What is justice? What is the difference between right and wrong? What should we teach the young?
These are hard questions, but they are questions the ancient Greeks thought all wise men should try to answer. The Greeks even invented a word that means, lover of wisdom, philosophos, or, philosopher. The pursuit of wisdom, sometimes called philosophy, is one of the lasting achievements of ancient Greek civilization.
virtue one of the most important greek philosophers was a man who said the unexamined life is not worth living his name was socrates and you could find him arguing with people on the sidewalks of athens during the 5th century bc Ever since this skunk set up shop here, he's made me work twice as hard. So you say Simeon's here is your enemy because he makes you work harder than you did before. Wasn't that enough to make any man your enemy?
What an enemy is a man who does you evil, isn't he? Any fool. knows that and the friend is one who does you good any fool knows that too but what a fool does not know is what is good and what is evil now you make better races and you work harder because of simius competition do you not this question and answer method of teaching is still known today as the socratic method thank you The talk to Socrates was to be taken down the garden path at the end of which one finds that, alas, you don't know what you're talking about. So it's fun to read the works. You sympathize.
with the person Socrates is questioning. And you have a sense that this poor person is being had, but you don't know exactly how it's being done. Socrates is the master of this. Socrates made a lot of enemies.
because he questioned many of the ideas people believed in. The leaders of Athens soon grew tired of being tripped up by Socrates'sharp tongue. In 399 BC, the 69-year-old philosopher was brought to trial for corrupting the young. Socrates was offered his freedom if he would just stop questioning people. He refused.
He was condemned to die by drinking poison made from the hemlock plant. But the teachings of Socrates would live on thanks to his most famous student, Plato. Plato made Socrates the main character in more than 20 of his books, including The Republic, a series of imaginary conversations between Socrates and others.
Plato was born during the Golden Age of Athens, around 428 BC. The newly completed Parthenon towered over the city, one of the crowning achievements of the world's first democracy. The first plays were performed and the first great histories written.
But it was also a time of devastating human loss. For the first 23 years of Plato's life, the Peloponnesian War raged between Athens and its neighbor Sparta. Plato thought there must be a better way to live.
In his book, The Republic, Plato describes a utopia, an imaginary perfect world, in which everybody gets one job for life and is assigned a social rank. There is no war, because philosophers, of course, are kings. To ensure that this perfect world remains perfect, children are only allowed to hear heroic and uplifting tales. The famous national epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey are out, because the gods behave badly and the heroes are flawed. How would you feel if your favorite movies and TV shows were banned because they were considered bad for you?
Plato was serious about spreading his ideas. He even started a school called the Academy. The Academy's most famous student was a kid named Aristotle, who went on to tutor Alexander the Great.
The writings of the Greek philosophers might have been lost forever after the Roman Empire collapsed, except for the work of Islamic scholars. They translated Plato into Arabic and passed his books through Egypt, India, Persia and Spain. It wasn't until centuries later that the ancient texts finally reappeared in Europe.
Philosophy, wrote Aristotle. begins in wonder. We still wonder about the same questions that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle asked all those centuries ago. The quest for wisdom and justice is as important today as it was in ancient Greece.