How Plato turned his friend into a martyr for truth

4 min readAug 21, 2025

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Plato did something utterly audacious and totally successful: he turned Socrates, a barefoot weirdo who mostly annoyed people in the Athenian marketplace, into the intellectual world’s Jesus. A martyr for truth. A saint of dialectic. A crucified questioner. Only, instead of getting nailed to a cross, Socrates got handed a cup of hemlock, and unlike Jesus, he had the good sense not to come back.

But this was not the Socrates of historical record. Plato took a real, stubborn, charismatic gadfly and made him divine. He sculpted Socrates into an ideal: the philosopher-hero, the martyr for the polis, the guy who dies for the greater good, but also the guy who wins every argument in the room, even while sweating in the Athenian sun. This wasn’t just hagiography. It was strategy. Plato didn’t want you to follow Socrates as a man. He wanted you to follow Socratic method as religion.

In the process, he created a new cult for the mind: philosophy not as a set of teachings, but as a way of life, complete with its own origin story, prophet, and trials. Move over Homer, move over Orpheus, Socrates was now the tragic founder of the Reason Church.

And yet, even as Plato sanctified Socrates, he made him into a kind of clown, a trickster whose relentless questioning was often indistinguishable from trolling. He stylized Socrates as the world’s most annoying dinner guest, who asks what justice is and then laughs when nobody gets it “right.” It’s funny until you realize that he never really answers anything himself either, like the guy who critiques everyone’s PowerPoint but never submits slides. Socrates becomes the ultimate Socratic irony: simultaneously a holy man and a smug, passive-aggressive nightmare.

Sophists, Straw Men, and Thucydides’ Revenge

In doing all this, Plato also needed a villain. Enter: the Sophists. The original consultants. Wandering experts who taught skills-for-hire like rhetoric, persuasion, and law. These guys were the ancient world’s TED talkers, charging fees to teach impressionable youth how to win arguments, make money, and maybe lead a city-state or two. Plato hated them.

And so he wrote them into his dialogues as dolts, frauds, and moral degenerates. Never mind that thinkers like Protagoras and Gorgias were exploring deep epistemological questions, or that Thucydides, yes, the Thucydides, was basically doing empirical political science with far more realism than Plato ever stomached. Plato lumped them all into one big Sophist piñata and beat it with his stylus.

But why? Because the Sophists believed that skill, *techne, *was enough. Plato didn’t. To him, the Good wasn’t a skillset. It was a form, an ideal, a transcendental beam of truth that only philosopher-kings could perceive. Goodness wasn’t being a great orator or a smart lawyer. It was aligning your soul with the harmony of the cosmos, man.

And here lies the core of Plato’s political vision: that justice is not the sum of individual competencies, but the arrangement of society toward the flourishing of the whole. No private excellence, however technically brilliant, justifies harming the communal balance. If that sounds a bit ominous, that’s because it is. It’s also why Plato’s Republic reads like a wellness cult run by an AI obsessed with music theory.

The Philosopher’s Republic of Paradox

So let’s recap. Plato turned:

• A man who never wrote a word into the author of Western philosophy.
• A professional irritant into a holy martyr.
• An anti-systemic Socratic method into a tool for designing authoritarian utopias.
• A mistrust of rhetoric into the most rhetorically artful writing in Greek history.

All while denouncing Sophists for being too clever.

Plato is a paradox merchant, hawking contradictions like eternal truths. He calls for harmony while outlawing poetry. He elevates philosophy as open inquiry, then ends every dialogue with one side utterly crushed. He glorifies the Good while shoving it behind a veil of abstraction so thick it may as well be God hiding behind algebra.

And yet, we still read him. Not because he solved the contradictions. But because he was the contradictions. A poet who distrusted poets. A mystic who loved math. A dramatist who wrote political science. A totalitarian with impeccable taste.

He gave us a Socrates who was both a Christ and a court jester. And in doing so, Plato ensured that philosophy would never again be just a trade. It would be a calling. A performance. A fight. A farce. A faith.

And if you’re not confused by that, you’re probably doing it wrong.