Купить The Dialogues of Plato, Translated Into English With Analyses and Introductions (Classic Reprint), Plato Plato

Excerpt from The Dialogues of Plato, Translated Into English With Analyses and Introductions

There is hardly another philosopher of antiquity with whose life we are so intimately acquainted as with Plato's; yet even in his case, tradition is often uncertain and still more often incomplete. Born some years after the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, the son of an ancient aristocratic house, favoured also by wealth, no less than birth, he must have found in his education and surroundings abundant intellectual food; and even without the express testimony of history, we might conclude that he profited by these advantages to the fullest expansion of his brilliant genius. Among the few further particulars that have descended to us respecting his earlier years, our attention is principally drawn to three points, important in their influence on his mental development.

Of these we may notice first the general condition of his country, and the political position of his family.

Plato's youth coincided with that unhappy period succeeding the Sicilian defeat when all the faults of the previous Athenian government were so terribly avenged, all the disadvantages of unlimited democracy so nakedly exposed, all the pernicious results of the self-seeking ethics and sophistical culture of the time so unreservedly displayed. He himself belonged to a social class and to a family which regarded the existing constitution with undisguised, and not always groundless discontent. Several of his nearest relations were among the spokesmen of the aristocratic party.

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