Birth and familyPlato's exact birth date is unknown. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars estimate that he was born in Athens or Aegina[b] between 428 and 427 BC[a] His father was Ariston. According to a controversial tradition, reported by Diogenes Laertius, Ariston traced his lineage back to the king of Athens, Codrus, and the king of Messenia, Melanthus.[4] Plato's mother was Perictione, whose family claimed a relationship with the famous Athenian legislator and lyric poet Solon.[5] Perictione was the sister of Charmides and niece of Critias, both leading figures of the Thirty Tyrants, the brief oligarchic regime that followed the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404-403 BC).[6] In addition to Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children; these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus (Plato's nephew and successor as head of his Philosophical Academy).[6] According to the Republic, Adeimantus and Glaucon were older than Plato.[7] However, in his Memorabilia, Xenophon presents Glaucon as younger than Plato.[8] According to some accounts of ancient writers, Plato's mother became pregnant by virginal conception: Ariston tried to impose his attentions on Perictione, but failed in his aim. ; then the ancient Greek god Apollo appeared to him in a vision and, following it, Ariston left Perictione undisturbed.[9] Another legend said that, while he was sleeping as a child, bees had landed on Plato's lips; a harbinger of the sweetness of the style in which he would speak of philosophy.[10]Ariston appears to have died during Plato's childhood, although the precise dating of his death is difficult.[11] Perictio...... middle of paper ......although tradition tends to see Plato as the author of a sort of "pseudo-history" of Socrates' life, the chronologies of the characters are inconsistent. For example, in the Protagoras, Alcibiades and Agathon are teenagers who grow beards (and are the respective lovers of Socrates and Pausanias), and Apollodorus and Glaucon are fathers of teenage children. When the Symposium supposedly took place, however, Glaucon and Apollodorus were infants and Alcibiades and Agathon were adult men (and Alcibiades is said to have been older than his beloved Agathon). This chronological discrepancy, which does not appear to be unintentional, suggests that Plato is not a historical writer. Plato's dialogues bear at least some similarities to classical works, in that they have no more than three speakers "on stage" (speaking) at the same time. , and in often having "a choir" of (silent) listeners)..