Contrary to many people’s perception of him, Plato did not spend his entire life listening to Socrates philosophising in colonnades in Athens or writing dialogues meandering through complex ideas. He was once captured in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and put up for sale in a slave market....The enslavement allegedly occurred while Plato was travelling home from Sicily in 384 BC. A number of ancient biographers claim that the philosopher boarded a ship with a Spartan who enslaved him on the orders of the tyrant of Syracuse, but Plato’s new biographer, Robin Waterfield, suggests it’s more likely that he was on board a merchant ship which caught the eye of pirates. The seas were full of marauders in this period and it is entirely possible that Plato sailed into treacherous waters. His luck changed after he was spotted in the market by an admirer who agreed to pay a ransom to secure his release.Plato never mentioned any of this in his own writings, but then he rarely wrote about himself at all... Waterfield is reluctant to dismiss the episode of Plato’s capture as pure fallacy because the circumstances are credible and the chronology seems to fit with what we know of his movements.
Well, the story certainly isn't a fallacy because a fallacy is an error in logic, not an error of fact. That is on the reviewer, though, not the author. The author sounds like he's done a creditable job at constructing a history of Plato, which is a task well worth doing even if it is not always as exciting as the stories about Plato.
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"It's all in Plato. What DO they teach them at these schools?" -- Digory Kirke.
One word of caution. If a historian named Michael Grant is correct biography was considered a thing apart from history. It was believed that biographers weren't above just making stuff up for the sake of keeping things interesting and some of the biographies I read, particularly one of Alexander the Great, did make me think that those who believed that might have a point.
That's a worthy concern. The review sounds like the author was careful not to do that, but I've definitely read some biographies that do.
On the other hand, I've also read some histories that were inclined to Procrustean tactics in order to make the facts fit the narrative they preferred. Especially Marxists, but not only Marxists, are inclined to that.
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