Plato

Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was an Athenian philosopher, born to an aristocratic family, who became a follower of Socrates as a young man and devoted his life to philosophy after his teacher's execution in 399. Around 387 he founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, where Aristotle studied for twenty years. His works, which survive complete, are dialogues in which Socrates usually leads the discussion: the Apology, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic and some two dozen more, on justice, love, knowledge and the ideal state. He twice traveled to Sicily hoping to make a philosopher of the tyrant of Syracuse, and twice failed.