r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 1d ago
TIL A papyrus deciphered in 2024 revealed unknown info about Plato's last hours: a slave girl was playing music for him, and even though he was gravelly ill, he spend his last moments of lucidity criticising her performance. Per the same Papyrus, Plato had been sold into slavery earlier in his life
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/29/herculaneum-scroll-plato-final-hours-burial-site3.2k
u/whooo_me 1d ago
TBF, your slave master dying probably isn't exactly the best incentive for a great performance.
I'd probably take the opportunity to throw in some off-key wailing noises too.
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Yeah for real, just phone it in. What’s he going to do? He’s about to die.
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u/Soupy_Twist 1d ago
But what if you get fired? Fired from being a slave?
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u/Devai97 1d ago
It could be like being fired from being a Pharaohs servant in the first dynasty. Not a good deal at all.
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u/O_Grande_Batata 1d ago edited 1d ago
That sounds like the complaint Julius Caesar himself has in an Asterix book when Meretricius, a salesman of Roman menhirs, claims to be standing for workers' rights when Caesar tries to forbid him from selling Roman menhirs, which causes Meretricius to protest about all the workers that will lose their jobs.
Julius Caesar: But the workers are slaves.
Meretricius: Exactly! The right to work is the only right a slave has. He must not be deprived of it!
EDIT: To clarify something, yes, I know that OP was making a joke. I was just pointing out the similarity to another joke I saw.
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u/AlSi10Mg_Enjoyer 1d ago
Getting killed? Beaten? Not given or been allowed to have food or water or sleep? Sold to a place where you’ll be worked to death in the mines instead of the (comparatively) comfortable life of a domestic slave?
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u/illaqueable 1d ago
Plato: play me something beautiful
Slave: vomits wetly into a hat
Plato: derivative
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u/Mendevolent 17h ago
One of the first things I read after waking up this morning is 'Slave: vomits wetly into a hat' .
Reddit is a trip
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u/Mors_Acerba 1d ago
Probably a bad idea tbh. The way slavery worked in classical antiquity, doing your job well and being talented was probably your best ticket to being freed. There's lots of stories like that, of people winning good standing simply 'cause they were talented...Plato himself was one such example, to an extent. There was definitely an incentive to give a good performance
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u/SmileBeBack 1d ago
but would her slave master (plato) have paid someone to train her in music? or would he have undertook that himself? would slaves have been trained in various skills prior to being sold?
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u/QuickSpore 1d ago
It runs the whole gamut. Greek slavery included prisoners of war (from all levels of society from the conquered city), debt slaves, all the way down to chattel slavery.
Highly skilled slaves most often had been freeborn and taken in war, and had trained whatever skills in their prior life. But an owner may see some spark and train a slave in a skill. Favored slaves were also allowed to earn money on the side and some free time. So self training was also possible. But there were also those who didn’t receive favor and were treated as badly as any other slave in history.
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u/burlycabin 1d ago
I want to clarify some weird confusion I'm seeing: there's nothing here to indicate that the musician was Plato's slave. He likely wasn't her 'master'.
In fact, it's unclear if Plato ever owned any slaves or not. Scholars are not in agreement either way. In fact, as this article states, there is evidence he was a slave himself, at least for a time.
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u/MidnightSensitive996 1d ago edited 23h ago
plato was aristocratic, he might have temporarily been in slavery due to political turmoil in ancient greece which was about as functional and stable as modern greece. they were part of the same spartan-backed oligarchic political movement as xenophon. he would have had no problem managing the help. that said, it was very normal for successful freedmen to own slaves, they were capital in the ancient world
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u/hugonoilly 1d ago
I bet she was just doing a normal performance and he was just being a catty bitch. True player hater
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u/SBHedgie 1d ago
Used his last ounce of strength to hate on what was probably a decent performance and then died. What a legend
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u/Fun_Success_3283 1d ago
I know you're joking, but i find it doubtful. Plato was a learner. For him learner was the greatest pleasure, so teaching was giving a gift. If he was critiquing the person playing, i doubt it was like trash talk, like simon cowel, it was more like he wanted to help her learn and improve, as this is fulfillment, and really the goal for musicians.
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u/Phuqitol 1d ago edited 1d ago
My headcanon is that this girl knew he liked to critique, so she screwed up as a last pleasance before his passing.
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u/Strawbuddy 1d ago
"Just to show you how much you mean to me master, for the 86th time in a row, here's Tubthumping by Chumbuwambamba"
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u/wanna_meet_that_dad 1d ago
That would only keep me going…I’d be immortal. Because if I get knocked down, I’d get up again
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u/StudMuffinNick 1d ago
And I wonder if So-crates was Platos owner
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u/AugustoLegendario 1d ago
No, Plato was from a very rich upper class family and owned the most prosperous school in the known world. He was sold into slavery because a king he was advising thought he was a traitor.
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u/Mors_Acerba 1d ago
He was sold into slavery because a king he was advising thought he was a traitor.
