Ariston of Collytus ( grc-gre,
Ἀρίστων Ariston (from el, ) may refer to:
People
Ancient Greece
* Ariston of Sparta (6th century BC), Eurypontid King of Sparta
* Ariston of Athens (died circa 424 BC), father of Plato
* Ariston of Byzantium (), tyrant of the city of Byzantium
* Aristo ...
; died c. 424 BC), was the father of the Greek philosopher
Plato (originally named Aristocles). Legend holds that he was descended from
Codrus, the ancient king of
Athens. He supposedly could trace his ancestry to the God of the sea
Poseidon through Codrus and
Melanthus.
[Diogenes Laertius Plato 1] Diogenes Laërtius
Diogenes Laërtius ( ; grc-gre, Διογένης Λαέρτιος, ; ) was a biographer of the Ancient Greece, Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving ''Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers'' is a ...
on the authority of
Speusippus and others, relates a story that "Ariston made violent love to
Perictione, then in her bloom, and failed to win her; and that, when he ceased to offer violence,
Apollo appeared to him in a dream, whereupon he left her unmolested until her child was born". Ariston died when Plato was still a boy, and his mother Perictione remarried
Pyrilampes, a friend of the Athenian politician
Pericles.
[Plato, ''The Republic'', Trans. G.M.A. Grube, Cambridge: Hackett, 1992. viii]
Ariston had three other children by Perictione:
Glaucon,
Adeimantus, and
Potone.
Notes
References
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ariston
5th-century BC Athenians
Family of Plato
424 BC deaths
Year of birth unknown
Demigods