surface. So long as
the lamp of civilization shall not have ceased to burn, the Iliad and
the Odyssey must hold their forward place among the brightest
treasures of our race.

PLATO

Extracts from "Plato," by GEORGE GROTE, F.R.S.

(427-347 B.C.)

Of Plato's biography we can furnish nothing better than a faint
outline. We are not fortunate enough to possess the work on Plato's
life composed by his companion and disciple, Xenocrates, like the life
of Plotinus by Porphyry, or that of Proclus by Marinus. Though Plato
lived eighty years, enjoying extensive celebrity, and though Diogenes
Laertius employed peculiar care in collecting information about him,
yet the number of facts recounted is very small, and of those facts a
considerable proportion is poorly attested.

Plato was born at Aegina (in which island his father enjoyed an estate
as clerouch or out-settled citizen) in the month Thargelion (May), of
the year B.C. 427. His family, belonging to the Deme Collytus, was
both ancient and noble, in the sense attached to that word at Athens.
He was son of Ariston (or, according to some admirers, of the God
Apollo) and Perictione; his maternal ancestors had been intimate
friends or relatives of the law-giver Solon, while his father belonged
to a gens tracing its descent from Codrus, and even from the God
Poseidon. He was also nearly related to Charmides and to
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 physical 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 Argeian 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 remarkable
quickness of apprehension, combined too with the utmost gravity and
modesty. He not only acquired great familiarity with the poets, but
composed poetry of his own--dithyrambic, lyric, and tragic; and he is