Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece

Plato is one of history's most influential thinkers, yet the image we have of him-an ethereal figure far removed from society and politics, who conjured abstract ideas in peaceful groves-is a fiction, created by Plato's admirers and built up over centuries.



In Plato and the Tyrant, acclaimed historian and classicist James Romm draws on personal letters of Plato to show how a philosopher helped topple the leading Greek power of the era: the opulent city of Syracuse. There, Plato encountered t...