Episode 159: Plato, Syracuse and the Tyrant

A philosopher walks into a palace—no, really. This week on History For Weirdos, we follow Plato from the Academy to the armored court of Syracuse, where his friend (and insider) Dion bets that good ideas can tame bad power. Meet the Elder-and-Younger Dionysius tag team, a fortress-city built for paranoia, and a very risky plan to educate a ruler into a philosopher-king—shadowed the whole time by the (contested) Seventh Letter and its “this is how it went down” vibe.

When ideals hit palace politics, bodies hit the floor. We track Dion’s return with mercenaries, the siege of Ortygia, and the assassination that blew up the reform—then zoom out to how the fiasco re-wired Plato’s own politics, from the starry-eyed Republic to the more legalistic, “second-best” Laws. Come for the philosopher-king experiment; stay for the receipts, the betrayals, and the uncomfortable lesson about teaching power to think.

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Sources for this week:

Plutarch, Life of Dion Diodorus Siculus, Library 16 Plutarch, Life of Timoleon

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_III

https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/seventh_letter.html

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-pseudo-platonic-seventh-letter/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosopher-king

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/

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