The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams. He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states, whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the banks of the Indus River. But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon the unruly democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks. I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without exhausting that rich vein of pure learning. At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university. After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336 when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and soon attracted pupils from all over the world. Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word for free thinking and unbelief.