Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/11

 MONG classical authors Plato is second in importance to Homer only, if even to him. To call the founder of the Academy the chief of philosophers ancient or modern is a very inadequate statement, and even, in one important respect, misleading. Though at war with many of the strongest moral tendencies of his race and time, he was none the less himself a Greek, an Athenian, to the core. That is, he was an artist, with eyes opened wide for all beauty in color, form, and motion. The Athenians saw, as perhaps no folk of later days have seen, the glorious charm of the universe, of life, of man. The varied pageant of earthly existence did not pall upon them. Only after a century or two of provincial enslavement is Menander’s cry heard:

To be sure, there is a vein of occasional repining in the Hellenic poets, as, indeed, in all thoughtful men, just sufficient to show that they saw, also, the pathos of life. In the Platonic “Apology” Socrates declares that death, even if it be only a dreamless sleep, is still a gain, since there are few days or nights in a long life which a wise man can recall that were so happy as the night when he slumbered most unconscious. But it is from the lips of the Homeric Achilles, bereft and conscious of imminent doom, from the octogenarian poet of an Œdipus himself world-worn, or from a Socrates already upon the threshold of old age, strenuous to reconcile himself and his to the inevitable, that such utterances fall.

To Pindar and the countless lesser lyric poets, to the Tragic Three and their forgotten rivals, as to Homer, life, and especially youth and early manhood, seemed far more fair than