Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

The great Cordoban commentator on Aristotle, who — lacking any Arabic text of Aristotle's Politics — wrote instead a commentary on Plato's Republic, treating it as the political philosophy the shelf was missing.

The Republic's route back into Europe runs through him, and not through Greek. His commentary was rendered into Hebrew by Samuel ben Judah of Marseilles in 1320 and into Latin from that Hebrew — so a medieval European read Plato's cave, when he read it at all, through an Arabic philosopher by way of a Jewish translator. That is the same shape as ☉'s channel, and it is not a coincidence: it is how antiquity travelled.