The Patriotic Platonism of Demosthenes

It is often said that “history is written by the victors.” Actual historians and students of history know that this is simply untrue. Among the most famous ancient writers were the losers of history: Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, and Demosthenes. Demosthenes was the great Athenian statesman and patriot who defied the coming hegemony of Macedon—rallying the Athenians to one last glorious defeat as the armies of Philip, then Alexander, conquered much of the ancient world. This action by Demosthenes, however, has caused many to assert that he was not a student of Plato even though the ancient sources indicate he was. The reader might ask here, why does this matter, why does it matter if Demosthenes was or wasn’t a student of Plato’s Academy?

The place of Demosthenes as a student of Plato is part in the larger scholarly debates over Plato himself. The crude anti-Plato mentality holds that since Plato was an opponent of Athens (very poorly argued on numerous technical grounds that fail to realize that Plato was principally concerned with justice (dikaiosynē) and that he actually articulates a subtle endorsement of “democracy” instead of tyranny), Demosthenes could not be one of Plato’s students given his patriotism and defense of Athens. Carrying this presupposition forward, Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, endorsed the coming Macedonian Empire. Therefore, no student of Plato would have been a patriotic defender of Athens. In fact, philosophers going back to Thales had always been favorable toward a world polity instead of the independent collection of city-states. Demosthenes, therefore, is an outlier all his own. Subsequent ancient sources claimed Demosthenes as a student of Plato’s Academy in the Platonic political turn.

William Altman, however, brilliantly deconstructs the limitations of this view. As Altman notes in his introduction, “Since the modern consensus depends on the view that Demosthenes was not Plato’s student, moderns who take the question seriously must explain why some ancients fabricated evidence for a connection that had in truth never existed. But it is far easier for a defender of the ancient view to show how this same evidence was rather suppressed than fabricated.” More than that, Altman also highlights how shoddy modern scholarship, beginning in the late nineteenth century in Germany, depends on its own twisted and contorted logic and suppressions to divorce Demosthenes from Plato and, in doing so, preserve a Platonic Academy favorable toward a world state even though most of Plato’s students (with a few exceptions) put their lives, property, and sacred honor on the line in defense of Athens. Many would die in the defense of Athens against world state imperialism. The argument that Plato’s students didn’t defend democratic Athens is not substantiated by the historical record but that doesn’t stop the story of the philosophers being proponents of a world-state from twisting the record.

So again, why does this matter? As regards Plato, it returns us to the political-theologico question and whether Plato and Platonism are best understood as a political philosophy with this world implications or if it is a primarily speculative and contemplative philosophy concerned with metaphysics and epistemology, cosmology and mysticism, as later Neoplatonic and Christian makeovers have given it. As it relates to Demosthenes, it can confirm historical reality (whether Demosthenes was a student of Plato or not) and help us better understand the historical Demosthenes while affirming or dispensing with a large body of secondary scholarship revolving around the dispute of the Teacher-Student relationship. Lastly, the reunification (or the continued separation) of Plato and Demosthenes has political wisdom for us today who are living through another period of political conflagration, changing geopolitical dynamics, and a contest between eroding liberty and democratic politics on one side with autocratic, imperial, and increasingly unjust politics on the other. The very origin of political philosophy was at the heart of this perennial problem. To put it another way: Is (political) philosophy the handmaiden of a politics of justice, liberty, and democracy or the backroom tutor for totalitarianism with its imperial, world-state, aspirations? Recovering the Old Academy in its original form would definitively prove the former rather than the latter even if the “New” Academy, if we can call it that, has taken the exact opposite track.

Plato and Demosthenes, therefore, not only probes and reveals the limitations of the scholarly positions of Arnold Schaefer, Jacob Bernays, and their contemporary heirs, it gives us a reconstruction of what the Old Academy was like and what Plato’s principal task to his students was. “It was in the Academy,” Altman writes, “that Plato was training his students to practice virtue, and he did so by having them study his dialogues.” Demosthenes, of course, becomes exhibit A in have internalized Plato’s purpose and living out that life of virtue in commitment to justice and liberty (the two are intertwined) against the encroachment of imperial tyranny and the injustice that would necessarily be inflicted upon Athens as a result of Macedonian hegemony.

