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The wisest of the Grecian philosophers, among whom were Solon, Pythagoras and Plato, went there for instruction, as our young men now go to England and Germany. The Eleusinian mysteries were introduced from Egypt; and the important secret which they taught, is supposed to have been the existence of one, invisible God.
So great was the regard and veneration for him that it was considered better to err with Plato than be right with any one else. The writings of Plato are numerous, and most of them are in the form of dialogues.
But his fame rests on his "Dialogues," intended to ridicule the heathen philosophy and religion, and which show him to have been one of the great masters of ancient satire and mockery. His style of dialogue a combination of Plato and Aristophanes is not much used by modern writers, and his peculiar kind of ridicule is reserved now for the stage.
The seeming modesty of the title philosopher for etymologically it is a modest one, though it has managed to gather a very different signification with the lapse of time the modesty of the title would naturally appeal to a man who claimed so much ignorance, as Socrates; and Plato represents him as distinguishing between the lover of wisdom and the wise, on the ground that God alone may be called wise.
The law of gravitation, according to Plato, is a law, not only of the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, but of similar bodies to similar, having a magnetic power as well as a principle of gravitation. He observed that earth, water, and air had settled down to their places, and he imagined fire or the exterior aether to have a place beyond air.
When the Emperor Michael III of Constantinople was conquered in battle, one of the obligations imposed upon him was to send many camel loads of books to Bagdad, and Aristotle and Plato were studied devotedly and translated into Arabic. The era of culture affected not only the capital but all the cities, and everywhere throughout the Arabian empire schools and academies sprang up.
The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.
Here he studied his favourite philosopher, Plato, and composed three Discourses on Heroic Poetry, dedicated to his friend.
I had worked hard at Greek prose, had translated and re- translated a good deal of Xenophon, Plato, and some Demosthenes, yet to my disappointment we had no paper of Greek prose, a thing that I believe never occurred before, and which is generally believed to test a boy's knowledge well. My Iambics were good, I expect, though not without two bad faults.
Just as the most angular and gauche man in a literary gathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have been compared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods have been compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in the room may turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lack of dignified style.
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