It is Plato's cousin Critias the tyrant (and not, as some scholars have supposed, the tyrant's grandfather) who appears again as introductory speaker in the
Timaeus and as narrator in the unfinished
Critias. Plato's older brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus are the chief interlocutors in the
Republic, his stepbrother Demos is mentioned as a reigning young beauty in the
Gorgias (481d), and his half brother Antiphon appears in the
Parmenides as the one who preserves the memory of the philosophical conversation between Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides. Plato had no occasion to mention his sister Potone, the mother of his nephew Speusippus who succeeded him as head of the Academy.
We are largely dependent on the autobiographical sections of the Seventh Letter for information about Plato's life. (The authenticity of this Letter is disputed, but even scholars who doubt its authenticity generally assume that the author was well informed.) The author of the Letter reports that Plato's relatives in the anti-democratic coup of 404 BCE invited him to join them, and that he, as an upper-class young man of twenty-three with political ambitions, was initially sympathetic; he expected these men to lead the city "from a life of injustice to a just government." But Plato observed that in a short time "they made the previous (democratic) regime look like a Golden Age" (Epist.
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