Yes! It is. It doesn't matter what I think of Plato's class, social position, or even the ideas whatever. I have him on my shelf with Aristotle next to him, then follows Guthrie's Pre-Socratics. Then Erasmus, Descartes, Spinoza, the English, French and German Enlightenment (Locke and Hume to Kant and Hegel).... These are followed by most of Cassirer, some of Heidegger. Carnap is in another room with the math sets which include Euclid and several surveys of ancient science. I could use a lot more of that.
Many of these writings share that art quality, which is why they are attractive. In a way, it doesn't matter what truths they may contain as long as they are beautiful to read and think about.
What's going on in a certain sense is that these writers were guided almost as much by their sense of pleasing form, as they were by devotion to truth.
You probably need an example. It was believed that there were four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. To this highly symmetric collection was added a fifth, the ether. Here is the wiki:
In Plato's Timaeus (St-55c) Plato described aether as "that which God used in the delineation of the universe." Aristotle (Plato's student at the Akademia) included aether in the system of the classical elements of Ionian philosophy as the "fifth element" (the quintessence), on the principle that the four terrestrial elements were subject to change and moved naturally in straight lines while no change had been observed in the celestial regions and the heavenly bodies moved in circles. In Aristotle's system aether had no qualities (was neither hot, cold, wet, or dry), was incapable of change (with the exception of change of place), and by its nature moved in circles, and had no contrary, or unnatural, motion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element)
It takes awhile to study this system and see that the Platonic solids form a numerology and cosmology. You have to spend a fair amount of time with Euclid's books to understand the grand plan, which was a cosmological system in which the five solids were the expression of its symmetries. The elements (earth, air, etc) were assemblies of each of the first four solids, their structures were made of these geometric shapes. Ether was the ideal, unchanging element and was represented as the pentagon in 2d.
You need to meditate on these associations to see this is an extremely pretty idea, that the regular solids compose the microstructure of the elements. They are all cycles 2 or the Fermat primes, of which only 3 and 5 were known in antiquity. The Icosahedron was the penultimate figure. The Ether was made of these objects as the medium where the stars floated.
(Can't believe I am defending Plato either... )
CG