Of course, Plato did not kill Socrates -- at least not physically.

We know the story of Socrates' end: his trial, his self-defense (recorded in The Apology by Plato), and his execution by drinking hemlock while being surrounded by his students.

Note: This post is largely inspired by Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, a book I had the pleasure of reading after stumbling upon it by chance in a second-hand store. Lucky me!

Plato was around 28 years old when his teacher, Socrates, was sentenced to death. Roughly 25 years later, he wrote The Republic, perhaps the most influential work of political philosophy ever produced.

Although written as a series of dialogues featuring Socrates, The Republic is not a historical record. The conversations never took place. Plato uses Socrates as a literary character to present his philosophical ideas.

That distinction matters.

The historical Socrates is remembered as someone who questioned everything -- including his own beliefs. He claimed that his wisdom consisted in knowing that he knew nothing (after the Delphic oracle proclaimed him the wisest of men, Socrates didn't believe her and set out to prove her wrong by finding someone wiser than himself! Instead, he found that those regarded as wise were often the least aware of their own ignorance, a fault that Socrates didn't have). He was known to challenge assumptions wherever he found them and treated philosophy as a conversation rather than a doctrine.

Ancient sources also portray him as egalitarian for his time, arguing that education should not be reserved for a privileged few. In Plato's Meno (written around a decade before The Republic), we arguably get a better look at the "real" Socrates, who tries teaching a young slave a version of the Pythagorean theorem to prove that even an uneducated slave can grasp abstract problems!

The Socrates of The Republic is strikingly different.

There, "Socrates" argues for a rigidly stratified society divided into permanent classes. Plato proposes natural rulers, natural auxiliaries, and producers, each assigned their place in society. Crossing these class boundaries is not merely discouraged, it is treated as one of the gravest injustices against the city!

Education is tightly controlled by the rulers. Oh and, by the way, the working class -- the vast majority of the population -- is denied education entirely! Meaning that education is reserved only for those who have the right (by being born to the right class, of course) to receive it. The cherry on top is that this ideal state is governed by philosopher-kings -- individuals supposedly capable of knowing what is objectively best for everyone else.

What happened to the Socrates we know?

A man who built his life around questioning certainty is made to defend rulers who possess it. A philosopher remembered for intellectual humility becomes the advocate of political certainty. A figure associated with open inquiry is transformed into the spokesman for an ideal state whose stability depends on strict social hierarchy and centralized authority.

It is well known that Socrates criticized Athenian democracy. That alone, however, does not make him an enemy of democracy. Socrates questioned nearly every assumption presented to him, whether political, moral, or philosophical. It is therefore difficult to imagine him accepting any form of government uncritically. We cannot know his political beliefs with certainty. But I would venture to guess that even if Socrates lived under an authoritarian regime, he would've also critiqued it (given that he wasn't executed immediately for it).

The "Socrates" of The Republic, by contrast, speaks with a confidence and political certainty that seem difficult to reconcile with that character.

Here I borrow an excerpt from Popper:

"The Platonic 'Socrates' of the Republic is the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism. (Even his self-deprecating remarks are not based upon awareness of his limitations, but are rather an ironical way of asserting his superiority.) His educational aim is not the awakening of self-criticism and of critical thought in general. It is, rather, indoctrination -- the moulding of minds and of souls which (to repeat a quotation from the Laws) are 'to become, by long habit, utterly incapable of doing anything at all independently'. And Socrates' great equalitarian and liberating idea that it is possible to reason with a slave, and that there is an intellectual link between man and man, a medium of universal understanding, namely, 'reason', this idea is replaced by a demand for an educational monopoly of the ruling class, coupled with the strictest censorship, even of oral debates."

Even Plato's idea of philosopher-kings stands in stark contrast to Socrates's beliefs. Instead of a humble seeker of truth (philosopher -- "lover of wisdom"), we have a proud possessor of truth, who approaches both omniscience and omnipotence. Popper put it best:

"It is hard, I think, to conceive a greater contrast than that between the Socratic and the Platonic ideal of a philosopher. It is the contrast between two worlds -- the world of a modest, rational individualist and that of a totalitarian demi-god."

This is why I say that Plato "killed" Socrates.

Not by ending his life, but by giving his own political philosophy the voice of the man least likely to have spoken it.

Whether Plato sincerely believed Socrates would have agreed is impossible to know. What is clear is that, for over two thousand years, many readers have encountered Plato's ideas through the character of Socrates, often without separating the historical philosopher from Plato's fictional spokesman.

In that sense, Plato's greatest literary achievement may also have been his greatest injustice to his teacher.