Author Description

THE SON OF APOLLO THEMES OF PLATO BY FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Eije tbetfte i e tf Cambridge MDCCCCXXIX NOTE THE illustrations in this book are, for the most part, adaptations of authentic Greek material of the time near to Plato. The drawings are by my son, Fred erick J. Woodbridge, who has made in them only such changes as seemed warranted by the context in which they now appear. In the banquet scene, for example, it was obviously appropriate to transform a lady into a gentleman and the stele at the end, carrying those two epitomes of wisdom, Know Thyself 5 and Nothing in Excess, is the kind of stele my son looked for and found in his imagination. It is my hope that the illus trations, in their faithfulness to the spirit of such artists of ancient Greece as Duris, Smikros, and Euphronios, contribute, from a source too much neglected by philosophers, something of the character of Platonic scenes as a contemporary might render them. I am indebted to Horace Liveright, Inc., publishers of Bcrtrand Russells Education and the Good Life, for permission to quote entire the Introduction to that book. I am very conscious that my rendering of Plato is an interpretation. It represents, however, the Plato who, after repeated reading and after a studious attempt to viii NOTE deal with the documents in the case, has caught my imagination the son of Apollo and not the founder of the Academy, the artist and not the metaphysician. I have a very strong suspicion that the Plato of the philosophers is more a product of a biased tradition than of Athenian culture, but I cannot prove it nor would I attempt the proof. Yet I may say that there appears to me to be considerable evidence that the writers of commentaries and epitomes transformed Aristotelian references to Plato, which were illus trative, into a definition of the Platonic enterprise, thus linking Plato and Aristotle together as men with the same basic purpose but rivals in the exec