[Illustration: SOCRATES (Vatican Gallery, Rome)] CONDEMNATION AND DEATH OF SOCRATES Late in life Socrates was accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens with his doctrines. As a matter of fact he was a deeply religious man. If he objected to the crude mythology of Homer, he often spoke of one God, who ruled the world, and of a divine spirit or conscience within his own breast. A jury court found him guilty, however, and condemned him to death. He refused to escape from prison when opportunity offered and passed his last days in eager conversation on the immortality of the soul. When the hour of departure arrived, he bade his disciples farewell and calmly drained the cup of hemlock, a poison that caused a painless death. Although Socrates gave his life for his philosophy, this did not perish with him. PLATO One of the members of the Socratic circle was Plato, a wealthy noble who abandoned a public career for the attractions of philosophy. After the death of Socrates, Plato traveled widely in the Greek world and even visited Egypt, where he interviewed the learned priests. On his return to Athens Plato began teaching in the garden and gymnasium called the Academy. [27] His writings, known as _Dialogues_, are cast in the form of question and answer that Socrates had used. In most of them Plato makes Socrates the chief speaker. Plato's works are both profound in thought and admirable in style. The Athenians used to say that if Zeus had spoken Greek he would have spoken it as did Plato. ARISTOTLE As great a philosopher as Plato, but a far less attractive writer, was Aristotle. He was not an Athenian by birth, but he passed many years in Athens, first as a pupil of Plato, who called him the "mind" of the school, and then as a teacher in the Athenian city. Aristotle seems to have taken all knowledge for his province. He investigated the ideas underlying the arts of rhetoric and poetry; he gathered the constitutions of many Greek states and drew from them some general principles of politics; he studied collections of strange plants and animals to learn their structure and habits; he examined the acts and beliefs of men in order to write books on ethics. In all this investigation Aristotle was not content to accept what previous men had written or to spin a pleasing theory out of his own brain. Everywhere he sought for facts; everything he tried to bring to the test of personal observation. Aristotle, then, was as much a scientist as a philosopher. His books were reverently studied for centuries after his death and are still used in our universities. EPICUREANISM