Xenophon & Plato | History of Leaders of Thought

Hello, welcome to Kashkrov TV. My name is Kaelan Ashcroft. Thanks for watching another video on History of Leaders of Thought. Today we will be doing Xenophon and Plato. So starting off with Xenophon because as per usual he was born slightly before Plato, so obviously working in some chronological order without with a few exceptions. So he is most famous for being the general of the army of 10,000. So the army of 10,000 was a mercenary army that had a particularly in his case a large influence on the civil war in Persia and I think for example if you've seen there's many modern references to it for example I think the Unsullied are based on the army of 10,000 except the real army of 10,000 didn't have to be castrated which I would say would be a nice perk but nonetheless he was an extremely important and famous tactician he was the first to use flanking feints and attacks in depth so one of the greatest before Alexander the Great. So he was also a student of Socrates and along with Plato. Plato and Xenophon were pretty much the only two to have written on Socrates so they are the two sources of Socrates. So although we covered Socrates in a previous video actually the last video if you're watching these in order today I'll talk a little bit more about Socrates as well. Additionally he was amongst being a philosopher and a great general he was also a historian so he's very well known for firstly completing the history of the Peloponnesian war which Thucydides started which I covered in the previous video but also his recounts of the Persian civil war as well are very important among other things and his biography of Cyrus the Great, a different Cyrus. He was born in Athens but despite this he was actually a big supporter of Sparta and there are a few reasons for this firstly because at the time Athens was going through a sort of very pro-democratic movement in that a lot of powerful people were getting kicked out of the land even killed in some cases as you'll see with Socrates and he was pro-oligarchy so he thought that the people had gone too far and Sparta at the time was a very strong oligarchy and they ultimately won the Peloponnesian war so he thought they had a better government too. Similarly he was also a fan of Agesillus who I covered in Plutarch's lives as well who was a great Spartan general. He's called the Attic Muse because he wrote in very simple whereas most previous historians or philosophers wrote in a hexameter usually he wrote in simple plain Greek so it's actually for those who are looking to learn Greek it is one of the main sources for typical writing or at least typical writing of the time. He said he came from a wealthy equestrian family so meaning his family was involved with the cavalry or in some way so he was quite wealthy but probably not wealthy enough to maintain himself as an oligarch especially perhaps because the oligarchs were having such a hard time with the pro-democratic movement but at one point his friend suggests that he goes to so in Persia the king was about to be overthrown by his brother Cyrus the Younger so Cyrus the Younger recruited the army of 10,000 amongst many other generals and satraps what they're called who are like essentially local officials so Xenophon asked Socrates whether he should go and fight for the army of 10,000 and support the civil war or support the overthrowing of the king for Cyrus the Younger and Socrates says to him go speak to the oracle and when he goes to the oracle obviously the oracle of Delphi which was sort of the main religious authority sort of kind of like I would say the pope at that time in in terms of religious authority and autonomy so he goes to the oracle and asks he doesn't ask whether he should go he asked the oracle which god should he pray to so he goes back and he says to Socrates this god told me to go Socrates obviously gets very upset because he sort of deceived Socrates and didn't ask the right question but I think it's indicative of his character firstly he was ambitious he didn't want to leave it up to fate whether or not he went he wanted to go regardless so he rephrased the question and obviously sort of upset Socrates in that regards and so ultimately he went and Cyrus the Younger unfortunately lost or fortunately depending on which side you support he lost a lot of support from the Persians because many of the Persians did not support him overthrowing his brother so it ultimately resulted in pretty just the army of 10,000 against the whole Persian army and evidently they lost despite the the army of 10,000 fighting very well but Cyrus the Younger was killed in the battle so the army of 10,000 was sort of left stranded with the individual who was supposed to pay them Cyrus the Younger was dead and they had to sort of march back to Greece through some very dangerous territories so they slowly walked back through particularly Armenia and they practiced the they had the first use of well flanking during the war but also in terms of their retreat they would one particular battle they they made themselves seem super weak so as they were retreating they would not fight back they would not fight back until they got pushed and pushed and pushed until the right time and then they realized the Persians realized they were a lot stronger than they really did so they sort of faked their retreat on another occasion they were came up to a river and they were pretty much surrounded and they were worried that they would die so what what he did and it was a big sacrifice that proved to be meritorious was he killed all the cows and sheep and goats and all of their food and filled them up with hay and put them on the river and walked across them so there they