Around 408 BC, when Plato was about twenty years old, he met Socrates. This encounter changed everything.
According to tradition, Socrates had a dream the night before: a swan landed in his lap and immediately took flight, singing beautifully. When Plato appeared the next day, Socrates recognized him as the swan — someone who would carry his teachings forward and make them sing.
The story is almost certainly apocryphal. But it captures something true: Socrates recognized Plato's potential, and Plato recognized in Socrates something he had never seen before — a man who lived for truth alone.
Burning the poems
Another legend says that after meeting Socrates, Plato burned all his poetry. He had been preparing for a career as a tragic playwright. But philosophy, Socrates showed him, was the higher calling.
Whether or not Plato literally burned his poems, the symbolic meaning is clear. He turned away from one kind of life — the life of an artist seeking fame and applause — toward another: the life of a philosopher seeking truth through relentless questioning.
For the next eight years, until Socrates' death in 399 BC, Plato devoted himself to following his teacher through the streets and marketplaces of Athens.
The Socratic method
What made Socrates so different?
First, he did not teach for money. The Sophists — traveling intellectuals who offered training in rhetoric and virtue — charged fees, often high ones. Socrates accepted nothing. He insisted that he had no wisdom to sell. His only skill was in asking questions.
Second, his method was elenchus (ἔλεγχος) — cross-examination. Socrates would approach someone who claimed to know something important — What is courage? What is piety? — and through careful questioning, reveal that the person did not really know what they claimed to know.
This was not meant to humiliate (though it often did). It was meant to clear away false certainty, so that real learning could begin. Socrates compared himself to a midwife: he helped others give birth to ideas, but he did not claim to possess the truth himself.
Third, Socrates was relentlessly ethical. He did not care about wealth, fame, or pleasure. He cared only about living well — which meant living justly, with a soul in proper order. When most Athenians were pursuing power and success, Socrates was asking: What is the good life?
The gadfly of Athens
Socrates called himself the "gadfly" of Athens — a stinging insect that keeps a lazy horse alert. Athens, he said, was in danger of falling asleep, content with its wealth and power. His job was to wake people up by questioning their assumptions.
He would stop people in the agora (marketplace) and ask them basic questions: What is justice? What is courage? If you claim to teach virtue, what exactly is virtue? And if you don't know, how can you live well?
Many found this irritating. But for Plato, it was liberating. Here was someone who took ideas seriously — more seriously than politics, wealth, or reputation. Socrates showed that philosophy was not just abstract speculation. It was a way of life.
Plato's presence
Plato mentions himself only twice in all his dialogues: in the Apology (Socrates' trial) and the Phaedo (Socrates' death). In both cases, the mention is brief. But it tells us something important.
At the trial in 399 BC, Plato was there. Socrates mentions him among those willing to guarantee his good conduct. This was a public statement: Plato stood with his teacher, even when it was dangerous to do so.
At the execution, however, Plato was not present. The Phaedo lists those who were there, and adds: "Plato, I think, was ill." Whether this is literally true or a way of saying he could not bear to witness it, we don't know.
What is clear is that Plato was deeply attached to Socrates — perhaps more than to anyone else in his life. Socrates became a substitute father, a model of how to live, and the hero of nearly every dialogue Plato would write.
The redirection
Before meeting Socrates, Plato was on track for a conventional aristocratic career: politics, oratory, perhaps drama. Meeting Socrates redirected all of that.
Philosophy was not an escape from public life. It was a preparation for it — but only if one understood what justice and virtue really were. Plato would spend the rest of his life trying to answer the questions Socrates raised, and trying to vindicate the man who was killed for asking them.
In a sense, every dialogue Plato wrote is an attempt to keep Socrates alive.