Plato, the great glory of Athenian philosophy, was born in Ægina, about B.C. 430 years. Descending from Codrus and Solon, his lineage was most distinguished; but his genius was much more illustrious than any ancestral fame. He learned dialectics from Euclides the Megaric; studied the Pythagorean system under Phitolaus and Archytas; and traveled into Egypt to accomplish himself in all that which the geometry and other learning of that country could impart. Returning to Greece, he became the most characteristic and renowned teacher of philosophy in the Periclean age. Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aristotle were among his disciples, and continuators of his immense mental and moral worth. Plato also visited Italy, where he gathered the noble germs which he grafted on the doctrines of Socrates, and which are not accounted for in Xenophon. On his final return to Athens, he took possession of a modest apartment adjacent to the groves and grounds which had been bequeathed by Academus to the public, wherein he lectured to the public on sublime themes. He divided philosophy into three parts--Morals, Physics, and Dialectics. The first division included politics, and under the second, that science which afterward came to be distinguished by the name of metaphysics. In his Commonwealth, the object of Plato was to project a perfect model to which human institutions might in some remote degree approximate. He seems even at that early day to have had a presentiment of the ennobling republicanism which human progress would necessitate and attain. His writings form a mass of literary and moral wisdom, inculcated with the highest charm of thought and manner, which had ever appeared to exalt the imagination and affect the heart. He was, doubtless, the best prose writer of antiquity; in the form and force of his composition, he stands at the highest point of refinement Attic genius ever attained. He died at Athens, eighty-one years old, and was honored with a monument in the Academy, upon which his famous pupil, Aristotle, inscribed an epitaph in terms of reverence and gratitude.