Views of the Xenophontic Sokrates respecting the Holy--different from those of the Platonic Sokrates--he disallows any common absolute general type of the Holy--he recognises an indefinite variety of types, discordant and relative _ib._ The Holy a branch of the Just--not tenable as a definition, but useful as bringing to view the subordination of logical terms 455 The Euthyphron represents Plato's way of replying to the charge of impiety, preferred by Melêtus against Sokrates--comparison with Xenophon's way of replying _ib._ CHAPTER I. PLATO. PRE-SOKRATIC PHILOSOPHY. CHAPTER I. SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY IN GREECE, BEFORE AND IN THE TIME OF SOKRATES. [Side-note: Change in the political condition of Greece during the life of Plato.] The life of Plato extends from 427-347 B.C. He was born in the fourth year of the Peloponnesian war, and he died at the age of 80, about the time when Olynthus was taken by the Macedonian Philip. The last years of his life thus witnessed a melancholy breach in the integrity of the Hellenic world, and even exhibited data from which a far-sighted Hellenic politician might have anticipated something like the coming subjugation, realised afterwards by the victory of Philip at Chæroneia. But during the first half of Plato's life, no such anticipations seemed even within the limits of possibility. The forces of Hellas, though discordant among themselves, were superabundant as to defensive efficacy, and were disposed rather to aggression against foreign enemies, especially against a country then so little formidable as Macedonia. It was under this contemplation of Hellas self-acting and self-sufficing--an aggregate of cities, each a political unit, yet held together by strong ties of race, language, religion, and common feelings of various kinds--that the mind of Plato was both formed and matured. In appreciating, as far as our scanty evidence allows, the circumstances which determined his intellectual and speculative character, I shall be compelled to touch briefly upon the various philosophical theories which were propounded anterior to Sokrates--as well as to repeat some matters already brought to view in the sixteenth, sixty-seventh, and sixty-eighth chapters of my History of Greece. [Side-note: Early Greek mind, satisfied with the belief in polytheistic personal agents as the real producing causes of phenomena.]