were walking through ultimately to Armenia on their way back to Greece and they had to fight some many decisive battles where they were had very little food and very little supplies but they managed to make it back to Greece as the result of Xenophon's great leadership and great military tactics. Another particular the Carduchians in Turkey were also a very formidable opponent who caused a lot of or had achieved many great successful battles and were rarely ever defeated and the army of 10,000 made it back and supposedly Xenophon got this role when he was only 30 so quite a big achievement for a young individual. He wrote this book later in his life so after he sort of finishes his career as a mercenary soldier he sort of becomes a historian and he wrote this one book in particular Syropedia which is a biography of Cyrus the Great so not Cyrus the Younger the one who hired them trying to overthrow his brother and become Persian king but Cyrus the Great and basically a lot of it is considered to be pretty perhaps not true because it conflicts with Herodotus who was a more reliable historian but what it sort of shows is perhaps Xenophon's philosophy regarding politics and leadership and one of them particularly with regards to Cyrus the Great he saw that Cyrus the Great was sort of such a great leader that could almost not be replicated so he sort of saw that empires and monarchies were actually not the best so obviously despite him not supporting the democracy back in Athens and supporting the oligarchy in Sparta he wasn't exactly a supporter of monarchy or tyranny he was sort of actually somewhat in the middle so he was not really an extremist in that regards and it's one of although maybe perhaps not true it's one of the greatest pieces of writing and that is why although Herodotus might have been more to the point perhaps Xenophon better captured the objective of history which is to inspire people and that's sort of what it did and that's why for example for the longest time Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey and also Hesiod's writings were so great maybe perhaps because most of it wasn't even true they inspired people and people enjoyed reading them even for example in Xenophon he spoke of centaurs and obviously at the time a lot of writers had the like to incorporate sort of mythological figures but the concept of the centaur were that the Persian soldiers a good Persian soldier should never get off his horse so he was essentially tied to it and originally it had a sort of derogatory term but he sort of saw there was a certain pride in the centaurs so once again sort of mythological but it inspires people and made for a great read and perhaps one of the reasons why you can still read it today. So going back to his concept of democracy was this thing called homo timoi which was that equal distribution of rewards for all the victories so he thought this was sort of untrue he thought that there needed to be a sort of meritocracy so example a soldier who does great defends a lot of people or meets a lot of objectives should perhaps get more spoils and this is kind of contrary to the sort of democratic movement that was sort of establishing in Athens at the time in that everyone is deserved equal things and you later this history just keeps repeating itself keeps repeating itself pretty much any society there's either there's sort of a left wing and a right wing and this is sort of an he's kind of an early opponent to what later becomes socialism so he saw that that was not true and he thought that soldiers should get what they're due based on their merit. Here's a kind of a reference to his love for Sparta it occurred it occurred to me one day that Sparta though among the most thinly populated states was evidently the most powerful and most celebrated city in Greece and I fell to wondering how this could have happened but when I consider the institutions of the Spartans I wondered no longer so if you've seen the previous video I made it was one of the earlier ones I made so it's very short but it covers the point I believe Licurgus who was one of the first lawgivers of Sparta he sort of made these really finite institutions and it's last it lasted all the way up to Sparta's ultimate decline but he sort of saw that this these powerful institutions were necessary in order of to keep the democracy in check and he saw that it wasn't even his own state he respected it more and he really respected Agesillus who was one of the great generals there in terms of his relationship with Socrates so Socrates and Plato both were huge fans of sorry Plato and Xenophon were huge fans of Socrates they both wrote of him but Socrates's actual favorite student was Alcibiades who is covered in I cover in Plutarch's Lives and this is probably sort of an ironic feature of sort of the mentorship Xenophon and Plato were very very supportive and always pretty much agreed with Socrates on every front but it seems like Socrates seemed to have loved his most difficult student that being Alcibiades so Alcibiades was very prone to pleasure he would always party always drink he was sort of a sex addict you could call and he was always trying to hold him back but for that reason he was his favorite student it's sort of a sort of a disconnect that I think is pretty common I think it's also common in families perhaps the most difficult child or the most rebellious child is perhaps the most the most loved maybe because they they struggle the most yeah so in terms of his first meeting with Socrates apparently he was walking through the street and Socrates blocks him and he where can I find all kinds of necessary things sold and Xenophon says he gives an answer and I believe it's probably like the market or