Scholar claims to have unlocked 'The Plato Code'

A scholar unlocks a code buried within ancient Greek texts to discover secret messages left by a long-dead philosopher. This isn't the plot of the next Dan Brown novel, but the result of an English academic's five-year-long study of Plato.

Jay Kennedy of the University of Manchester claims that Plato (who died around 347 B.C.) wove a complex musical and mathematical cipher into the text of famed dialogues like "The Republic." According to Kennedy's research, which is published in this month's edition of the respected classics journal Apeiron, that code was used to hide the fact that the Athenian was a secret follower of the philosopher Pythagoras and shared his belief that the key to understanding the universe lay in numbers and math.

"Plato's books played a major role in founding Western culture, but they are mysterious and end in riddles," says Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science. "In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but modern scholars rejected this. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato."

Other academics aren't quite so certain that hidden meanings lurk beneath Plato's ponderings. "It's not impossible in principle, but I think I would need further persuasion," says Dr. James Warren, an expert in early Greek philosophy at Cambridge University's Corpus Christi College. "The question is, why should it be there? And what difference does it make to our understanding Plato's dialogues?"

Kennedy says he unwrapped the Platonic puzzle using stichometry, measuring the number of lines in the original text. Using a computer program, he was able to convert the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts into their original form, which would have consisted of lines of 35 Greek characters, with no spaces or punctuation. He found that the restored texts followed a curious pattern and had line lengths involving multiples of the number 12. "The Apology," for example, has 1,200 lines, "The Symposium" has 2,400 and "The Republic" has 12,000.

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