The exact relationship that Plato shared with Aristotle is still an area of speculation among all major scholars inn the world. In his work, Apology of Socrates, Plato mentions that he was probably the most devoted disciple of Socrates. In the same dialogue, Socrates is supposed to have stated that Plato was one of those few youths close enough to him to be corrupted, only if he was guilty of corrupting the youth present around him. Socrates also questioned about why the fathers and the brother of his disciples failed to come forward and testify against him if he indeed was guilty of such a heinous crime. Later in the dialogue, Plato along with Critobolus, Apollodorus and Crito are mentioned to have offered a price of thirty minas to free Socrates from his death sentence.

In Plato’s other famous dialogue, the Phaedo, the great philosopher mentions all the names of the people who gathered around Socrates’ cell on his last day. He justifies his own absence by saying he was seriously ill. The common factor about all of Plato’s dialogues is that he has never written his dialogues in his own language. This is proved in Plato’s second letter where it is mentioned that no writing in Plato’s dialogues is his own and Plato only managed to recreate those writings that he gathered from his teacher, Socrates.

Another pointer towards the fact that Plato was Socrates’ most beloved student is the fact that other famous ancient Greek philosophers like Aristophanes and Xenophon depict Socrates in a completely different light than Plato does. They call Socrates to be Plato’s mouthpiece because of Socrates renown for ironical statements.

Aristotle, who was Plato’s most famous student from his Academy, declares that he possessed a completely different doctrine of ideas when compared to Plato or Socrates. In simple words, Aristotle mentions that his idea about forms was something very different from Plato’s and far less complicated. He suggests that the idea of forms could be investigated by studying the natural world around us. This statement contradicts Plato’s which states that the idea of forms, falls beyond the normal range of human understanding.

Description: The famous relationship between the renowned trio of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is still an area of speculation and guesswork. Lots of dialogues and writings by all three philosophers need to be studied before coming up with any kind of conclusion.