Since “the Academy’s original purpose was to promote, on a philosophical basis, the traditional values of civic obligation and Socratic courage in the face of death,” it is unsurprising that once we accept the ancient view that Demosthenes was a student of Plato that Demosthenes’s speeches are filled with Platonic echoes and rhetorical allusions. The speeches of Demosthenes are thoroughly Platonic, calls for personal virtue and the defense of the common good instead of embracing a life of “pleasure, flattery, and self-seeking” dot the landscape of Demosthenes’s most famous speeches. Modern scholars, so corrupted by the misinterpretations of Plato by nineteenth century German philhellenes, can only see Plato through the lens of philosophy vs. rhetoric (the sophists). Therefore, Demosthenes’s rhetoric—despite its Platonic themes and allusions—must necessarily put him in the anti-philosophical and pro-rhetoric camp that it becomes impossible to accept the possibility that Demosthenes was a student of Plato. Altman’s brilliant book thoroughly deconstructs the modern phantasmagoria and restores Demosthenes to his rightful place, recognized by many of the ancients, like Cicero (another Platonic hero), as among Plato’s most brilliant students.

This returns us to that question we’ve already been asking: why is this important? It is important because of the political implications both to Plato and to any conception of Platonic political philosophy—a virtuous idealism standing over and against a cutthroat realism that now permeates Western politics in the aftermath of Machiavelli. By presenting the strong case of Demosthenes having been one of Plato’s students and having shown that the Platonic Academic program was, for a lack of a better term, the promotion of Platonic Patriotism, Altman recovers Plato from the terrible interpreters (most famous of them by Karl Popper) who considered Plato to be a proto-fascist and intellectually sympathetic for imperial tyranny. If so, Altman implies, why did the most famous political Platonic students of antiquity all die in defense of ancient democracy and republicanism (including Cicero) against encroaching totalitarian imperialism? Plato’s commitment to virtue and justice in his dialogues makes him a friend of liberty—not the propagandized conception of freedom we have today where abracadabra words like democracy and freedom which are wielded in a new sophistry to demean anyone deemed outside the democratic cathedral (meaning everyone not part of the progressive left in contemporary politics)—but a liberty where freedom and justice are integrally related to each other.

How, then, the reader might ask, did Demosthenes become detached from Plato? After Macedon defeated the Greek city-states the fact that Demosthenes and other patriots were students of the Academy brought negative attention that could ruin the Academy under its new masters. Explaining the “suppression” thesis, Altman explains, “The hypothesis on offer here is that it was because Philip discovered that Demosthenes had been Plato’s student after his myth-based speech in Pella that Speusippus now needed to use an alternative and Macedonian-friendly account of the founding of the Amphipolis in order to regain the king’s sympathy for the Academy, or rather, for him.” Given the extensive reconstruction of the evidence for a patriotic, anti-Macedonian, Academy to which Demosthenes belonged and was a faithful student of Altman’s explanation for the eventual suppression and divorce of Demosthenes from Plato makes far more sense than the modern view that Demosthenes was never one of Plato’s students.

Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy is surely to be a work that all scholars and students regarding the question of Demosthenes’s education, the intent and purpose of Plato’s Academy, and the implications of political Platonism must consult. Altman mounts a vigorous and convincing defense of the traditional, old, view. It also is, in a more indirect way, a good defense of the real Plato as committed to justice and liberty instead of the post-1945 corruption of Plato as some sort of proto-fascist. Finally, the book also raises deep questions we must ponder today in light of democratic backsliding, the erosion of liberty and justice within our societies, and whether the proliferation of relativism (the real impetus for all tyranny to emerge) can be checked by a few noble souls or if a broader societal revival to personal virtue and the common good is needed for the safeguarding of democratic institutions and the liberty and justice they promise.

Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy
By William H.F. Altman
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022; 280pp

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