Plato and Athens

Carol Atack joins me in the Lesche to discuss Plato's civic entanglements (and disenchantments) with his native Athens. Carol is the author of a new biography of Plato titled Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press 2024). The book is the second in a new series, Great Lives of the Ancient World, edited by Paul Cartledge. 

Ancient texts

• Plato: lots and lots
• Xenophon's Socratic works
• Isocrates, Against the sophists

About our guest

Carol Atack is a fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her books include Plato: A Civic Life (2024), Xenophon (Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, 2024), and The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (2019), based on her doctoral research. She has published many articles and chapters on classical Greek political thought and its modern reception, on topics ranging from free speech through utopian thought to radical contemporary readings of Greek political thought. She is currently working on a monograph on the temporality of Plato’s dialogues.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
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