Plato (Aflatun)

Plato, a Greek sage. Al-Mas'udi relates that on the stone threshold of the gate of the Sabian assembly at Harran, there was written in Syriac: "Whoever knows himself becomes divine." Also written there is that the human being is a heavenly plant, like an inverted tree whose root is in the heavens. ²

Al-Mas'udi attributes to some people the claim that the soul is a substance that is not a body, living, knowing and governing bodies, and that its death is its passing from one body to another. ²

Ibn al-Nadim, citing the book of Plutarch, says his name was Plato, son of Arsatn, and that his father was called Isthun and was one of the Greek notables. In his early years he inclined to poetry, then attended the session of Socrates and left it, and then moved to the saying of Pythagoras. Aristotle took from him. ³

The source differs on his age: it is said he was eighty-one years old, and in Ishaq's report, eighty. ³

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) treats Aflatun, Arabic for Plato, as the standard philosopher of late Greek thought alongside Aristotle, in three parts: works and doctrine, lives, and sayings. Arab authors knew Plato through the Greek sections of the Roman empire. Most Arab thinkers subordinated him to Aristotle, but they recognised a common purpose between the two, and read Plato through the Neoplatonists, Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. Galen's summary of the Timaeus reached the Arabs through Hunayn b. Ishaq, and the systematic arrangement of the dialogues was used and partly reproduced by al-Farabi. Al-Kindi's psychology and al-Razi's Platonising ethics drew on Plato's tradition, and al-Suhrawardi's interpretation of the Platonic Ideas was reworked in a later anonymous treatise. ⁴

The Arabic bibliographers list all the dialogues of the Greek corpus, but no Arabic translation of a dialogue has been traced; Plato was also made the author of alchemical and magical works, such as the Rawabi Aflatun and the Liber Platonis de XIII clavibus. The Arabic lives of Plato add little to the Greek tradition (Diogenes Laertius, Olympiodorus, the anonymous Prolegomena). Their chief sources were Theo of Smyrna, Mubashshir b. Fatik's Mukhtar al-hikam, and Ibn al-Qifti, who also records Plato's supposed stay in Egypt. The principal collection of his sayings is Hunayn's Nawadir al-falasifa, with Ibn Hindu's al-Kalim al-ruhaniyya. ⁵