Plato - Page 2

commercial ostracism is very hopeful--a few years ago it meant the scaffold.

We have been heirs to a leaden legacy of fear that has well-nigh banished joy and made of life a long nightmare.

In very truth, the race has been insane.

Hallucinations, fallacies, fears, have gnawed at our hearts, and men have fought men with deadly frenzy. The people who interfered, trying to save us, we have killed. Truly did we say, "There is no health in us," which repetition did not tend to mend the malady.

We are now getting convalescent. We are hobbling out into the sunshine on crutches. We have discharged most of our old advisers, heaved the dulling and deadly bottles out of the windows, and are intent on studying and understanding our own case. Our motto is twenty-four centuries old--it is simply this: KNOW THYSELF.

* * * * * * *

Socrates was a street preacher, with a beautiful indifference as to whether people liked him or not. To most Athenians he was the town fool. Athens was a little city (only about one hundred fifty thousand), and everybody knew Socrates. The popular plays caricatured him; the topical songs misquoted him; the funny artists on the street-corners who modeled things in clay, while you waited, made figures of him.

Everybody knew Socrates--I guess so!

Plato, the handsome youth of nineteen, wearing a purple robe, which marked him as one of the nobility, paused to listen to this uncouth man who gave everything and wanted nothing.

Ye gods! But it is no wonder they caricatured him--he was a temptation too great to resist.

Plato smiled--he never laughed, being too well-bred for that. Then he sighed, and moved a little nearer in.

"Individuals are nothing. The State is all. To offend the State is to die. The State is an organization and we are members of it. The State is only as rich as its poorest citizen. We are all given a little sample of divinity to study, model and marvel at. To understand the State you must KNOW THYSELF."

Plato lingered until the little crowd had dispersed, and when the old man with the goggle-eyes and full-moon face went shuffling slowly down the street, he approached and asked him a question.

This man Socrates was no fool--the populace was wrong--he was a man so natural and free from cant that he appeared to the triflers and pretenders like a pretender, and they asked, "Is he sincere?"

What Plato was by birth, breeding and inheritance, Socrates was by nature--a noble man.

Up to this time the ambition of Plato had been for place and power--to make the right impression on the people in order to gain political preferment. He had been educated in the school of the Sophists, and his principal studies were poetry, rhetoric and deportment.

And now straightway he destroyed the manuscript of his poems, for in their writing he had suddenly