THREE:It is evident that the fate of Socrates was constantly in Platos thoughts, and greatly embittered his scorn for the multitude as well as for those who made themselves its ministers and minions. It so happened that his friends three accusers had been respectively a poet, a statesman, and a rhetor; thus aptly typifying to the philosophers lively imagination the triad of charlatans in whom public opinion found its appropriate representatives and spokesmen. Yet Plato ought consistently to have held that the condemnation of Socrates was, equally with the persecution of Pericles, a satire on the teaching which, after at least thirty years exercise, had left its auditors more corrupt than it found them. In like manner the ostracism of Aristeides might be set against similar202 sentences passed on less puritanical statesmen. For the purpose of the argument it would have been sufficient to show that in existing circumstances the office of public adviser was both thankless and dangerous. We must always remember that when Plato is speaking of past times he is profoundly influenced by aristocratic traditions, and also that under a retrospective disguise he is really attacking contemporary abuses. And if, even then, his denunciations seem excessive, their justification may be found in that continued decay of public virtue which, not long afterwards, brought about the final catastrophe of Athenian independence.Dick, examining with the thoroughness of an expert, with Jeffs and his chums life perhaps depending on his care, stated that he saw no damage to the waterproofed coverings of the water supports. Declaring that they would stand by and watch the airplane, Sandy and Dick watched Larry and Jeff get settled, Dick spun the propeller to pump gas into the still heated cylinders, Jeff gave the switch-oncontact! call, Dick, pulling down on the prop, sprang aside to avoid its flailing blades, and the amphibians engine took up its roar.
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