Letter Nine
Plato to Archytas the Tarentine:1 Do well!
357e Those close to Archippus and Philonides2 arrived at our place both bearing the letter which you gave them and reporting the things from you. They accomplished the matters concerning the city without difficulty—for it was not altogether laborious—and they went through for us thoroughly the things from you, saying that you are restless because you are not capable of being released from the lack of leisure connected with the common things. That the most pleasant thing in
358a life is to do one’s own thing, especially if someone should choose to do things of such a sort as you too have chosen, is clear to nearly everyone; but you need to take the following to heart as well: that it is not only for oneself that each of us has been born, but one’s fatherland gets a certain portion of our birth,3 one’s parents another, and the rest of one’s friends another, and many things are given also to the propitious moments that overtake our life. When the fatherland itself calls one to the common
358b things, perhaps it is strange not to hearken; for that turns out at the same time also to leave a space for paltry human beings, who do not proceed from the best4 to the common things.
Enough, now, about these things. But we have a care also now for Echecrates, and will do so in the time to come, because of you, and because of his father, Phrynion, and because of the youth himself.5
1. On Archytas, see n. 86 to Letter Seven.
2. Two Pythagorean philosophers belonging to Archytas’s philosophic circle at Tarentum; they are included in Iamblichus’s list of Pythagoreans from Tarentum (De vita Pythagorica liber 267).
3. Lit. “of our coming-into-being” (tēs geneseōs hēmōn).
4. It is usually assumed that this means “from the best motive,” but no noun is given in the text. The Greek could also be construed as meaning broadly “from the best place,” or perhaps “from the best thing,” i.e., affair or occupation, in contrast to “the common things.”
5. Echecrates is the name of the man to whom Phaedo narrates the conversation that took place on the day of Socrates’s death in Plato’s Phaedo. This man, known as Echecrates of Phlius, was “a Pythagorean and a pupil of Philolaus and Eurytus, who in their later life taught at Tarentum” (Morrow 1962, 259n3). However, Nails (2002, 139) argues that Echecrates of Phlius could hardly have been a “youth” at the time of the writing of Letter Nine. There was another Echecrates, perhaps related to the first, who, like Archippus and Philonides (above), is mentioned by Iamblichus in his list of Pythagoreans from Tarentum (De vita Pythagorica liber 267).