THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

IF YOU look at a map of Europe you
CHAPTER I
Plato
I. THE CONTEXT OF PLATO
will observe that Greece is a skeleton-
like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea,
South of it lies the great island of Crete, from which those grasping fingers
of civili-
captured, in the second millennium before Christ, the beginnings
zation and culture. To the east, across the ^Egean Sea, lies Asia Minor,
quiet and apathetic now, but throbbing, in pre-Platonic days, with in-
dustry, commerce and speculation. To the west, across the Ionian, Italy
stands, like a leaning tower in the sea, and Sicily and Spain, each in those
days with thriving Greek colonies; and at the end, the "Pillars of Hercules"
(which we call Gibraltar), that sombre portal through which not
many an ancient mariner dared to pass. And on the north those still
untamed and half-barbaric regions, then named Thessaly and Epirus and
Macedonia, from which or through which the vigorous bands had come
which fathered the geniuses of Homeric and Periclcan Greece.
Look again at the map, and you see countless indentations of coast
and elevations of land; everywhere gulfs and bays and the intrusive sea;
and all the earth tumbled and tossed into mountains and hills. Greece
was broken into isolated fragments by these natural barriers of sea and
soil; travel and communication were far more difficult and dangerous
then than now; every valley therefore developed its own self-sufficient
economic life, its own sovereign government, its own institutions and
dialect and religion and culture* In each case one or two cities, and
around them, stretching up the mountainslopcs, an agricultural hinterland
: such were the "city-states" of Eubcea, and Locris, and -^Etolia, and
Phocis, and Bceotia, and Achsea, and Argolis, and Elis, and Arcadia, and
Messenia, and Laconia with its Sparta, and Attica with its Athens.
Look at the map a last time, and observe the position of Athens : it is
the farthest cast of the larger cities of Greece. It was favorably placed to
be the door through which the Greeks passed out to the busy
Minor, and through which those elder cities sent their luxuries and their
culture to adolescent Greece. It had an admirable port, Piraeus, where
cities of Asia
countless vessels might find a haven from the rough waters of the sea*
And it bad a great maritime fleet.