something and then he asks or sorry Xenophon is asking these questions where men make good and virtuous and Xenophon doesn't know and Socrates says to him follow me so from that point since it seemed as though Socrates was able to answer a question that Xenophon was not able to answer he followed him until his ultimate death and Plato and Xenophon were supposedly both not even at the deathbed of Socrates but they had a sort of different different take on it Xenophon sort of thought and he sort of shamed Socrates a little bit for because he thought he had a way out and he didn't do everything that was necessary of him it was he believed maybe his moral obligation to stay alive and to fight it whereas Plato sort of has no contention or just doesn't disagree with Socrates on everything and thinks everything he did was meritorious so that's a little difference but I'll get to that more in the comparison so yeah I suppose we'll move on to Plato and I'll explain this more in the comparison so obviously I have no doubt you've heard of Plato very very famous philosopher so he was the founder of the academy which was probably the first western academic institution he was Socrates is obviously famous for being one of Socrates's students but he was also the teacher of Aristotle who was maybe even the most famous philosopher of all time also in terms of further influence Neoplatonism was heavily influenced on Plutonius and Porpheus which ultimately led to Saint Augustus so it's also in the Christian religion but it's pretty much in every everything that we believe today and that's why I'll probably focus more on the things that are different from today's society than those that are similar so like similar common ethics I think you'd probably agree with and wouldn't need to be explained in too much detail and plus there's a all of Plato's or supposedly all of his writings still last to this day so this is very uncommon for someone this long ago over 2,400 years ago and pretty much since the since the day or day he first got fame until today people are still studying him to this here I am still 2,400 years later still looking into him so pretty much an unbroken following which is quite impressive so here's a quote that pretty much sums it up by Alfred North Whitehead the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato so pretty much everything comes back to Plato and in effect to Socrates it's very hard to determine what was actually Plato's ideas and what was actually Socrates because Socrates wrote nothing and Plato was sort of the one who wrote for him and maybe it was sort of this ultimate sacrifice in that he said this is not my writings these are Socrates writings that made him so great and obviously I talk a lot about the artistic component sort of doing something a little different to make it more long lasting rather than just writing a bunch of like rules which would be harder to make long lasting he was also one of the the first to sort of push forward the dialogue or dialectic approach to philosophy in which people sort of go through negative hypothesis so they deduce the right answer they don't create a hypothesis and then try to cancel the hypothesis they shut down hypothesis to hypotheses to see what can be believed so sort of a first principles approach he was in terms of his influencers obviously he's most known for being heavily influenced by Socrates but he was also very heavily influenced by Pythagoras maybe even more so also Heraclitus and Parmenides had a big influence on his philosophical discussions so he was born up from an aristocratic family and wealthy family which is probably necessary because if he was born in like a poorer class firstly it would have been hard to associate with people such as Socrates even though Socrates didn't come from a necessarily high upbringing but if he had to work in the fields all day it would have been hard for him to be sitting down thinking of all these abstract topics Diogenes Laertes who is probably he wrote the pretty much the lives of philosophers which is probably one of the greatest books of all time up there with Plutarch's lives in terms of thinkers kind of parallel to this series I would say making an effort to cover all of those lives but he says that his father was Ariston who was a descendant of a former king of Athens Codrus so maybe this is true maybe it's not maybe in hindsight sort of it's kind of like the Pareto distribution you know once somebody gets famous people start attributing everything to this oh he was a descendant of a king and all so those who have everything more will be given those have nothing more will be taken as well so his mother was Periktione who is supposedly a descendant of Solon who was a ancient law maker in Athens who I actually covered he's one of the first lives in Plutarch's lives and he was one of the early lawmakers who ultimately got rid of draconian policies which was like you know steal something lose your hands so draconic measures so obviously a good descendant but once again is it true it perhaps doesn't even really matter because yeah just I would say perhaps assume it's true and then because it just makes it a better story so apparently yeah also his mother his mother sister and niece were closely related to the 30 tyrants so following the Peloponnesian war in backlash to the the large democratic movements there was 30 tyrants who tried to take over Athens and ultimately did for a short period so he sort of had a lot of oligarchs in his sort of family and that you can kind of see in his sort of philosophy it said that his father Ariston forced himself on his wife Periktione and apparently Apollo came to him in his sleep and told him not to so maybe this is kind of saying or kind of