Why Was Plato Given His Name?
In short. Plato's name comes from Greek platys, 'broad'. Tradition says his birth name was Aristocles and 'Plato' was a nickname; here is the full evidence.
“Plato” comes from the Greek word platys, meaning “broad” or “wide”. It was not, on the ancient tradition, the name he was born with. That tradition holds his birth name was Aristocles, after his grandfather, and that “Plato” was a nickname picked up later in life. Modern scholars are less sure: Platon was also an ordinary Athenian name, so it is possible no renaming ever happened at all. Both accounts rest on evidence written down centuries after Plato lived, so neither can be stated as fact.
What does the name “Plato” actually mean?
The Greek adjective platys means broad or wide, and Platon is the form it takes as a personal name. It is the same root that gives English words like “plateau” and “platypus” (literally “flat-foot”). As a Greek name, Platon was not exotic. Inscriptions from Athens and other Greek cities record ordinary citizens called Platon who have no connection to the philosopher, which is one of the reasons the question of where his own name came from is genuinely open rather than settled.
Was Plato’s real name Aristocles?
The claim that Plato’s birth name was Aristocles comes from Diogenes Laertius, who wrote his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers around 550 years after Plato died. In Book III, section 4, Diogenes says the philosopher was named Aristocles after his grandfather, and that he was called Plato only later, either by his wrestling teacher or for other reasons he goes on to list. Aristocles combines aristos (“best”) with kleos (“fame” or “glory”), a common type of Greek compound name.
The grandfather detail fits well with what is known about Athenian naming from other sources. Plato’s own works, discussed below, never mention the name Aristocles or explain his name at all, so Diogenes is the earliest and really the only source for it. That does not make it false, but it means the claim rests entirely on a biographer working centuries after the fact, drawing on earlier writers whose own reliability cannot now be checked.
Why was he nicknamed “Plato”?
Diogenes Laertius (III.4) gives three separate explanations for the nickname, and does not choose between them:
- His build. Plato was broad-shouldered, and the nickname described his physique.
- His style. “Broad” described the breadth or fullness of his manner of speaking and writing, as opposed to a narrow or crabbed style.
- His forehead. The name referred to a broad forehead.
Attached to the first explanation is the detail, repeated in many popular accounts, that it was his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, who gave him the nickname. Diogenes reports this alongside the other two explanations rather than singling it out as the true one. All three explanations, including the wrestling-coach story, are later anecdotes: none of them appear in anything Plato wrote, and none is attested by a source close to his own lifetime. They belong to the same layer of biographical tradition as the stories that he burned his early tragedies after meeting Socrates or was once sold into slavery at a Sicilian market, memorable but unverifiable. See our full list of sourced Plato facts for how these anecdotes are usually flagged.
Could “Plato” simply have been his real name all along?
A counterargument, made by modern scholars rather than by any ancient source, is simpler: Platon was a normal Athenian name, attested on inscriptions for people with no connection to philosophy, so there is no particular reason to assume a renaming happened at all. On this reading, the Aristocles-and-grandfather story and the wrestling-nickname story are both later attempts to explain an ordinary name as something more significant, the kind of embellishment that tends to accumulate around a famous figure once he is famous. This view does not claim to disprove Diogenes; it simply notes that the positive evidence for a renaming is thin, and that the alternative, an ordinary name with no hidden meaning, requires no explanation to be true.
Nothing in Plato’s own dialogues settles the question either way. He mentions himself only three times across his whole body of work, twice in the Apology and once in the Phaedo, and in none of these does he discuss his own name.
How did Greek naming conventions work?
Understanding the Aristocles claim requires some background on how Athenians actually named their children. A Greek citizen typically had a single personal name plus a patronymic (his father’s name in the genitive case) and a demotic (the name of his local deme, or district), used together for formal identification: “Aristocles, son of Ariston, of the deme Collytus” is the kind of formula that would have applied if Aristocles was indeed his registered name.
