lar assembly. He
regarded the Athenian constitution as past help.

Not much is known of the philosopher's youth. He composed poems. He
was given the best education that an Athenian citizen of those days
could obtain. His teacher, Cratylus, was a follower of Heracleitus,
and Plato no doubt learned from him the doctrines of that philosopher.
It is improbable that he allowed himself to remain unacquainted with
the disputations of the Sophists, many of whom were his own
contemporaries. He probably read the book of Anaxagoras, which was
easily obtainable in Athens at the time. But on all these points we
have no certain information. What we do know is that the decisive
event in his youth, and indeed in his life, was his association with
Socrates.

For the last eight years of the life of Socrates, Plato was his friend
and his faithful disciple. The teaching and personality of the master
constituted the supreme intellectual impulse of his life, and the
inspiration of his entire thought. And the devotion and esteem which
he felt for Socrates, so far from waning as the years went by, seem,
on the contrary, to have grown continually stronger. For it is
precisely in the latest dialogues of his long life that some of the
most charming and admiring portraits of Socrates are to be found.
Socrates became for him the pattern and exemplar of the true
philosopher.

After the death of Socrates a second period opens in the life of
Plato, the period of his travels. He migrated first to Megara, where
his friend and fellow-disciple Euclid was then founding the Megaric
school. The Megaric philosophy was a combination of the thought of
Socrates with that of the Eleatics. And it was no doubt here, at {167}
Megara, under the influence of Euclid, that Plato formed his deeper
acquaintance with the teaching of Parmenides, which exercised an
all-important influence upon his own philosophy. From Megara he
travelled to Cyrene, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily. In Italy he came in
contact with the Pythagoreans. And to the effects of this journey may
be attributed the strong Pythagorean elements which permeate his
thought.

In Sicily he attended the court of Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of
Syracuse. But here his conduct seems to have given grave offence.
Dionysius was so angered by his moralizings and philosophical
diatribes that he put Plato up to auction in the slave market. Plato
narrowly escaped the fate of slavery, but was ransomed by Anniceris,
the Cy