mythol turning Plato's lives into a sort of myth where maybe he's a some kind of demigod some descendant of Plato whether it's true or not I think the real essence of this is that his father was not so kind to his mother and maybe they're trying to put a more positive spin on it but nonetheless he had two brothers and one sister most notably Glaucon who's actually an important character in many of his writings a lot of the time Socrates has discussions with Glaucon and he's sort of has a often differing opinion so obviously doesn't express his own opinion so he's sort of a necessary figure also Aedimatus who is also sometimes in his writings and his sister Pothoni or Pothon and supposedly Glaucon was older than him perhaps even his other brother perhaps these were even his uncles but I think it's mostly considered that they're his brothers but either way his name Plato often he had this nickname called Platon which is means broad so maybe he had a broad chest because he was a wrestler it said that he competed in perhaps even competed in some competitive games or maybe it was a reference to his broad forehead which is kind of alludes to one's intellect or maybe it just was a common name at the time it had no real significance but either way he was sometimes called Platon so as a student he was bright but he was also very modest so this kind of contrasts Socrates's other student Alcibiades who was in no ways modest and maybe that's why he didn't he wasn't really despite being probably Socrates's most important student not necessarily his favorite student but he was given since he was wealthy the best education he was which would have consisted of grammar music and gymnastics which ultimately led into his athletics which is kind of I think we don't really see this today I think the top intellectuals don't really see the the importance of physical activity in their daily lives whereas for these individuals one had to be sort of a polymath you got to be good at everything and you also see this also in many other great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci who also exercised enough weights and also some of the founding fathers of the United States like Benjamin Franklin would exercise and such so I think it's an important component but I also I think it's just indicative of their character that they were to put it in any other way try-hards they gave an effort at every component of life so he was perhaps a student also alongside he very much believed in Pythagorean beliefs but also Cratylus and well Cratylus was a student of Heraclitus so he sort of got into that whole dialogue which I'll talk about very soon the becoming and being which is the Parmenides Heraclitus sort of debate supposedly he was perhaps a student of Jeremiah in Egypt who was a sort of pseudobiological figure but maybe that's where he got some of his sort of mathematical predispositions so he was also very interested in mathematics but that was later opposed by some figures such as Saint Augustus but so he pretty much lived his younger life just being a good student and working very hard and then he traveled a lot he went to Italy Sicily and Egypt and he ultimately when he was older started the academy which is sort of the first school and here's a picture of it where they were sort of just sort of all just sit down in these circles and have these dialogues and debate and see you know what can be believed and sometimes it would also get very abstract and one thing in terms of politics where he did get involved was and I talked about this in the so Syracuse had a sort of a string of a lot of tyrants such as Dionysius and Dion and at one point Plato was asked to be a tutor for one of the tyrants and he almost gets killed there but he makes a good effort and it sort of shows and I think a similar thing to Socrates and kind of maybe a parallel to his teacher was that he was willing to die or put his life at risk for the for his ideals and the things he believed which is a nice thing and sort of makes him sort of above human or above just an intellectual rather than one guy who just sits around talking all day one guy someone who's willing to put their life at risk and put their ideas into action and in terms of his death he obviously wasn't killed in that conflict he narrowly escaped but he died supposedly at 81 perhaps at some wedding or having some nice Thracian girl playing flute to him so apparently he had a nice death sort of quite different from that of Socrates so as mentioned earlier he was a Pythagorean which and the Pythagorean was sort of like a cult to become a Pythagorean you had to do these certain rituals there was sort of a like a hazing period often they had to stick to a strict diet which consisted usually of no meat unless it was a certain special sacrifice meat it's not sure if Plato was actually a Pythagorean or he just had the same beliefs or had teachers who were Pythagoreans but he sort of believes in the meta psychosis that the Pythagoreans believe in where sort of there's an eternal soul and reincarnation which was a very common Pythagorean belief but also in terms of his beliefs in mathematics he thought that very much like the Pythagoreans that numbers were sort of the foundation of the universe but there's also two components of mathematics and Plato is actually one of the first to really divide it there's the arithmetic sort of component which is like one plus one is two but then there's also numerology which is like numbers have a certain meaning and represent certain objects and to kind of expand on this he has these are the the four major elements there's earth water air fire and then there's the fifth element which I'll talk about in a sec but each of these elements are associated