great to resist.

Plato smiled--he never laughed, being too well-bred for that. Then he
sighed, and moved a little nearer in.

"Individuals are nothing. The State is all. To offend the State is to
die. The State is an organization and we are members of it. The State is
only as rich as its poorest citizen. We are all given a little sample of
divinity to study, model and marvel at. To understand the State you must
KNOW THYSELF."

Plato lingered until the little crowd had dispersed, and when the old
man with the goggle-eyes and full-moon face went shuffling slowly down
the street, he approached and asked him a question.

This man Socrates was no fool--the populace was wrong--he was a man so
natural and free from cant that he appeared to the triflers and
pretenders like a pretender, and they asked, "Is he sincere?"

What Plato was by birth, breeding and inheritance, Socrates was by
nature--a noble man.

Up to this time the ambition of Plato had been for place and power--to
make the right impression on the people in order to gain political
preferment. He had been educated in the school of the Sophists, and his
principal studies were poetry, rhetoric and deportment.

And now straightway he destroyed the manuscript of his poems, for in
their writing he had suddenly discovered that he had not written what he
inwardly believed was true, but simply that which he thought was proper
and nice to say. In other words, his literature had been a form of
pretense.

Daily thereafter, where went Socrates there went Plato. Side by side
they sat on the curb--Socrates talking, questioning the bystanders,
accosting the passers-by; Plato talking little, but listening much.

Socrates was short, stout and miles around. Plato was tall, athletic and
broad-shouldered. In fact, the word, "plato," or "platon," means broad,
and it was given him as a nickname by his comrades. His correct name was
Aristocles, but "Plato" suited him better, since it symbols that he was
not only broad of shoulder, but likewise in mind. He was not only noble
by birth, but noble in appearance.

Emerson calls him the universal man. He absorbed all the science, all
the art, all the philosophy of his day. He was handsome, kindly,
graceful, gracious, generous, and lived and died a bachelor. He never
collided with either poverty or matrimony.

* * * * *

Plato was twenty-eight years old when Socrates died. For eight years
they had be