In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates had ever said or thought into a series of dialogues which might be truthfully called the Socratian Gospels.
When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain of the more obscure points in his master’s doctrines and explained them in a series of brilliant essays. And finally he conducted a number of lecture courses which spread the Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond the confines of Attica.
In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and unselfish devotion that we might almost compare him to St. Paul. But whereas St. Paul had led a most adventurous and dangerous existence, ever traveling from north to south and from west to east that he might bring the Good Tidings to all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged from his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to come to him.
Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent wealth allowed him to do this.
In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through his mother could trace his descent to no one less than Solon. Then as soon as he came of age he inherited a fortune more than sufficient for his simple needs.
And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly traveled to the Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to follow a few of the lectures in the Platonic University.
For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young men of his time. He served in the army, but without any particular interest in military affairs. He went in for outdoor sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly good runner, but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium. Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal of his time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and paid a short visit to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather Solon had done before him. After that, however, he returned home for good and during fifty consecutive years he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners of a pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the river Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the Academy.
He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful institutions to beautiful ideas.
This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the members of the “upper class.”
Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.