Plato's epistemology is truly impressive for its time, and stunning. When, more than 60 years ago, I first read the allegory of the cave and the explication de text that follows it, it left me dazzled and high as though on a drug (for a time). Like all drugs, it faded, though it remains a good memory. But his was not the last word.
His literary style, however, and wit, which received wisdom assigns not to him but to Socrates, has never faded in my experience, and pieces like Protagoras and Euthyphro and Phaedo grow only more entertaining, moving, and powerful wtih each reading.
But his political philosophy, I believe, is absolutely pernicious and not deserving of respect. If implemented, his Republic would look like Afghanistan under the Taliban. I cannot off hand give you the reference, but Aristotle called the Republic unfit for human beings.
Now, having given full disclosure, I want to come to the wisdom of Plato. Your guest, and you guys, too, failed even to mention the extravagant and ridiculous invention Plato had to make in order to ground, as it were, his "bizarre"(as one of you called it) theory of knowledge: the soul, an immaterial something that has neither location nor dimension. Plato seems to me to me to have expropriated Euclid's geometric point, and assigned one of them to each of us. With the possible exception of the neutrino, there is nothing like it in the real world that we inhabit, and even the neutrino falls far short, for it interacts, barely, with the real world as far as any of us, including Plato, understands it, yet he blithely ignores the contradiction: we are not geometric abstactions nor do we carry them within us. Non-interaction with the material world seem to me as good a definition of non existence as we're going to get. Somehow Plato got away with that slight of hand, rather like Citizen Kane's famous last word, "Rosebud," which no one could have heard because the old fellow died alone, yet the search for the meaning of "Rosebud", as Kane understood it, informs the entire film that follwed, only to produce only a cliche unworthy of even a cocktail party: we really love what we most loved in childhood (along with some good stuff along the way, even so.)
Plato's misappropriation of geometry not only led him to deny poetry (except the poetry he liked, such as Pindar's bought-and-paid for homiletics dinking songs for jocks, who, it must be admitted, probably needed them), and music, also led him to permit the Philosopher King to lie. I have even read some Staussites who have borrowed that bit of ancient wisdom to excuse G. W. Bush's public excresecences. But give the Straussites their due: they know a Philosopher King when they see one.
Worst of all, however, Plato's notion, at once tempting and ridiculous, that we cannot both know what is right/just/good and at the same time do what is dumb/evil/bad, really puts him out in lala land. Yet he must have been aware of Phaedra's great struggle with just that issue and her awful and pathetic failure in the first episode (lines 176-524) of Euripides' Hippolytus, and her speech midway through the episode to the women of Troizen (lines 373 - 430). The episode as a whole is best understood if you read the choral odes that immediately precede and follow it. Read it and you'll see what I mean, and in terms that were native both to the relevant ancients and to the mass theater audiences of the time.
There is a story from late antiquity that Euripides submitted his plays to Socrates for a critical analysis before letting them go into production. This passage lends some credibility to the tale, though the Hippolytus may be a bit too early (428-27 BCE) to have been pre-auditioned by the Socrates whom we know from Xenophon and Plato. In any case it was widely known and discussed and probably known to both Socrates and Plato, and Aristotle quotes from it; it is the earliest surviving expression of the so-called Socratic paradox, though it claims a bit less and is far more forgiving than Plato's later formulation through the persona of Socrates.
On the larger question your show today discussed, whether the questions posed by some Greeks -- there were many Greeks and they believed many different things -- it seems to me they failed to develop methods that could give good answers, or even answers that were better than those, already given by the received wisdom of the time, though they undermined some of the bad ones. Something of the sort may also be said of the Hippocratic writers who were contemporary with the Socrates and Plato and their epigons. Hippocrates removed the gods from medicine but did not really bring about any great advances of the kind that have characterized our last two centuries: sterilization, anesthetics, antibiotics,public health, etc., etc., and so forth, which have depended, in part, on much better experimental methods, and a strong taste for so-called reductionism -- knowing when and how to intervene in the progress of a disease -- and, of course, even more dramatic advances in technologies.
I agree that we have much to learn from the Greek experience in many areas of life, from both their successes and even more from their failures, but most of all from coming to understand how unlike us they were and yet how dependent our own is existence is on their .surviving legacy. They challenged the gods. We, as we slowly acquire god-like powers, quake and tremble. As Sir John Beazley put it, "They were young. We are old. In our decrepitude, they mock us." They challenged the gods. We, as we slowly acquire god-like powers of destruction and creation, quake and tremble.

The democratic history of Greece began when the retired judge, Draco, set out to make the Athenians virtuous. He succeeded in recording and codifying the law but his punishments were so absurdly harsh that such laws are still referred to as "Draconian" or "Draconaic."
The Athenians next turned to a merchant, Solon, who wrote poems to virtue but softened the law. Even so, Solon's greatest achievement was to established a centrally-planned and centrally-controlled economy which allowing a great deal of personal and economic freedom. His insight and pragmatism was to bring prosperity to Athens as it evolved democracy until the time of Plato. Then came the deluge.
Plato stands as a catastrophic figure on the road to progress (according to the philosopher, Max Otto, and the writer, Arthur Koestler, anyway). The classical scholar, C. M. Bowra writes," [Plato] is prepared to sacrifice almost everything to permanence and security, and in the end it is clear that what moves him is fear. It is this which makes him so distrustful of human nature and its ambitions and desires, of any kind of liberty personal or political, of variety and change, of the whole richness of life ...."
The ancient Greeks were ingenious, energetic and insightful but limited by their time and knowledge. As long as we remember this, not only philosophers, but we all can still benefit much from studying their struggle to understand and master the workings of the world.

I found Arvo's comments lucid and insightful. His(?) last sentence was most instructive. How old do we wish to go? The Chinese appear to pre-date almost everyone else, and a recent finding seems to show they wrote things down---long before the first Greek was ever born. Ancient wisdom? Indeed. The bigger question might be:
Just how ancient is ancient? Hmmmm.

So---please tell me, if you can, how ancient wisdom is beneficial. I have been around for over half a century, and I'm not getting it yet. Modernity appears to have its ways of cancelling out or re-defining ancient wisdom. Seems that "situations" dictate behaviors and how those are perceived. There are none of the absolutes that formed my world, as a child growing up in the '50s and '60s. I do see some resurgence among a few of the young parents I know. Ancient wisdom begins at home.

I love your standpoint. I am just college student and it is genuinely of great help for me.