still shone with the lustre shed over it by her great tragio triumvirate; while history, eloquence, and philosophy, the latest in ripening, and the most important and enduring of the products of a nation's intellect, now developed their noblest elements of power, and gave its fitting consummation and crown to the splendid career of Grecian genius.

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Plato could boast an illustrious ancestry. He traced back his paternal lineage to Codrus; his maternal to Solon. His original name was Aristocles, which was changed to Plato (IIλarús, broad), whether from the amplitude of his shoulders, his forehead, his chest, or his diction, the antiquarians seem not fully to have decided. His subsequent renown clothed his infancy with prophetic wonders. A parentage from Apollo was alone worthy of the divine philosopher, and bees settled on his infant lips, portending the honeyed sweetness of his style. His education was conducted, probably, under the ablest masters of education that his age produced. Gymnastics and music-under music being included grammar, poetry, and elegant literature-trained his body and mind into a symmetrical development. Cratylus, a distinguished Heracleitan, made him thoroughly conversant with the doctrines of the celebrated Ionian; and the eager and careful study of Anaxagoras, gave him the latest and best results of the pre-Socratic physics. The exuberant fancy which he subsequently lavished on the subtleties of dialectics, at first overflowed in poetical essays, epic, lyric, and dramatic. But he burned his epics on comparing them with Homer, and when in his twentieth year he fell under the influence of Socrates, he yielded his whole soul to the spell of that great intellectual enchanter, and devoted himself to philosophy, with the conviction that he was here dealing with that essence and soul of harmony of which rythmical numbers are but the sensuous and shadowy embodiment. He was a pupil-undoubtedly an intimate and favorite pupil-of Socrates during the last eight or nine years of that great reformer's life, and became alike thoroughly imbued with his high ethical principles, and master of his searching and potent dialectics. Plato alone, of all the disciples of Socrates, seems fully to have appreciated the

intellectual greatness, and seized the scientific conceptions of his master. Hence, while others, looking at single aspects of the Socratic teaching, framed one-sided systems which rather caricatured than fairly represented it, Plato was able to seize its germs in all their scientific fulness and fruitfulness, and to develop them into a system in which, while admitting elements that Socrates would undoubtedly have disavowed, his fundamental method and principles were yet faithfully adhered to and splendidly illustrated.

After the death of Socrates, Plato repaired to Megara, where Euclid, a former fellow disciple, had opened a school, in which he sought to engraft the Socratic ethics on the stock of the Eleatic idealism. To the ideas and impulses here acquired, we owe very probably that group of more strictly dialectical dialogues, in which he seeks to establish, against the Heracleitan doctrine of absolute multiplicity, and the Eleatic assumption of absolute unity, the true idea of science. From Megara he visited Crete, Egypt, Magna Grecia, and Sicily. His residence in Egypt yielded apparently no large contribution to his stock of philosophical ideas. In Magna Grecia, however, the original home of Pythagoreanisin, and where it still mainly flourished, he seems to have made himself thoroughly conversant with the tenets of that philosophy. From this system he drew that large element of mathematical physics which so essentially characterized it, his tendency to political speculation, and in part, doubtless, his love of mythical and allegorical imagery; while its doctrine of unity developing itself in multiplicity, admirably coalesced with, and mediated between, the sensuous fluctuations of Heracleitus, and the rigid ideal unity of the Eleatics. His visit to Sicily we pass over as philosophically unimportant. Thus, after about ten years of foreign residence and travel, in the ripeness of early manhood, Plato returned to Athens, and opened a school in his garden near the Academy. From a mind so richly endowed by nature, early imbued with the best Grecian culture, trained for nearly ten years in the severe logic and lofty morality of Socrates, stimulated and enriched by leisurely and extensive foreign travel, during which it had successively surveyed and

compassed all the great classified forms of the wisdom of its age, great results might rightfully be expected. That Plato himself appreciated his position appears from that recorded saying, in which, with the Greeks' characteristic ungallantry, he congratulated himself that he was born a human being, and not a brute; a man, and not a woman; a Greek, and not a barbarian; and, above all, an Athenian of the age of Socrates. That he met nobly the claims of his position, the history of the world bears witness.

