Postmodern Plato: A Murder Mystery

Cynthia Giles
Schopenhauer & Friends
5 min readMar 16, 2020

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“The Athenian Murders” is a great read — especially if you’re intrigued by philosophical debates, ancient history, and/or esoteric puzzles

Photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash

“Hypnotic,” “ingenious,” “bizarre,” “enthralling,” and “unique” are just some of the words readers use to describe this “wildly original,” “intellectually stimulating,” and just plain entertaining novel.

The Athenian Murders (2002) is the English translation of José Carlos Somoza’s La caverna de las ideas (2000). The original title means “the cave of ideas,” referring to Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, which argues that the material world perceived by our senses is just the shadow of things in their “real” form. According to Plato, real forms are only ideas, so reality can only be apprehended by the intellect.

In that spirit, Somoza invites readers of The Athenian Murders to enter a multi-layered world of puzzles and mysteries, where we can never be sure what (if anything) is “real.” This novel is definitely an intellectual exercise — but it’s also great fun to read, for two reasons.

First, it creates a convincing sense of being “in” Plato’s Athens. The protagonists visit many places and events that have been recreated from historical accounts, and Somoza paints a detailed picture of daily life in ancient Greece.

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Schopenhauer & Friends
Schopenhauer & Friends

Published in Schopenhauer & Friends

Pages from my Schopenhauer Notebooks — plus a lot about Joan Didion, a little about contemporary French literature, and an assortment of further explorations (from Vedic philosophy to the politics of pessimism and the dilemmas of desire)

Cynthia Giles
Cynthia Giles

Written by Cynthia Giles

Writer at large, Ph.D. in humanities. Persistently curious! Publishes "The Misfit Writer" on Substack. Launching Complexity Press, Autumn 2024.