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Professor Whitehead has said that all modern philosophy
is but a footnotes to Plato. We know of Socrates as a man
of modest begginings and mild manners, but Plato on the
other hand was something to contend with. He was first
of all an aristocrat, he was an Olympic wrestler, he was
at least the “Whizzer” White of his time. Plato itself
means broad shoulders. Plato was a Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard
graduate, from the main line of Philadelphia, who went on
to play professional football and finish Harvard Law School
number 1 in is class.

Socrates, according to Plato, always said that “An
unexamined life is not worth living.” These dialogues that
we discuss in this lesion are all about the trial and con-
viction and death of Socrates. Of course, he was charged
by Meletus, a democrat, with, in Socrates’ words, “making
loud speculations about the heavens and the earth and the
areas under the earth, and secondly, of misleading the young
and third, of making the better argument seem worse. All were
apparently capital offenses in Athens at that time. Now
Meletus was not friend of Socrates, although Socrates is
not very mean to him. Meletus was a democrat, Plato an
aristocrat, Socrates a man of basically aristocratic sympathies.
They were both opposed to the democrats. Their democrats democracy
were was more of a town meeting form of democracy and not a
constitutional democracy. And It was a mob. Both of these men well were