any “casual hope of being elsewhere blest.” The gods and heroes, the kindly lesser powers that haunt mountain, wood, and stream, were almost as near to the fifth-century Hellenes as to the mythic age itself. Ordinary men knew all the Homeric poems by heart. In popular tradition, in the myriad forms of painting and sculpture, above all as vivified afresh by the genius of dramatic poetry, the legends
“Of Thebes or Pelops’ line,
Or the tale of Troy divine,”
still hung like a splendid tapestry about the calmer reality.
That reality itself was anything but commonplace. The glorious war against the Persian invader left the most deep-rooted confidence that the Hellene had no rival, and that Athens was the natural capital and university of Hellas. Pericles lived and died in that belief: and Plato’s life all but overlapped that of the idealistic statesman. He must have actually looked on, an eager-eyed boy, when the armada sailed forth upon the Sicilian expedition, amid yet wilder dreams of occidental empire.
The failure and disillusion came—swift and bitter, indeed. Yet victorious Sparta did not destroy, or even utterly and permanently humble, her nobler rival. Throughout Plato’s mature life Athens was again self-governed; she had regained a fleet, some commerce, and even a modest leadership in a maritime league, though never her pristine haughtiness and far-reaching hopes. Her people looked backward, rather than forward, with fond pride. Their instinct was right. Macedon, not Attica, was to lead Hellenism to world-wide dominion, though the culture, the art, and the speech of the race were to remain always essentially Attic.
Throughout the fourth century B.C., indeed, supremacy in things spiritual still abode with Athens. With Plato walked and talked, under the over-arching trees of Academe, the choicest spirits of Hellas—greatest of all, Aristotle, “master of them that know”—though less happy than Plato and all they that are dreamers with him of the dream divine. Aristotle was drawn to Athens by the great teacher, and spent there his happiest and most useful years.
Plato, then, was no mere introverted musing psychologist
