Explore
Compare
Life
Sent to Rome as an ambassador, he gave a public lecture arguing for justice one day and a devastating lecture against it the next, and was expelled from the city for making truth look too easy to argue either way.
He saw a world behind the world. The Forms are real; what we see are shadows.
Connection
Plato the Academy turned against its founder Carneades — Carneades led the very Academy Plato had founded, generations after it turned from Plato's confident metaphysics toward systematic skepticism: an irony ancient writers noted directly, since Carneades' arguments often targeted certainty of exactly the kind Plato had claimed.
Ideas
Words
“The wise man will sometimes even give his opinion on things about which he cannot be certain, provided he distinguishes and warns that the matter is not certain.”
“Justice, if it existed at all, would consist in an equal regard for the interests of all — but no nation that means to be great can practice it.”
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
Key Moments
155 BCE
Delivers dueling orations on justice in Rome
c. 155 BCE
Leads the Academy's skeptical turn
c. 428 BCE
Born in Athens
c. 408 BCE
Meeting Socrates
399 BCE
Death of Socrates
c. 388 BCE
First Voyage to Syracuse
Works
No surviving works
Apology
Crito
Euthyphro
Protagoras
Symposium
Meno
Phaedo
Gorgias
Republic
Phaedrus
Theaetetus