Q. Why did ancient Greeks like Plato and Socrates have only one name? A. You can search the history books forever and never find a single allusion to little Billy Socrates or his precocious playground ...

Prologue I learned a few things about Plato in high school and in my university classes on ancient and medieval Greek history. I improved that meager ...

Born in 427 BC, Plato fled Athens in 399 BC after Socrates was executed, blaming democracy and the Peloponnesian War for his teacher's death. An aristocrat and an elitist, much of what we know about ...

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams examines the complex relationship between the classics and identity politics. And he is speaking to Walter Isaacson about racism, ...

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Socrates (470–399BC) on western philosophy. We know that he was the mentor of the young Plato, and we also know that Plato’s writings had deep ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

Detail from the Chigi vase. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain While discussing philosophy in the public square, Socrates would also have been training as a hoplite, a heavily armed foot soldier ...

In Plato’s cave, humans watch silhouettes flicker on the wall, unaware that fires just behind them are distorting reality into a shadow world – not unlike the world we find ourselves in today, aided ...

Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, ...