- Plato Background
Plato is viewed by many as the father of Western philosophy. He lived 428-348 BC, living almost all of his life in the Greek city-state of Athens. The vast majority of his writings are in the form of dialogues, in which there is a discussion of some topic--such as the nature of justice, knowledge, or beauty--between a master philosopher and one or more people who lack philosophical insight in varying degrees. This format makes Plato's dialogues far more readable than the works of philosophers who wrote technical treatises, but it also presents interpretive problems: nowhere in the dialogues does Plato speak in his own voice, and even the philosophical masters in the dialogues tailor their discussions to the limited understanding of their interlocutors. As a result, it is often difficult to pin down Plato's own views on the topics that are discussed in the dialogues. This is even further exacerbated by the text of a letter, believed to be by Plato, generally referred to as Plato's Seventh Letter, in which he claims that he never put his own philosophical views into writing and that anyone who did so misunderstood the nature of philosophical understanding!
In the majority of Plato's dialogues, the philosophical master is a character named Socrates. Socrates was an historical person, and in fact was a teacher of Plato's. Socrates was an unusual figure who lived in Athens 470-399 BC. It was his habit to spend much of his time in the public market, conversing with people about matters such as the nature of the good life, justice, and beauty. In particular, he would question people who had reputations for knowledge on these subjects in this purblic forum, and his questioning would generally reveal that they did not in fact possess any hard theoretical knowledge of what they were talking about at all. These were often prominent people, who did not appreciate this kind of public embarrassment, and as a result Socrates made powerful enemies. Eventually, he was brought before the Athenian court on charges of denying the gods that the city worshipped and corrupting the youth. The latter charge seems to have stemmed from the fact that Socrates' activities attracted a crowd of young men, sons of wealthy Athenians, who enjoyed seeing prominent men of the older generation made to look foolish, and began to employ what little they understood of Socrates' methods simply in order to trip other people up. Socrates was convicted by a narrow margin and sentenced to death. Plato's Apology is probably a relatively accurate account of Socrates' unorthodox self-defense at the trial. In it, Socrates suggests (as he does in other dialogues) that his practice of causing people to examine their own beliefs about these most important topics is (a) a divine commission and (b) the most important thing that one can do: "the unexamined life is not worth living." Plato's other dialogues set around the time of Socrates' death--the Crito and Phaedo--suggest that Socrates had ample opportunity to escape by bribing guards and fleeing the city, but that he refused to do so because of his respect for the laws of Athens. It becomes evident in these dialogues that Socrates thought that the justice of his own soul was immeasurably more important than the preservation of bodily life, and that no bad thing could befall a just man.
See also the Author Biography on Plato on Perseus at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/lookup?lookup=encyclopedia,Plato and Encyclopaedia entry at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia?entry=Plato.
Note on Plato Pagination
You will notice in many editions of Plato that there are sets of numbers in the margins (or at the beginnings of paragraphs in online text). These are standard page numbers for reference purposes, and are called Stephanos numbers, for the monk whose edition of Plato's texts is used as the standard reference. The point behind this is that different editions and translations would naturally have the same text on different pages, and so it is necessary to have some standard way of pointing to a given block of text. Hence it is traditional to refer to a passage in Plato by its Stephanos numbers rather than the page number in the copy you happen to possess.