Everyone crowded round to catch a glimpse of him. The spectacle proved to be nothing brilliant, just a pathetic old man of slight build, wrapped in a coarse, shabby cloak, and lying on some grass by the sea. People began to laugh and jeer at him.
The long career of Agesilaus—more than forty-one years on the throne—has a tragic dimension. Although he was a man of some ability, he saw the world as if he suffered from tunnel vision. He allowed his values to be distorted by a hot-tempered fidelity to his homeland. Whatever was in his country’s interest, narrowly defined, was right, and whatever was not was wrong.
He refused to accept, for example, that the illegal seizure of the Theban citadel had been counterproductive. His long-standing prejudice against the Thebans encouraged them to military reforms and so contributed to the disaster of Leuctra. He never accepted the loss of Messenia and demotion from the status of a great power.
At the height of his success he believed himself destined to lead an invasion of the Persian Empire and so avenge the criminal aggression of Darius and Xerxes. He represented Sparta in its days of unparalleled authority, but he lived long enough to see it reduced to a maddened impotence.
Relations with the Egyptians were complicated and unsatisfactory. But Agesilaus had to swallow his pride and fulfill his contract. In 360, a rival pharaoh, to whom he had switched his loyalties, let him go. He was given a fine formal leave-taking—and the sum of 250 talents.
Agesilaus never made it home. Since it was winter, he had his fleet hug the shore. At a deserted spot on the Libyan coast, called the Harbor of Menelaus, he died. As a rule the bodies of Spartans who lost their lives abroad were buried where they fell, but kings were brought home. The custom was to steep their corpses in honey, but on this occasion none could be found. So his comrades embalmed their leader in wax.
As he approached his end, Agesilaus gave instructions, according to Plutarch, to his staff that they should not commission any image of his person: “If I have accomplished any glorious act, that will be my memorial. If I have not, not all the statues in the world—the products of vulgar, worthless men—will make any difference.”
Into which category, one wonders, did the calamitous king place himself?
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As its power diminished, Athens became the ancient equivalent of a university town, where wealthy young men just out of their teens could finish their education.
Sophists had usually been itinerant, but from the end of the fifth century some of them settled down and founded higher education establishments, especially in Athens. Groups of teachers, students, and researchers came together in one place for a common purpose. They arrived from all parts of the Greek world and Athens was soon more than one polis among many, but a genuinely Panhellenic center. At last the dream of Pericles was coming true—culturally if not politically.
For most of these establishments the basic offer to the student, as Plato put into the mouth of Protagoras, was to promote “sound judgment in his personal life, showing him how best to manage his household, and in public life to make the most effective contribution in action and speech.”
The first to open his school in Athens shortly after 399 was Antisthenes, a devotee of Socrates (although he placed more emphasis on the written word than Socrates and expected those attending his classes to take notes). Then a few years later came Isocrates’ establishment, many of whose students came from abroad. One of his favorites was the then young and promising Timotheus.
Plato (a nickname perhaps meaning broad-browed, his given name being Aristocles) was by far the most able of the disciples of Socrates. He had a bad time of things during the early postwar years. He was born about 429 to a distinguished and wealthy upper-class family and could have expected a career in public affairs. Critias, leader of the Thirty, was an uncle of his as was one of his colleagues in power, Charmides. The violence of the regime disillusioned him with politics and “it soon showed the preceding government to have been an age of gold.” The revived democracy was scarcely an improvement, for it put Socrates to death.
The grief-stricken Plato and other disciples retreated to Megara. He spent the next twelve years traveling—first, to Cyrene in North Africa, then to southern Italy and Sicily where he met followers of the sixth-century polymath and mystic Pythagoras. He visited the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, but disliked its pleasure-seeking atmosphere. (He made two more visits to the city in the vain hope of training his son and successor to be a virtuous ruler.)
In 387, Plato bought a small estate next to the Academy, a public park and gymnasium just outside the city. Here he opened a school of philosophy and mathematics of which he remained the head until his death in 347. Unlike most of his competitors he banned the teaching of rhetoric, the art of making the worse seem the better cause.
Plato wrote about twenty-five philosophical dialogues, all of which survive (the authenticity of a few has been questioned). He does not appear in any of them himself and he never announces his own Platonic doctrines. This detachment sends an important message to the inquirer after truth: he should never accept any philosophical proposition without testing it. Knowledge can only be won through intellectual struggle.
However, some overriding themes do emerge in Plato’s work. Values are absolute and virtue is essential to an individual’s life. True knowledge, what Socrates in the dialogues calls wisdom, enables whoever has it to see that sense impressions are illusory and to understand their ideal or perfect “forms” (see this page). These forms are actual entities, but can only be grasped by abstract reflection and inquiry, not by experience. Wrongdoing stems from ignorance; those who truly know what is good will inevitably do good. In On the State, Plato, no democrat, describes an ideal state governed by wise guardians or philosopher-kings.
The historical Socrates used his technique of question and answer, the elenchus, or dialectic, to test definitions of, say, love or justice. However, the technique has a weakness in that it tends to show what these things are not, not what they are. In Plato’s later dialogues “his” Socrates plays a lesser role or fades away altogether. Positive theories or teachings are put forward (for instance, a belief in reincarnation, so that new knowledge is really an act of remembering what we had known before we were born) and we may guess that what we read derives from the disciple rather than the master.
Plato was an inspiration to his contemporaries (including to that well-known intellectual King Philip of Macedon, who paid him memorial honors when he died) and has remained so to the present day. A leading British thinker of the twentieth century wrote: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
One of Plato’s best students was a seventeen-year-old lad called Aristotle, a native of Chalcidice. He was the son of the court physician to the king of Macedon and may well have been, or become, a citizen of the kingdom. He enrolled at the Academy in 367 and was quickly recognized as an outstanding student. It seems that while respecting Plato he was not slow to criticize him. Plato was reported to have said of him: “Aristotle kicked against me as a colt kicks against his mother.”
Aristotle remained at the Academy until Plato’s death and at about that time left Athens, probably because of his association with the unpopular Macedonians. He settled for a while with fellow-philosophers in a small city-state in the Troad under the protection of Hermeias, an intellectually inclined tyrant who had studied at the Academy under Plato. Aristotle married his niece and adopted daughter.
Hermeias conspired with Philip of Macedon and rose against the Great King, but was tricked into attending a meeting with the Persian general commissioned to quash the revolt. Sent in chains to Susa, he was tortured, mutilated, and impaled. He died saying: “I have done nothing unworthy of philosophy.”