A newly deciphered scroll from Herculaneum reveals a feverish old man on his deathbed in Athens, criticizing a Thracian flute player for her poor sense of rhythm. That man was Plato, and this episode strips away the marble-statue image to follow the dramatic life behind Western philosophy's foundational thinker: an aristocratic kid nicknamed for his broad shoulders, a would-be playwright who burned his poetry after meeting Socrates, and a young man who watched both the Thirty Tyrants and the restored democracy fail catastrophically.

The hosts trace his years of travel, including a possible period of enslavement on Aegina, his encounters with the ideas of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans, and the synthesis that became the theory of forms. They cover his disastrous attempts to tutor Dionysius II of Syracuse, where he was effective ...