“Plato and the Tyrant” with author James Romm

New Books in Politics and Polemics · Sep 13, 2025 · 54m

In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracuse, on the eastern shores of Sicily. Syracuse was ruled by a tyrant, Dionysius, who on death was followed by his son, also a tyrant. Over the course of his three separate visits to Syracuse over the years, encountering both father and son, Plato arrived at the model for tyranny laid out in The Republic. That’s the argument of James Romm’s splendid book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic…