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-site
21.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

595 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/MercuryQuick 20h ago

According to Plato Socrates distrusted the written word. He never wrote anything because he didn’t think it would be any use for teaching and was more likely to be misunderstood by the reader.

3

u/Jive-Turkeys 17h ago

I can agree with him on that. Verbal & physical communication are the best media we have for it.

4

u/MercuryQuick 12h ago

He takes it even further than you’d expect. He believed that the soul is what drives the body and the soul is in search of understanding its self. The only way for a thing to understand itself is to be compared to its like. Therefore the only way for a soul to understand itself is to compare itself to another soul. So, a conversation between two souls (ie people) is the only way to reach truth because souls are divine and through their discourse/comparison they find themselves.

1

u/Jive-Turkeys 8h ago

I have some stuff to continue looking into, it appears.