200), Plato could trace his ancestry from his mother's side back to Solon, who in turn traced his ancestry to Poseidon. On his father's side Codrus, last of the legendary kings of Athens, was claimed as an ancestor and was also thought to have descended from Poseidon. At any rate there can be little doubt that Plato came from one of the wealthiest families in Athens. It was also one of the most politically problematic, including among its members two of the notorious Thirty Tyrants, Charmides (Plato's uncle), and the leader of the Thirty, Critias (Charmides' uncle).
In his biography of Plato, Diogenes Laertius also cites three sources (Speusippus, Clearchus, and Anaxilaides) for the story that Plato's birth was the result of Ariston's rape of Perictione, although Plato seems to have had two older brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, and a sister, Potone, by the same parents. (W. K. C. Guthrie, in A History of Greek Philosophy [1975], offers an argument for the claim that Glaucon and Adeimantus were older than Plato.) After Ariston's death, Plato's mother married her uncle, Pyrilampes (in Plato's Charmides it is related that Pyrilampes was Charmides' uncle, and Charmides was Plato's mother's brother).
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