The master and its trade

Abstract

One afternoon, almost 2,400 years ago, the most famous conference of antiquity took place in Athens.

The lecturer was Aristocles, better known as Plato, and the exhibition was about the Good or, in terms that perhaps are considered more platonic today, the Good.

The story should not be taken at face value because it comes from Aristóxeno, of whom a certain antipathy towards Plato is known, not to mention his manifest taste for gossip and slander.

Be that as it may, it seems that in the place of the conference the cream of the Athenian intelligentsia was gathered. The students of the Academy attended and, naturally, the main disciples of Plato. There were Xenocrates, who would write a play about the teacher's life; Espeusipo, his nephew and successor in the direction of the Academy, Heráclides Póntico, the atomist and cosmologist and, of course, the faithful Aristotle.