INTRODUCTION
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1. THE AGE OF PLATO.
PLATO was born about 427 B.C., and lived till about 347. Pericles had passed away in 429, and Plato's youth nearly coincided with the wearing struggle of the Peloponnesian war, which ended after a quarter of a century with the military, political, and commercial downfall of Athens. In 404 the city surrendered to Lysander, and an unscrupulous oligarchy, 'the thirty,' was established with Spartan aid. In 399 Socrates fell a victim partly to the perplexed passions of the democracy, mistaking friends for foes, and partly to his own defiance of restraint in matters which concerned his conscience. The epoch was in every way significant. The democracy, no longer imperial, had lost the field for its energies, and the harvest of its gains. The individual citizen could no longer draw a salary for judging the causes of an empire, nor profit by the crowds that thronged to the com- mercial capital of Greece, nor gain at once a sailor's pay and training in vigilance and maritime skill by maintaining the naval police of the Eastern Mediterranean. Pauperism ap- peared within the citizen ranks; self-indulgence grew; energy declined; Macedon arose in the distance, and the day of the sovereign city-commonwealth was over.