Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/24

 8 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS Critias this last the well-known and violent leader among the oligarchy called the Thirty Tyrants. Plato was first called Aristocles, after his grandfather, but received when he grew up the name of Plato, on account of the breadth (we are told) either of his forehead or of his shoulders. Endowed with a robust phys- ical frame, and exercised in gymnastics, not merely in one of the palaestrae of Athens (which he describes graphically in the Charmides), but also under an Ar- geian trainer, he attained such force and skill as to contend (if we may credit Dicaearchus) for the prize of wrestling among boys at the Isthmian festival. His literary training was commenced under a schoolmaster named Dionysius. and pursued under Draco, a celebrated teacher of music in the large sense then attached to that word. He is said to have displayed both diligence and remark- able quickness of apprehension, combined too with the utmost gravity and mod- esty. He not only acquired great familiarity with the poets, but composed poetry of his own dithyrambic, lyric, and tragic ; and he is even reported to have prepared a tragic tetralogy, with the view of competing for victory at the Dionysian festival. We are told that he burned these poems, when he attached himself to the society of Socrates. No compositions in verse remain under his name, except a few epigrams amatory, affectionate, and of great poetical beauty. But there is ample proof in his dialogues that the cast of his mind was essentially poetical. Many of his philosophical speculations are nearly allied to poetry and acquire their hold upon the mind rather through imagination and sentiment than through reason or evidence. According to Diogenes (who on this point does not cite his authority), it was about the twentieth year of Plato's age (407 b.c.) that his acquaintance with Socrates began. It may possibly have begun earlier, but certainly not later, since at the time of the conversation (related by Xenophon) between Socrates and Plato's younger brother Glaucon, there was already a friendship established between Socrates and Plato ; and that time can hardly be later than 406 b.c, or the beginning of 405 b.c. From 406 b.c. down to 399 b.c, when Socrates was tried and condemned, Plato seems to have remained in friendly relation and society with him, a relation perhaps interrupted during the severe political strug- gles between 405 b.c. and 403 b.c, but revived and strengthened after the res- toration of the democracy in the last-mentioned year. Whether Plato ever spoke with success in the public assembly we do not know ; he is said to have been shy by nature, and his voice was thin and feeble, ill adapted for the Pnyx. However, when the oligarchy of Thirty was estab- lished, after the capture and subjugation of Athens, Plato was not only relieved from the necessity of addressing the assembled people, but also obtained addi- tional facilities for rising into political influence, through Critias (his near rela- tive) and Charmides, leading men among the new oligarchy. Plato affirms that he had always disapproved the antecedent democracy, and that he entered on the new scheme of government with full hope of seeing justice and wisdom pre- dominant. He was soon undeceived. The government of the Thirty proved a sanguinary and rapacious tyranny, filling him with disappointment and disgust