Plato and Athenian Justice

Plato’s interest in justice is pronounced and familiar. So too are his criticisms of Athenian democracy. This article suggests that Plato’s conceptualization of justice constituted a direct and conscious confrontation with the highly democratic mode of justice pursued in Athens’ popular courts. Yet Plato did not resist all Athenian judicial norms. His approach recalls Athenian homicide trials, which operated quite differently from the ordinary kind. Plato’s signal contribution to the history of political thought may be characterized as having taken the conception of justice associated with homicide to be paradigmatic, with remarkably enduring effects.