out The Cost of Glory podcast. You can get that wherever you get your podcasts. And it’s real nice, by the way. It’s a very fine production value. Alex puts a ton of work into these highly well-researched podcasts. It’s basically like the Dan Carlin podcast if you’ve ever listened to one of those, detailed historical research podcasts with a real attention to detail. I think Alex is building pretty much, I think you’re building this eternal, evergreen store of audio knowledge in a way, not unlike what Plutarch did with his Lives, but you’re doing it basically in podcast format. So people should definitely check that out. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate it. I’ll talk to you soon.