out of many returned home.”33 Soon after, in 404 BCE, victorious Spartans imposed ‘The Thirty Tyrants’ on the Athenians.This was a short lived, but brutally oppressive regime that executed around 1,500 citizens without trial34, chased out the key democrats and plundered the city of its wealth. It is true that ancient Athenians had many scars of warfare, but the eventual surrender to the Spartans in 404 BCE cut to the bone. It destroyed the symbolic order of the Athenian mind. It dragged everything into question. War makes a grave imprint on a young psyche, and there is no reason to think that Plato was any different. In fact, we know from his surviving personal letters that this episode deeply shook him up, even though he was not on the battlefield himself. The historian Thucydides, whose account of the Peloponnesian War was intentionally trying to tune into the moral signals of the events, famously commented that “war is a violent teacher” ( ὁ πόλεμος βίαιος διδάσκαλος).35 He shared Plato’s great mistrust of democracy.
33 Thucydides, “History of the Peloponnesian War”, Book 7 (87,6) 34 Nails, Debra. “The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics”. Hackett Publishing, 2002. 35 Thucydides, 3.82.2.
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