Harris, Jonathan (2005) Plato, Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance. Scottish Association of Teachers of History: History Teaching Review Year Book, 19
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The ideas of Plato (429-347 BC) have exerted such an abiding influence on western philosophy and political thought that it is easy to forget that for many centuries, between about 500 and 1400, his works were almost unknown in western Europe. This was partly because very few people in Medieval Europe knew enough Greek to read Plato and even if they had, copies of the Dialogues were almost impossible to obtain, with only the Timaeus available in Latin translation. Scholars were therefore largely dependent on earlier Latin authors such as Cicero and St Augustine for a second-hand knowledge of Plato's ideas. It was the rediscovery of the Dialogues in the original during the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century that set western thought off on new paths, a rediscovery that was made possible by the preservation and transmission of Plato's work by scholars in Byzantium.
This is a Submitted version This version's date is: 2005 This item is not peer reviewed
https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/dbac19c8-da38-5f27-88b0-d37d92fbfd58/2/
Deposited by Research Information System (atira) on 24-May-2012 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 24-May-2012
This article first appeared in Scottish Association of Teachers of History: History Teaching Review Year Book 19 (2005), 11-16. The author thanks the editors for their kind permission to reproduce this article here.