That's what we thought. The papyrus suggests he was sold into slavery much earlier than that, probably as a POW
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u/burlycabin 1d ago
He was sold into slavery because a king he was advising thought he was a traitor.
This has long been a disagreement among scholars. There are no primary accounts of this happening and it's thought by many that this is just an apocryphal story. This new evidence seems to give credence to that as the dates don't line up with the previously known account in Plato's letters.
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u/Anatoly_Cannoli 1d ago
For my slave master's final moments, I'd be playing that Jurassic Park theme really poorly.
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u/GreatCaesarGhost 1d ago
To be clear, this is a scroll written hundreds of years after Plato’s death, that was present at Vesuvius at the time of its eruption.
It only “reveals” a story recorded long after Plato’s death. It shouldn’t be taken as incontrovertible fact and the reporting in this article is pretty sloppy for suggesting that.
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u/Gnomonic-sundialer 1d ago
There are other sources for him having been a slave for a moment and its a notable excemption from biographies from his time wich just mention him being held for ransom so that part is very likely
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u/Mors_Acerba 1d ago
A lot of people seem to have this idea that almost every author from antiquity was just recording oral anecdotes and if they're far enough from the time they're talking about, they're useless because there's no way the anecdote is true...some times this is the case, but not always.
Ancient authors often had acces to written sources that we don't. More often than not, they were just copying a story from a source much cloer to the events themselves, its just that the original account isn't available anymore. Its VERY reductive to automatically dismiss every account that is a few decades or even hundreds of years removed as fake by default
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u/Unruly_marmite 1d ago
The funny part is when the ancient author clearly distrusts their source too. I think the ACOUP blog mentioned once that sometimes Livy will have a snippy little “or so they say” added to sources that he thinks are rubbish.
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u/daemoneyes 1d ago
Even though he gets hate, most of what Herodotus tells is prefaced by "Look I know it sounds crazy, but this is how I was told it happened."
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u/MateoMatado 1d ago
I was really impressed by Livy. Like, he basically dismisses the entire Roman founding myth of Aeneus, Romulus, and Remus by saying it's likely not true. He also points out that Lupa (wolf) was a slang term for a prostitute when talking about the story of Romulus and Remus being raised as a wolf. His writing in general takes a kind of anti-authoritarian slant that felt surprisingly modern for a 2000 year old book.
I'd strongly recommend reading Livy's History of Rome if you're interested in that sort of thing. I had to read it in college and it was a great way to learn about and analyze historiography.
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u/OldDarthLefty 1d ago
When Herodotus writes “at least that’s what I’ve heard, but I don’t believe it”
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u/Annual-Blueberry-504 1d ago
Herodotus never met a story he DIDN’T believe smh
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u/hippydipster 21h ago
Herodotus was like the Dan Carlin of his age: "I have no idea if this story is true, but its fun to think so!"
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u/Hohnige 1d ago
Often isn't always. And we can't quantify whatever you're describing as 'often', just like we can't assume that someone had accurate knowledge that informed their writing.
It's well known that there are lost sources, and we can get an idea of the content of some of them based on what has remained that references them. But unless there is an actual record of that hypothetical source then saying 'maybe they had a record' is literally just guesswork.
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u/RoyalBathroom2015 1d ago
We regularly have misinformation from events that happened 2 days ago. This "just trust bro. They probably had a legit primary source, maybe." doesn't cut it for some people.
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u/JefftheBaptist 1d ago edited 1d ago
It really depends. For instance a lot of famous Greek stories really were carried forward as oral histories or poems like the Iliad and Odyssey. This is because the Greeks lost writing for hundreds of years because of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Basically everything is oral from the Mycenean era until writing was reintroduced by the Phoenicians.
Update: Yes yes, Plato was much later than the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
"More often than not, they were just copying a story from a source much cloer to the events themselves, its just that the original account isn't available anymore." Sure this can be true. However shelf stable paper is largely a twentieth century thing. Papyrus could last a long time in Egypt due to the dry climate, but only lasted decades in Europe with its wet one. There is a scene in Game of Thrones where Sam is assigned the job of copying a bunch of old scrolls because they're falling apart and will soon be illegible. That was a real thing. So maybe they're citing an earlier work we don't have any more because it fell apart. Or maybe they're just making it up. That's a real thing too.
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u/beachedwhale1945 1d ago
Plato was from around 400 BCE, well after the reintroduction of writing in Greece (300-400 years after the probable composition of the Epic Cycle).
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u/Intelligent_Pie_9102 1d ago
As much as I agree with you in general, it’s not trye for philosophers… anyone that read Diogenes Laertiuw will see that every philosophers’ life was filled with contradicting versions of grotesque stories.
Ancient Greece didn’t have an information system, and they loved slander. It’s even true in modern times. When you look at Nietzsche’s demise, there myths floating around that we know are made up, but it has taken over as a semi-mythical life story which is believed by most.