The life of Plato flowed henceforth in an even tenor, broken only by two visits to Syracuse, neither of them attended by very flattering results. One was made in the hope of realizing, through the newly crowned younger Dionysius, his ideal Republic. But the tyrant proved himself of refractory mettle, and the perfect Commonwealth still slumbered in Utopia. Plato never married, never mingled in public affairs, and seems to have regarded the constitution and character of his native city with disfavor, and almost despair. He spent a tranquil old age, surrounded by favorite disciples, partly employed in teaching, partly in composing and correcting those immortal works, to which, far beyond his oral instructions, he owes his influence and fame. In 348 B. C., he sunk peacefully into that sleep of which he, perhaps, beyond any other Pagan, indulged the hope that it was the soul's awakening to a purer and more perfect life.

The writings of Plato were favorites alike with Pagan and Christian antiquity, and hence have come down to us in a state of unwonted completeness and textual purity. Indeed, his name seems to have been the cover under which some lesser authors have chosen to take their chance for immortality; for a few, perhaps half a dozen, smaller pieces incorporated with his works are undoubtedly spurious. German criticism, indeed, with that sagacious, perverse, overreaching ingenuity, which it has shown in manipulating Homer and the Bible, has sought to strip Plato of a much larger portion of the works which bear his name. Until, however, the invaders of the Platonio territory come to some sort of an understanding, as to the real point and grounds of attack,-so long as one stoutly defends

what another fiercely assails,-the peace-loving student of Plato may safely leave their battles to themselves, satisfied that they are more likely to demolish each other than to wrest from Plato any considerable section of the territory which antiquity has assigned to him. His writings bear nearly all the form of dialogues. Their composition extended, doubtless, over a large portion of his life, and are to be judged rather as marking different stages of philosophical development, than as expositions of a perfectly matured and formal system. True, the care which Plato ever expended on his works, would lead him naturally to retouch his earlier compositions, with reference both to their literary merits, and still more to the harmonizing of their doctrines with his more matured convictions. Still, this process could be but partial; and the more so, as Plato himself probably never attained to a complete and rounded system, and to the last regarded himself less as having "attained," than as a questioner, an experimenter in the school of philosophy.

This places us in the right point of view for estimating the Platonic writings. It guards us against the one extreme of looking upon them as the incoherent fancies of a magnificent dreamer, and the opposite extreme of seeking in them a perfectly adjusted and complete system. Both assumptions are equally impossible. The former is impossible because Plato was a philosopher, with a philosopher's ceaseless striving after truth and unity. The latter is impossible from the nature of the problem which he undertook to solve, that, viz., of first settling the proper method of science; and then, of moulding into harmony the manifold and warring elements of Greek speculation. Not, perhaps, that Plato formally and consciously set himself to this task. But such was the breadth and manysidedness of his mind that he could not refrain from grasping and drawing within his sphere of inquiry, every distinctly marked train of speculation. To the end of his life, therefore, Plato's dialogues were, in part indeed, expositions of certain great central truths on which he felt himself securely planted; but in part, illustrations of a method, trials of the force and temper of his dialectics, hesitating incursions into a

territory which he could not yet claim to have subjugated. Some smaller dialogues on specific ethical points are probably to be referred to his more strictly Socratic period. His residence in Megara produced, doubtless, the noble tetralogy of the Theatetus, the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Parmenides; and finally to the period after his return from his travels with his accumulated stores of thought, belong those splendid compositions, the Phædrus, the Symposium, the Gorgias, the Phædon, the Philebus, the Republic, the Timæus, and the Laws; though in what order it is impossible to decide, except that we may naturally regard the Phædrus as the earliest. work of this period, while the Laws, by universal admission, is among the latest. This general arrangement seems to spring almost necessarily out of the course of the Platonic development. It assigns to the period of his pupilage under Socrates those dialogues which discuss specific ethical doctrines, and expose the pretensions of the sophists in the purely Socratic spirit. It assigns to the next stage, when, withdrawn from the direct teachings of his master, he felt the influence of the Megaro-Eleatic speculations, the dialogues which determine. the conception of science, and develop his doctrine of ideal forms. And finally, it reserves the more constructive dialogues, in which physics, ethics, politics, appear united, pervaded, and controlled by this central doctrine, and tinged by the ascetic spirit, and the mythical and mystical tendencies of Pythagoreanism, to that later period when he had felt the full influence of that school, and when his ripened intellect was naturally seeking to harmonize all the varied elements of its culture.

Plato is one of the most fascinating writers that ever undertook to expound the enigmas of philosophy. He spreads the exuberance of an exhaustless fancy over the subtlest controversies of the dialectician. With the profoundness of the sage he combines the brilliancy of the poet; with the severity of the earnest votary of truth he unites the laughing playfulness of the child. That Plato could have written the Iliad is doubtless as impossible as that Homer could have produced the Theætetus or the Republic. But in the field of philosophy he displays