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Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's best selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corthon.

In today's episode, you'll be hearing from Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College London.

I hope we're discussing the lost city of Atlantis.

Professor Hall's specialism is Ancient Greek literature and she's published 30 books on topics ranging from Aristotle to Ancient Slavery.

Professor Hall was joined by our digital editor, Emma Mason.

So Professor Hall, perhaps we could take us right back to the beginning.

Remind us who was Plato and what exactly was he known for?

Plato was the first really important philosopher in Ancient Greece to write things down.

He was actually Socrates pupil and he learned a very great deal about what Socrates, who was a great philosopher, had said but Socrates didn't leave us any writings.

So Plato is the main conduit through whom we get all the secratic teaching.

He's born in about 4 to 8 BC and lived to a very great age of then of 80.

He's said to have been born and died on the same day of the year, exactly 8 years later, into an extremely rich and aristocratic Athenian family, who were all historically what we would call sort of on the right wing politically.

Some of them were military men, so he would have had a very good education. They owned a great estate about 5 miles northeast of Athens, city centre where he may well have actually been born on the estate or somewhere around it.

He was of quite a large family, he had at least one sister who was married to another man interested in philosophy and he had two brothers who well he had three but two who survived two adulthood.

And he was very close to them.

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