To view Plato as a staunch anti-media theorist is an inference based on the allegory of the cave that, while seemingly unproblematic, in fact completely strips Plato from the context of his own media environment. This is detrimental to understanding the complexity and richness of his thought on media. Situated in an era of rising literacy, Plato opposed oral culture, especially the hijacking of the Athenian citizen’s soul by the oral creations of rhapsodes and tragic poets. Plato’s ideal republic is, in fact, a republic of letters. In his later years, Plato adopted a rather positive attitude towards the formless and imageless medium itself. Centered on the concept of chora, the nascent form of media ontology can already be seen in his work. However, media ontology diverges significantly from the metaphysics centered on “Ideas”, rendering Plato’s late-stage ontology deeply entangled in contradictions. From the perspective of media ontology, everything Plato was capable of imagining—including his world of Ideas—was nothing more than what could be articulated through his writing.