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* PLATNER. 101 PLATO. at Yale University. After five years as iustructor in Latin and French in Utica, X. Y., in 1890 he became assistant professor of Latin in Western Reserve University, where he became full professor in 1892. He was chosen secretary of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome in 1898, was professor there in 1899-1900, and for the year 1900-01 was president of the Ameri- can Philological Association. He wrote Selec- tions from the Letters of the Younger Pliny (1894) and The Topography and ilonujncnts of Ancient Rome (1903). PLA'TO (Lat., from Gk. HMtuv, Platon) (c.427-347 B.C.). A Greek philosopher, born probably May 7. B.C. 427, on the island of M^na., a dependency of Athens, where his father held an estate. His real name was Aristodes. His father claimed descent from Codrus; his mother, Peric- tione, from Solon. The known facts of his life are few. He received the education in music and gymnastics of a well-born Athenian youth, under the limitations imposed by the virtual .state of siege created for Athens by the Peloponnesian War. His writings are sufficient evidence that he absorbed all the culture of his age; poetry, art, pre-Socratic philosophy, the Sophistic enlighten- ment (see Sophists) in a synthesis, as Emerson says, "without parallel before or since." We may believe the tradition that he distinguished him- self in gymnastics and wrote poetry. The poems he is said to have burned wnen. at the age of twenty, he experienced the higher inspiration of the philosophic muse through Socrates. For a youth of Plato's birth and endowments, politics would have been the natural career. Two of his dialogues are named from his kinsmen C'harmides and Critias, who were prominent in the oligarchy of the so-called Thirty Tyrants which dominated Athens in the year 404-03. The experiences of that year disenchanted him for- ever with regard to the rule of the "Fair and Good.' as they called themselves. The judicial minder of Socrates by the restored democracy in the year 399 and the increasing license and weakness of popular rule through the fourth cen- tury further embittered his spirit and developed the conviction that all existing forms of govern- ment were mere partisan factions, and that there was no hope of salvation for the cities of Greece until "either philosophers should Income kings or kings philosophers." The philosopher whose lot was cast in fourth century Athens could exer- cise active citizenship only in the city of the ideal, "of which a pattern is laid up in heaven" — the City of God of later Grsco-Roman and early Christian idealism. The powers and social aspi- rations that might have made a great statesman and leader of rnen found expression in the Re- public and Laws, the masterpieces of Plato's ma- turity and old age. After the death of Socrates Plato is said to have left Athens and to have traveled extensively in Greece. Southern Italy, Sicily, and even Egypt and Northern Africa. About the year 388 he is said to have visited the court of Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse, who. ofTended by his freedom of speech, contrived to have him sold into slavery at .Egina on his voyage home. The story adds that he was at once ransomed by friends. Jlodem conjectural schol- arship tries to trace in Plato's writings the chro- nological succession of Megarian. Ttalo-Pythago- rean, Egyptian, and Sicilian influences experi- enced in these voyagings. But we really know nothing beyond the presumption that he was much absent from Athens during the ten years that followed Socrates's death. At the age of forty, about the year 387, he established the 'Academy,' which, with the rhetorical school of Isoerates. made Athens in very deed the 'educator of Hellas,' and was the beginning of that 'univer- sity life at Athens' which continued for eight centuries. The name is derived from the hero Academus, adjoining whose shady precinct and gymnasium on the road to Eleusis, one mile from Athens, was the small estate which Plato dedi- cated to the uses of the school. B.v Plato's will, the institution was probably perpetuated as a re- ligious foundation sacred to the iluses, and this organization was imitated in the Lyceum of Aristotle, the 'garden' of Epicurus, and the Mu- seum of Alexandria. Here for forty years he taught, debated high and subtle questions with his favorite pupils, and '"curled and combed the style of his dialogues" until his death in the year 3-17. Among his most famous pupils were Speu- sippus, his nephew, who succeeded him as scho- larch ; Xenocrates, the successor of Speusippus ; Aristotle (from the year 367), the orators De- mosthenes, Hyperides, and Lyeurges, the astrono- mer Eudoxus of Cnidos, and many other eminent men from all parts of Greece. The inner life of the school we can only divine. From Plato's sneers at the Sophists, who took pay for spiritual gifts, we may infer that no tuition fees were ex- acted. We may conjecture that some of the most abstract and metaphysical dialogues, as the Parmenides, the Sophistes, the Politicus, the Philebus, are idealizations of actual discussions in the school, as the C'harmides, Lysis, Protago- ras, and Gorgias are reflections of real conversa- tions in the gymnasia and public resorts fre- quented by Socrates. A famous passage of the Phwdrus exalts the spoken above the lifeless writ- ten word, and Plato, like those two other great artists in language, Renan and Ruskin. affected to hold mere literary virtuosity in light esteem. Con- temporary writers of comedy represent the stu- dents of the Academy as dandified young cox- combs, and jest about the obscure 'idea of good.' and the scientific definition of the cucumber by dichotomy, much as the paragraphist of the mod- ern newspaper alludes to transcendentalism and the "beanfulness of the bean.' From this remote and sphered course, Plato was drawn into the turmoil of real life by his two visits to Syra- cuse in the years 367 and 366 and shortly after. The younger Dionysius had succeeded his father as tyrant of Syracuse, and Dion, his kinsman by marriage, whose friendship Plato had won in his first visit, cherished the illusion that, under suitable guidance, the youthful ruler might develop into the philosopher king postu- lated in the Republic. The failure of the experi- ment, the banishment of Dion as its result, the expedition organized in the year 3.59 by Dion with the aid of pupils of the Academy against Dionysius. whom he drove into exile in turn, his assassination by his fellow pupil Callippus. and the anarchy into which Syracuse was plunged as a consequence, furnished abundant matter for those inclined to blaspheme philosophy and scofT at the scholar in politics, and may plausibly be conjectured to have contributed to the mood of cmbittemient and disillusion that prevails in the great work of Plato's declining years, the Laics.