Naming a son after his paternal grandfather was a widespread and recognisable pattern in Athenian families, which is exactly the claim Diogenes makes for “Aristocles”: that it was his grandfather’s name. Nicknames, separately, were common and could stick for life, especially ones picked up in youth through some physical trait, an occupation, or an associate’s sense of humour, which is the kind of process the wrestling-coach story describes even if its details cannot be confirmed.
Did other Greek thinkers pick up nicknames the same way?
Plato would not have been unusual if a nickname did eventually replace his birth name in everyday use. Greek nicknames of this kind, descriptive tags based on appearance, habit, or origin, are common enough among ancient philosophers that a few sit alongside “Plato” as useful comparisons. Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher, was nicknamed “the Dog” (kyon) for his deliberately shameless, animal-like way of living in public, a nickname he appears to have accepted and even embraced rather than resisted. Theophrastus, who succeeded Aristotle at the Lyceum, was originally named Tyrtamus; Aristotle himself is said to have renamed him Theophrastus, “divine speaker”, for the elegance of his delivery, according to the same biographer, Diogenes Laertius, who supplies the Plato story. The pattern in both cases is the same one claimed for Plato: an original, ordinary name is set aside once some striking personal trait gives the person a more memorable public identity, and the memorable name is the one that survives into later tradition.
None of these parallels proves that Plato’s own case unfolded the same way. They show only that the mechanism Diogenes describes, a birth name eclipsed by a descriptive nickname, was a recognised pattern in the biographical writing of the period, which makes the Aristocles story more plausible as a type of story even where its specific details cannot be checked.
The competing explanations at a glance
| Explanation | Source | Reliability |
|---|---|---|
| Birth name was Aristocles, after his grandfather | Diogenes Laertius III.4 | Late (c. 3rd century AD), single source, plausible given naming customs |
| Nicknamed “Plato” for his broad build, by his wrestling coach Ariston of Argos | Diogenes Laertius III.4 | Late anecdote, unverifiable, the most repeated version |
| Nicknamed “Plato” for the breadth of his style | Diogenes Laertius III.4 | Late anecdote, alternative offered by the same source |
| Nicknamed “Plato” for a broad forehead | Diogenes Laertius III.4 | Late anecdote, alternative offered by the same source |
| “Plato” was simply his given name, an ordinary Athenian name | Modern scholars, from inscriptional evidence | Plausible but not provable; explains the evidence without assuming a renaming |
What does “platonic” mean, and does it come from his name?
Yes: “platonic”, “Platonism”, and “Neoplatonism” all derive directly from Plato’s name, describing his philosophy and its later revivals rather than the meaning of the name itself. The everyday phrase “platonic love”, meaning an affectionate but non-sexual relationship, is a much later coinage. It comes from the Renaissance scholar Marsilio Ficino’s Latin phrase amor platonicus, not from Plato’s own vocabulary, and it flattens what Plato actually says about love in the Symposium and Phaedrus, both of which start from erotic desire rather than set out to exclude it.
Does it matter which story is true?
Not for understanding Plato’s philosophy, which survives in his dialogues regardless of what he was called as a boy. But the question is a useful small test case for how careful readers should be with ancient biography generally. Diogenes Laertius is often the only surviving source for details about a philosopher’s life that feel too specific and too human to have been simply made up, a childhood nickname, a wrestling match, a burned manuscript, and that specificity can make a story feel more credible than the evidence actually supports. A modern biographer working from a single unverifiable source that long after a subject’s death would usually flag the claim as tradition rather than fact. The name question is a reminder to extend Plato the same caution: treat the vivid detail as worth recording, and worth enjoying, without mistaking it for something proven.
Why does this question keep coming up?
Because the two competing stories, an inherited family name later concealed by a sports-field nickname, or simply an ordinary Greek name attached to an extraordinary thinker, both remain live possibilities, and the ancient evidence for either one is a single biographer writing thoughtfully but freely several centuries after Plato’s death. That gap is typical of what we know about Plato’s life generally: his own writings are almost entirely about ideas, not autobiography, which is why even a question as basic as his name cannot be answered with full certainty. For the same reason, readers curious about other details of his biography, his family, his travels, his students, are better served by Socrates facts and Plato’s works, in full than by treating any single anecdote as settled history.
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