with a shape so the earth is associated with the cube the air is associated with the octahedron water is associated with the icosahedron and fire is associated with the tetrahedron and then there's sort of a fifth element which is not sort of of this earth which is the dodecahedron and that's sort of the heavens sort of so that in terms of numerology each sort of physical thing or numbers have a meaning beyond just their mathematical or arithmetic usage so in terms of his discussion with Heraclitus and Parmenides as you might have seen in the previous videos Heraclitus believed that for example one never steps in the same river twice because everything is changing and becoming is change is inevitable change is the only real truth and nothing really exists everything is in constant influx constant change whereas Parmenides completely disagreed and said that there is no such thing as change all that exists is what is here and change cannot be proven so Plato sort of took his own take on this and sort of I would say kind of he definitely disagreed with Parmenides in saying that motion does exist so he disagreed with Parmenides in that but he saw that motion and rest both exist so he saw that Heraclitus wasn't necessarily wrong but he was wrong in that things do exist and to that there's sort of every object has its there's the apparent world which one perceives through their senses and then there's the unchanging and unseen world which is sort of like abstractions so this I think is like a good way to explain it is like for example there's rock or a rock doesn't really exist because rock is every rock is different but there's rockness there is the category of rock there is hard there is descriptions which are sort of unseen but abstract terms which one cannot observe through their senses other things that this applies to is justice truth and beauty but also colors like there is rock is red perhaps it would be a strange rock but rocks can be red I suppose rock red rock hard hardness redness so there's the unseen world and the abstract and he thought to get true wisdom one has to sort of not completely ignore their senses and try to learn as much as possible try to think and the knowing in terms of epistemology the only thing one can know is to get rid of their senses and just to learn more and this sort of leads into the Socratic irony in that Socrates was considered the smartest person in the world but he said that he knew less than anyone so the more you know the less you know which is sort of a sort of a paradox in one sense that's called the further the uther pyro dilemma so he has this I think it's an important sort of paradox is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is the pious pious because it is loved by the gods so this is kind of a question of morality is is good sort of within or is good given to you by god and it's sort of it's impossible to prove but these are sort of questions that are discussed in many of his dialogues and sort of get one to think sort of up at one's existence in terms of his politics as I mentioned earlier I think probably the first book on philosophy I ever read was Machiavelli's the prince which isn't even I guess it would be called philosophy it's more political philosophy but the next book which was also similarly drawn was Plato's Republic which was a fantastic book I would recommend to anyone especially if you are sort of newer to philosophy and it would sort of fit good context to observe further philosophers especially considering when it was made but some of the things he hypothesized so similar to Xenophon and Socrates he thought that the democracy was dangerous and he thought all democracies would eventually crumble into tyranny because unless there is some sort of divide between the those with power and those without people will seek power infinitely and eventually cause destruction and this is a very Thomas Hobbes he read Leviathan he believed that too he thought that the for example the monarch had to be separate from the state because if the monarch is not existent or not separate from the state greed would take over and eventually there will be a tyrant who just wants more and more power there needs to be something separate so he believed that there should be or sorry going back to Plato Plato believed there should be three classes there is the productive class the workers the protective class the guardians and the governing class the philosophical kings and these are represented by the three abstractions which is appetite which is the workers spirit which is the guardians and reason which is the philosophical kings so going back to sort of his contrast with democracy he thought that one of the problems with voting for people for example is that rhetoric and persuasion could lead someone to rule when really it should be reason it could be the deaf blind person who has a lisp who might actually be the best person to be king the best person be philosophical king so that's why one good i think a pretty valid issue he has with democracy and also in terms of the philosophical king he thought that the king has to be the come from the guardian class but they have to be trained in a certain way and they have to be trained from a youth it's very hard to develop the skills to be a leader later so he's sort of hypothesizing that if one's like a worker their whole class their whole life especially during their particularly important developmental years their capacity to be a king or a good king is very difficult and that's another thing that he really talks about in republic how should each of these classes be brought up so for example the philosophical kings at first he's like is it fair if the philosophical kings live a life of luxury and