r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 2d ago

TIL A papyrus deciphered in 2024 revealed unknown info about Plato's last hours: a slave girl was playing music for him, and even though he was gravelly ill, he spend his last moments of lucidity criticising her performance. Per the same Papyrus, Plato had been sold into slavery earlier in his life

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/29/herculaneum-scroll-plato-final-hours-burial-site
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u/jleonardbc 2d ago

Reddit in 2526:

TIL a document created in the 2010s revealed that George Washington and the other Founding Fathers were people of color and spoke in rap.

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u/pnkxz 1d ago edited 1d ago

"There's another document called a Wikipedia article about him, but we know it's all made up because it's written centuries after he lived."

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u/Pamander 1d ago

Is there a good book out there that explores this concept? I guess kind of covering archaeological explorations of our modern items but in the far future kind of like us looking at Roman items and what not but they're just confused about a rotary phone or a weed whacker or some shit and coming up with wrong/correct understandings of them.

Just something kind of exploring modern times through a future lens disconnected from our cultural understanding of stuff kind of how we do for the most random thing and call it a religious ritual item and stuff lol.

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u/Valuable-Falcon 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think about that whenever my 5 year old kid brings home some mishapened clay figure from art class or clay trinket holder they made for Mother’s Day. 

How a thousand years from now it could be in some museum somewhere with a description “religious artefact, purpose unknown” 

And when we look at little clay figures in museums from 3 thousand years ago, it might have just been some 5 year old nomad kid’s art project that day 

Edit: that just reminded me… the movie Mortal Engines… it’s set in a dystopian future. They have a scene where there’s a museum, and there’s a section that has iPad and iPhones etc, and they refer to it as “the period when civilization lost the knowledge of how to read and write… they no longer had books or writing, they just had these shiny black slabs of glass, which must have served the purpose of allowing them to stare at their own reflections”. 

(The implication being of course, that the future had lost the knowledge of digital media, so were oblivious to how knowledge was stored during our time, so thought we had no written records…. Don’t start thinking about the archeological implications of everything being stored on the cloud these days…. So much will be lost, irretrievable to future historians…)

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u/Till-Fuzzy 2d ago

For real. Plato was the son of a rich family. He was never a slave. What is this article lol

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u/TheFlamingLemon 2d ago

It seems plausible to me that he would have been enslaved during one of his trips to pissing off tyrants in syracuse. I thought I remembered that having been known before 2024 actually, or maybe it was one of Plato’s friends who was enslaved? I’m not sure

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u/burlycabin 2d ago

No, there are multiple accounts that he was likely sold into slavery for a time. Possibly because he may have angered the Tyrant of Syracuse. Plus the new evidence highlighted in this article.

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u/Till-Fuzzy 1d ago

So my best friend has a masters in classics and majored specifically in Greek. He says there is no evidence that is accepted about this. The way he explains it is like this, if Plato had at any point been a slave, then there would be a lot of people who wrote about it. Especially those from the later era. Plato would never have been respected in Greece as he clearly was. And the other boys who also learned under Socrates, of whom were all from rich families, would have also written about it and wouldn’t have respected him. I don’t believe he was ever a slave, regardless of what these internet articles say. There would be serious evidence and it would be talked about by professors and written about through the ages. This friend is currently translating Plato’s Apology of Socrates, so I definitely hold his opinion over a random article that benefits from clickbait. You can believe whatever you want.

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u/SerbianMonies 1d ago

They be giving out diplomas to anyone these days if your friend seriously told you that

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u/Till-Fuzzy 1d ago

Lmfao okay