Plato sat in his cage
accused of performing 
for the shadows
by a jealous onlooker 
a failed teacher of freedom

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

Section one on the prejudices of philosophers

7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies “Flatterers of Dionysius”—consequently, tyrants’ accessories and lick-spittles. Besides this, however, it is as much as to say, “They are all actors; there is nothing genuine about them” (for Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of which Plato and his scholars were masters—of which Epicurus was not a master! He, the old schoolteacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who the gardengod Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?

Translated by Helen Zimmern, 1909