Word: plato
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...mountains by the sea; later, they would hear of the careless youth of Athens who "had never tasted war." Some would imitate not Oscar Wilde but Alcibiades who sliced the noses off of the gods before he sailed to war, in Sicily, across a stormy sea. They might share Plato's dream of a fair, impossible republic and they might share too his memory of Socrates, a strange fellow who was continually talking and who, before he drank poison bravely, looked out of the windows of his jail at the hills of Athens...
Long before the days of scientific dredging, Plato and his friends sat at the baths discussing an ancient and powerful kingdom, an ideal commonwealth which had sunk into the sea: Atlantis. Others took up the tale; medieval writers made much of it; Brazilian legends still stimulate searching parties. The bank itself has been thoroughly mapped by H. M. S. Challenger (1873-76), the German ship Gazelle (1874-76), the French ship Travailleur (1880), the U. S. ship Blake (1877), the expedition of H. S. H. Prince of Monaco, the German Validivia expedition...
...fifth century B. C.-the idea being that when a student masters one civilization he is able to deal intelligently with any civilization or any problem: Dr. Meiklejohn and eleven instructors gave the students a program of reading, conference, discussion, papers to be handed in. They read Plato, Aristotle and Euripides, as.well as occasional chunks of Shakespeare, Shaw, O'Neill. They sketched Greek temples. Art, law, war economics, religion-no phase of Athenian existence was omitted. The climax of the year was a critical review, written by each student, of a modern book called the Greek View of Life...
...Surely these phenomena portend a reversal of the experience of history. Even Plato commented with bitterness on the fact that the winner of the foot race in the Olympic Games was better known in Greece than himself. And yet today we hear murmurs because "H" men exploit their position in order to sell insurance, real estate, bonds, and athletic supplies, but what are they to do? It may be reasonable to exclude them from the society of educated men, because listening to a monologue on the stockmarket is pretty painful punishment: but to criticise them for turning an honest dollar...
...publish, his scientific spirit urged him to accumulate more data. In 1628 a slim volume of 72 pages with two plates of diagrams came out under his name-72 pages of clear, logical, dignified exposition in which the whole existing theory of the blood was demolished. Homer, Aristotle, Plato, every village barber who had ever breathed a vein had known that the blood moved but until the hawkeyed Harvey, no one knew...