PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION AND LIFE.
It is the calm judgment of history that, in artistic,
literary, and philosophical development, the world
shows, relatively, nothing comparable to the Golden
Age of Greece. Attica was the Shakespeare of the
Ancient World. As the Bard of Avon gathered the
material of legend, romance, and history, and crowned
the intellectual activity of the Elizabethan Age with
results of enduring value, so the leading city of Greece
centred in herself many influences of the Orient, and,
in a period of great intellectual awakening under favorable
conditions, became the genius that produced
results of surpassing power and beauty. The Greeks
created when European civilization was young, and
as yet there was little of the ideal that, in the Attic
Period, blossomed into the conceptions of the True,
the Beautiful, and the Good.
In any other period never has so great a master as Socrates found so great a pupil as Plato; never has so great a master as Plato encountered so great a pupil as Aristotle. Each pupil grasped and enlarged upon the mighty work of his instructor.
The world still wonders how any age could become so suddenly and highly creative. Like the century plant, the Greek race seemed to have been accumulating, through a long period, power for a quick and startling development. The thoughtful