get all the food they want and he actually argues yes because if the philosophical kings are deprived of money or deprived of anything they will become greedy so they sort of have to have everything to begin with but also he even gets so far and i mentioned this earlier and something i also say don't believe everything a philosopher says he also believed heavily in the censorship so he thought that even homer and hesiod who were sort of they were almost like wrote the bibles at the time because those were the most important stories he thought that those should be censored because although there were many great lessons that could be learned in those they were not perfect and they they could be interpreted wrong so he thought that he thought that music he thought that literature and everything should be censored to optimize the state and not entirely untrue but i think i used this example in the video to be blind of evil is worse than to have the evil so for example if people only listened to great and glorious music and whatnot and they never read about evil which is does exist in great literature they will be blind to it and when it does happen which is almost inevitable they will not know how to deal with it so in this regard i do disagree with plato and also i think grounds of censoring any sort of art just to be cruel or unethical and obviously for his state it would be a great state with with a warrior guardian class the worker class and the leader class it would be very functional and perhaps it would even ultimately end up conquering other states like another state that doesn't have censorship or doesn't have these distinct classes ultimately maybe it would be destroyed by this state so maybe maybe i'm wrong and this is the ideal state but i think it's firstly censoring music and art is unethical i think it's people need to express these things and i think to hide any sort of evil from people would put society at greater risk and yeah so lastly one other reason why he didn't like homer and hesiod was that he believed more in logic rather than myth and that was one of the main divergences we saw through history and that's why hesiod and homer i didn't include in this because they sort of they were great writers but i'm not really trying to talk about artists here or like tolstoy is i would include dostoevsky because he's kind of more of a psychological psychologist but i wouldn't necessarily include tolstoy maybe i will include tolstoy but tolstoy is more of an artist than a philosopher but we'll see that's still many videos in the future so one last thing i want to talk about is the ring of gigis or geiges so this is a ring that supposedly allows an individual to become invisible so his brother glocon asks him if there was a ring that made one invisible would an intelligent person have it in them to not use it or not to abuse it and this is i think well this is exactly the ring that is later used in lord of the rings so ultimately player's response is yes like most people would use it for evil but to achieve real happiness one has to control their temptations so if one took the ring and just went and stole a bunch of food i don't know did all kinds of cruel things that would be they would be out of control of true happiness is in moderation and in control of their senses so it is possible to be good and interestingly enough in for example lord of the rings gandalf does not refuses to put the ring because he's not strong enough but i think frodo and one of the main lessons in the in the lord of the rings is that one can control their temptation and one can wear the ring and still come out of it alive even though it might be very difficult and that is sort of a very optimist view of society and that there is even like for if this ring does exist maybe not everyone but there are good people out there and the good will and can overcome the evil because happiness is contingent on it if one the one who puts on the ring and does all kinds of cruelty they will be satisfied perhaps but they won't be happy that is what plato hypothesized and that is what and happiness is derived from controlling one's satisfactions therefore there is good in society so yeah that is xenophon and plato uh in terms of comparison so once again xenophon sort of was a little bit more harsh on his teacher socrates he thought that socrates um sort of did the wrong thing in whereas plato sort of believed in everything that um socrates said uh in terms of one of the major differences is that xenophon sort of wrote a little bit more myth you know he wrote about centaurs whereas plato sort of um said not only no myths he said not no literature uh or well some literature but um he thought that he would have probably seen xenophon's writing to be um necessary to be censored because even though maybe 90 of it might have been good and ethical there might be one thing that could be interpreted wrong and that should not be allowed in the state so quite a difference there and additionally um some of the more obvious things xenophon was more of a soldier uh he was a great tactician whereas plato despite being an athlete he never really um fought in too many wars he did get involved in the syracuse tyranny but yeah in terms also similarly they both were not or did oppose the the democratic movement in athens perhaps maybe to a lesser degree plato but xenophon had said that maybe he wasn't um he wasn't an extremist and opposing democracy he was sort of um just kind of a moderate opposition so um yeah that is xenophon and plato i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope you might watch some of the ones i will make in the future and if you haven't seen any of the previous ones i hope you watch them too thanks so much bye