I was wondering, is there any text that documents Plato during his teenage years? I mean for such an inspirational, motivational person, one would think that his whole life is documented. I think about teens now-a-days and most of the fifteen year olds I know don’t like to get into heavy conversations about much of anything… yes there are exceptions
I wonder, was Plato a geek? When all of his fifteen year old buddies wanted to go to Dionysus night, was he home 'thinking why the hell are we here? I know his mom married another guy Pyrilampes after his real dad died. And during this time after his father death he studied under Cratylus who was a student of Heracleitus. I mean what a cool time to live, Heracleitus was famous for his Cosmology and was the one who thought fire was the basic material of the universe. Damn I thought my highschool biology teacher was a drunk quack who smoked way too much pot when he was a youngster. Imagine if we had a teachers who were responsible for shaping modern thought and future dynamics of politics, law and material oneness…
First of all growing up in Plato’s time would have been very very insane. If we weren’t being drafted into the Peloponnesian War we would have been learning how to cast busts of our favorite God and drinking vino on Friday nights while shoot’in the shit about why the hell the stars move and the sun rises…
What a time of discovery…I would have loved being there, kill’in time before a big fight in the colluseum, discussing why the universe exists, having a few Gyro’s with Aristotle, it would have been great.
But the real question lies in the fact that many of our BIG name philosophers and prophets (Jesus, Buddah, Muhaamad, Plato, Socrates) to name a few don’t have much documentation about their teen years…I think the meaning of teen years is much different now than then, but hey, the whole purpose of getting through them is to become a decently functioning adult. I am 31 and can barely believe I made it through my teens. What about these guys? wasn’t there anything in their teens that profoundly affected who they became, and why they thought the way they did? Am I not digging deep enough here, or is there really not that much info on these major icons???
Oh, and for Muhammed at least, there’s writing about what his teenage years were like. I had a History instructor tell me all about it–I even took notes, but, unfortunately, tossed them after my test. IIRC, Muhammed hung out with his dad the travelling salesman (they were caravan merchants of some sort I think). He did some other stuff, too. Sorry, no cite.
Don’t take my word for all that, except that that there seems to be documentation of Muhammed’s kidhood. How accurate that documentation is, however, might be contestable . . . IANAMuslim.
Muhammad’s dad, ‘Abd Allâh, died before he was born. His mom, Âminah, died when he was six. The caravan merchant who took young Muhammad with him to Syria was his uncle, Abû Tâlib. While in Syria they met a Christian monk who foretold that the boy would grow up to be a prophet.
Of course, it would have been a bit anachronistic, as well.
Aristotle was considerably younger than Plato, and was actually a student of Plato after Socrates had died and Plato had begun his own Academy. Plato was 61 by the time the 17-year-old Aristotle showed up to study in Athens.
No one in the time/place of the Greeks, Plato or Aristotle, would have been going to see the fights at the Roman coliseum. (When Rome took over the various Greek lands, they brought their fights and coliseums with them, but that was over 200 years later than Aristotle.)
The gyro’s may have been around in those days, (lamb was), but I tend to doubt it.
Actually, Plato’s youth (or young adulthood at least) is fairly well documented, if that’s questionable.
The vast majority of his writings purport to be transcriptions of conversations held at salons frequented by Socrates – though there’s almost unanimous agreement that they are setups for conveying Plato’s own philosophical doctrines. Socrates was Plato’s teacher and he spent much of his youth at these dinner/discussions.
