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Ladies and gentlemen, today I'm standing up for Plato.

So Plato is, of course, one of the great philosophers of all time.

He was born in the last third of the 5th century BCE, sometime to about 428 to 423 BCE.

He's born to a very good family, very well-connected political family. And like all great men,

events of his childhood take on a sort of omen quality after the fact, right? Ordinary things happening take on a sort of,men quality after the fact, right?

Ordinary things happening take on a sort of,

ooh, predicting the future kind of quality.

In the case of Plato, we're told by Cicero,

who's writing several hundred years later,

that a swarm of bees,

I'm so afraid of bees,

I can barely tell you this story without retching.

I just can't emphasize this enough. A swarm of bees lands I can barely tell you this story without retching. I just can't emphasize

this enough. A swarm of bees lands on his mouth. And this predicts, not, as you would assume,

a perfectly valid lifelong fear of bees, but rather that he'll have this sort of beautiful

honey eloquence

so have this beautiful capacity for sweet rhetoric

which is of course absolutely true

it's not the only animal that we have in connection with Plato

he is also compared by one of his unfavourable contemporaries

a man named Antistthenes he says he says Plato is exactly like a frisky horse.

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