If his critics had been more intent on discovering the excellence of his rules of abstinence than on discussing, with frivolous diligence, the probable or possible reasons of his alleged prohibition of beans, it would have redounded more to their credit for wisdom and love of truth. Assuming the fact of the prohibition, in place of collecting all the most absurd gossip of antiquity, they might perhaps have found a more rational and more solid reason in the hypothesis that the bean being, as used in the ballot, a symbol and outward and visible sign of political life, was employed by Pythagoras parabolically to dissuade his followers from participating in the idle strife of party faction, and to exhort them to concentrate their efforts upon an attempt to achieve the solid and lasting reformation of mankind.[11] But to be much concerned in a patient inquiry after truth unhappily has been not always the characteristic of professional commentators. Blind hero-worship or idolatry of genius or intellect, even when directed to high moral aims, is no part of our creed; and it is sufficient to be assured that he was human, to be free to confess that the historical founder of _akreophagy_ was not exempt from human infirmity, and that he could not wholly rise above the wonder-loving spirit of an uncritical age. Deducting all that has been imputed to him of the fanciful or fantastic, enough still remains to force us to recognise in the philosopher-prophet of Samos one of the master-spirits of the world.[12] III. PLATO. 428-347 B.C. The most renowned of all the prose writers of antiquity may be said to have been almost the lineal descendant, in philosophy, of the teacher of Samos. He belonged to the aristocratic families of Athens--“the eye of Greece”--then and for long afterwards the centre of art and science. His original name was Aristokles, which he might well have retained. Like another equally famous leader in literature, François Marie Arouet, he abandoned his birth-name, and he assumed or acquired the name by which he is immortalised, to characterise, as it is said, either the breadth of his brow or the extensiveness of his mental powers. In very early youth he seems to have displayed his literary aptitude and tastes in the various kinds of poetry--epic, tragic, and lyric--as well as to have distinguished himself as an athlete in the great national contests or “games,” as they were called, the grand object of ambition of every Greek. He was instructed in the chief and necessary parts of a liberal Greek education by the most able professors of the time. He devoted himself with ardour to the pursuit of knowledge, and sedulously studied the systems of philosophy which then divided the literary world.