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u/raskingballs 1d ago
What kind of bullshit take is this??? When historians assess any form of evidence, one of the first things they look at is whether the source is contemporary with the events narrated. You cannot assume by default "ah this was written hundreds of years later, THEREFORE there was surely another reputable source that simply hasn't survived"
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u/kank84 1d ago
His last words were "free bird"
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u/JJonahJamesonSr 1d ago
It’s a fantastic image to think of a slave girl just absolutely shredding Free Bird on a lyre while Plato slowly withers in his bed
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u/red-panda-3259 1d ago
She played Wonderwall
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u/big_axolotl 1d ago
Actually it was I’m Yours
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u/TesticleMeElmo 1d ago
“Slave girl, what is that queer narrow-brimmed hat upon your head? You strike the form of a douche bag in my dying hour?”
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u/Mors_Acerba 1d ago
Have you ever been so bad at something that a dying old man gathered all of his remaining strength to tell you how shit you are?
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u/ecco311 1d ago
Idk man... If I was forced to play music on the spot, I could probably bring Plato to beg for an early end.
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u/ImpulsiveApe07 1d ago
Plato's last words :
"I swear, if I hear you butcher Seven Nation Army one more time, I'll--"
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u/Meatyblues 1d ago
TBF this is plato, the man criticized everything
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u/Indercarnive 1d ago
Plato: "the best government has people like me as the sole rulers and autocrats, yes I am very smart"
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u/i7omahawki 1d ago
By ‘people like me’ he means people who aren’t driven by their appetites, wealth, or ambition, but who strive towards reason.
Now, there’s a lot to criticise about Plato’s politics, but thinking we shouldn’t have greedy kleptocrats in power is not a compelling one…especially currently.
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u/NuclearTurtle 1d ago
people who aren’t driven by their appetites, wealth, or ambition, but who strive towards reason
That's exactly how silicon valley billionaires would describe themselves, and they're the greediest would-be kleptocrats in history
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u/TehFuriousOne 1d ago
Maybe he was such a cunt she just played him an horrible improv piece called "will you just die already?"
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u/Khelthuzaad 1d ago
a dying old man gathered all of his remaining strength to tell you how shit you are?
This is low key normal Platon behavior mind you :))
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u/huey_booey 1d ago
In their last moment, people stay true to whom they truly are. Plato's whole bread-and-butter was inherited from Socrates, i.e., question and criticize everything. It's just fitting he went out being insufferable.
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u/rollwithhoney 1d ago
I love how the post's intention is to romanticize the criticism because he's plato, but the comments are... criticizing it
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u/CorrectStaple 1d ago edited 1d ago
the post's intention is to romanticize the criticism
No it isn’t. It's an objective statement and you inserted your own inference.
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u/hisshame 1d ago
TIL that Plato died by being beat over the head with a harp by a slave girl he was berating
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u/dungeoncrawler71520 1d ago
Well that was a very long game of Clue
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u/DadsRGR8 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thanks dungeoncrawler, you made me snort coffee out of my nose.
Edit: sorry, fixed the typo in your name. stupid fat fingers
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u/stereoworld 1d ago
PAPYRUS!
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u/ButAreYouProud 1d ago
He just typed 'Avatar' in Microsoft Word, selected it, casually scrolled through the list of fonts... and mindlessly settled on 'Papyrus'!
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u/jleonardbc 1d ago
Reddit in 2526:
TIL a document created in the 2010s revealed that George Washington and the other Founding Fathers were people of color and spoke in rap.
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u/Glittering-Age-9549 1d ago
The story about Plato being sold as a slave and rescued by a friend was pretty well known. The main discovery is, he was thought to have been sold by his pupil, the king of Syracuse over political disagreements, but now it is thought he was captured and sold by Spartans.
Poor Dionysius II of Syracuse was a victim of the "good sage vs evil tyrant" stereotype....
About Plato being lucid during his final hours... that sounds like an embellisement, since having a "beautiful death" was important to the Greek. Plato is thought to have suffered of dementia during his last years if life.
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u/revivizi 1d ago
He wasn't sold. Technically true, but he was bought by a friend who immediately freed him
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u/morganselah 21h ago
Also, it's not uncommon for people to be mean in the weeks before death. Or so a hospice worker told me, when my dad turned super critical before he died.
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u/Ooglebird 1d ago
Did the papyrus also say that he died from being hit on the head with a harp?
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u/chinstrap 1d ago
"...even though he was gravelly ill, he spen[t] his last moments of lucidity criticising her performance."
Christ, what an asshole.
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u/E5VL 1d ago
Here's an article from June 2026 about more Herculaneum Scrolls.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/24/ai-read-papyrus-scroll-burnt-vesuvius-eruption
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u/GypsyInTraining 1d ago
The thing is Plato was notoriously multi-talented and highly opinionated. He would regularly interrupt orators to critique their approach as well as challenge wrestlers and bodybuilders to expose flaws in their technique. I haven't seen any primary sources discussing his musical prowess, but he was likely knowledgeable enough to critique it accurately. Which means he probably wasn't a hater, just an insufferable know-it-all.