Alexandros Mistiriotis The Seventh Letter, or The Disappointed Plato

How does one of the greatest philosophers in history choose to narrate his own life? Plato stands on stage and addresses us. Through the voice of a narrator, he returns as both an enigma and a spectre, breaking the fourth wall and collapsing the distance that separates us from him – and from the politically unstable world he inhabited.  

In truth, we know remarkably little about Socrates’ student beyond his canonical dialogues. Four years before his death, Plato wrote the Seventh Letter – a kind of apologia for his life and work – addressed as both epistle and testament to the family of Dion of Syracuse, following the assassination of his dear friend. It is from this text that Alexandros Mistriotis embarks, approaching a Plato who is disarmingly human and confessional, in a performance that privileges lived experience over philosophy – a life about which we possess scarce certainties. The work unfolds through the narrator’s voice, summoning Plato to shed the many masks that populate his dialogues and to speak to us in his own person. We hear him recount his youth, including his ill-fated attempt to intervene in the political life of Syracuse. We witness him, even in early adulthood, recognising that Athens and the wider Greek world had reached a political impasse – and understanding that this very disillusionment would lead him toward philosophy.  

Yet at the end of this path, no longed-for resolution or reconciliation awaits him. Outside the edifice of his work, Plato arrives not at triumph but at perplexity. He is no longer the great sage or omniscient thinker, nor the figure who decisively shaped the course of Western philosophy. He is, rather, an ageing man – yet uncannily contemporary – who answers the narrator’s call, called forth from the ruins of history to sound out the tremors of our own unstable age. Through the telling of his life, he ultimately invites us to accompany him to the far shore of his life, where the search for virtue and truth refracts through every word he utters.