It is difficult for me to critique Plato and the Tyrant with any kind of objectivity, since it's approach is essentially antithetical to the way I was trained to read Plato. The closest the book comes to any kind of argument is espousing ideas that The Republic was written about Syracuse, that Plato had specific tyrants and cities in mind whom he knew and had dealings with, and that his philosophical positions were altered and defined by Syracusan political shenanigans due to his entanglements with those people. If you were to present me with that kind of project 10 years ago, I would probably find the idea intolerably boring and dismiss it out of hand. I do not care what literal caves this classicist thinks Plato had in mind when writing the allegory of the cave.

But! I am older now, more historically-minded and sympathetic to these kinds of projects. There's lots of excellent tidbits of history here which of course I didn't know, and they are presented wonderfully accessibly. All in all this work consists of well researched summary and interweave; a conglomeration of contemporary sources describing Plato's visits to Syracuse and his writings. It doesn't make many claims about political theory or philosophy, mostly sticking to historical narrative and arguments for or against (mostly for) Plato's authorship of his letters. Even these textual claims are infrequent and fairly surface-level. This is a book for the general reader; it's main job is to spread the stories written by Plutarch and the like, corroborated with supporting evidence, of course.

One gets the sense that it would be more interesting to simply read the works Romm summarizes, but that would take longer and be more difficult than this handy one-volume exposition. You can't really fault a historian for presenting a robust bibliography at any rate. I suspect Plato and the Tyrant is suitable either for people who won't read much history or philosophy, but want to feel knowledgeable about it, or for serious students looking for a starting-place for decent sources and prevailing academic myths. I would like to think of myself as neither of these, but it would be a lie to claim I didn't enjoy reading Plato and the Tyrant, or that I didn't learn anything from it.

Plato and the Tyrant

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