thumos - that wild popular political rage that burns like hot pitch, but which is the essential glue for all politics, even today. Who should rule? Again and again Plato watches the best of intentions fail. His family members’ brutal rule is overthrown. It is replaced by a new and hopeful group of real democrats. With in a few years they effectively murder Socrates. Another group rises. They gut the intellectual life of the city. Plato hunkers down and establishes his Academy as perhaps the only safe, sensible path to politics, to train minds. He develops the transcendent, completely original approach to philosophy we know him for today - man can strive for knowledge, but total and perfect wisdom is impossible. We may imagine his Academy as it appears in Raphael’s famous 16" Century painting: A sort of leisurely graduate seminar with Aristotle and Plato arm-in-arm in conversation; Diogenes lounging around tossing off bon mot. It was nothing of the sort. The real legacy of the Academy was rigor. The best students made contributions in mathematics or metaphysics, fields where you could check answers on the inflexible measure of reality. Plato craved the solidity of numbers. “Evil was growing with startling rapidity,” he wrote of Athenian life in his age. “Though at first I had been full of a strong impulse towards political life, as | looked at the course of affairs and saw them swept in all directions by contending currents, my head finally began to swim; and, though I did not stop looking to see if there was any likelihood of improvement in these symptoms and in the general course of public life, | postponed action till a suitable opportunity should arise.” So it was that he heard from Dion, asking if Plato might sail to Syracuse (we know it today as Sicily) to take the young king in hand. This was, Plato thought, a test he had to take. In 367 BC, he boarded a boat for Syracuse. He found the state to be beyond salvation. His friend Dion hovered on the verge of expul