Plato's secrets revealed

Chamari SENANAYAKE

Originally, a student of Socrates, Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher and mathematician. His works have been admired, studied and debated for more than 2,000 years by the greatest minds in history. Just like the great scholar Leonardo DaVinci, who lived much later, Plato seemed to have had many secrets hidden away from the world.

In an extraordinary discovery, a British academic claims to have uncovered a series of secret messages hidden in some of the most influential and celebrating writings of the Ancient World. The codes suggest that Plato was a secret follower of the philosopher Pythagoras and shared his belief that the secrets to the universe lie in numbers and mathematics.

This latest study comes from a respected Classical scholar at Manchester University, and has been accepted for publication by a leading academic journal.

Plato, who died around 347BC, is arguably the greatest of all the Greek philosophers.

With his mentor Socrates, and student Aristotle, he laid down the foundations of Western philosopher and science.

According to Dr Jay Kennedy, a classical scholar at Manchester University, one of Plato's most important beliefs was hidden in his writing, and his theory has been accepted to be published by the Academic world.

'In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars. It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato,' says Dr. Kennedy.

The key to unravelling the Plato Code lies in a Greek musical scale of 12 notes popular among followers of the earlier philosopher Pythagoras.

Dr Kennedy states that he has discovered that key phrases, words and themes crop up in regular intervals throughout Plato's writings and that they match the spacing of these 12 notes in the musical scale. Plato's most famous work, the 'Republic', for instance, is made up of 12,000 Homeric lines of text. Dr Kennedy found that every 1,000 lines, Plato returns to the theme of music.

Dr Kennedy, seem to believe that this pattern of symbols would have been obvious to the ancient followers of Pythagoras. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music or 'harmony of the spheres' and that the secrets of the universe lay in mathematics.

The presence and nature of the hidden codes in his texts may be a proof that Plato believed in the same. And a few thousand years before our scientific and technological development he may have been leaving messages that mathematics and logical patterns ruled the universe, not the Gods.

Dr Kennedy believes that Plato did not use the code for pleasure, unlike some believe was the case with Leonardo da Vinci, but for his own safety. Plato's own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. His teacher Socrates was sentenced to death by drinking poison for failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges' and 'introducing new deities.' Plato founded the world's first university, called the 'Academy' and even allowed women to study at the Academy, against the traditions of the time, was also known as an early defender of romantic love, as opposed to arranged marriages and defended homosexuality. He was an extremely intelligent man who has written more than 30 books.