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“... it is, has been in plain view all along: Herodotus, Thucydides, Old Comedy, Protagoras, Xenophon, Plato, Plutarch’s biography and of course the remains (above all on the Acropolis) of the great civic building programme. This suggests that any interpretative changes are due more to the varying assumptions of a succession of observers than to any fundamental ...”

“... and the abiding monuments of Western culture, Aristotle and his necessary precursor Plato. Lear wants Freud and Aristotle to get on, and this requires a certain artfulness. ‘Philosophy, Aristotle said, begins in wonder,’ he writes. ‘Psychoanalysis begins in wonder that the unintelligibility of the events which surround one do not cause ...”

“... God had revealed to Solomon the secrets of musical harmony which were also known to Pythagoras and Plato. The rules of good architecture were thus supported by both reason (mathematics) and revelation. Another of Wittkower’s students was Professor Joseph Rykwert. In a sense, his exciting new book, The First Moderns, does for the architecture of the 18th ...”

“... individualism was not invented by Descartes. Coady quite rightly begins much earlier, with Plato. In an influential passage of Plato’s Theaetetus, a jury passes judgment on a crime they did not witness. Suppose they get it right. Having been told about the crime by people who did see it, they decide that it was ...”

“... a moment in Rebel without a Cause, when Jim Stark (played by James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) climb up to an old Hollywood mansion that’s now lying empty. They pretend they’re going to live there together, with Jim and Judy as the ‘parents’ in this haunted house. Plato mimics an estate ...”

“... females, his body and mind lacerated by drugs, misled by spells and baffled by lures. When Plato accuses rhetoricians and sophists of witchcraft, it is these threats and values he seems to be appropriating to bolster the discipline of philosophy, and it has become a set of values with which it is hard not to feel complicit. It was something of a ...”

“... earliest giants of literary prose – the sophists, Xenophon and, most prominently, Herodotus and Plato – saw themselves as continuers of the Aesopic tradition and competitors with it. Critics have long wondered why Herodotus intercut his text with logoi, short and sometimes digressive stories; Kurke sees these as a sign of covert affiliation with ...”

“... who preferred more intellectual guidance could turn to the classical philosophers, among whom Plato remained a bestseller. Those who found Plato too wordy and patrician might prefer the informal teaching of a humble pundit who could still outclass priests and professors. Aesop had been a folk hero for at least five ...”

“... and attracts followers: ‘Promote the upright and the crooked will follow.’ In the Apology, Plato’s record of Socrates’ defence against the charges of corrupting youth and praising false gods, Socrates tells his accusers that ignorant men such as themselves corrupt the young by teaching them by their words and deeds to think and act without ...”

“... It’s also a number useful in fractions, dividing into sixths, quarters, thirds and pairs. So Plato in Laws makes the 12 gods the central organising system of both time and space in his theoretical city state called Magnesia, with monthly festivals alloted to each divinity including Pluto-Hades, to whom the last month is dedicated, and 12 tribes named ...”

“... lord happy and rich along with a Hong Kong importer; we’re a terrible short-termist lot; as Plato said, we’ll never control this except with force) but also by the latest typhoon. Eight hundred dead in chocolate unguent and more to be uncovered. I think of the Gulf Stream going too much up or down I forget which (both are bad), because the Arctic is ...”

“... less close to Aquinas than it is to Schopenhauer – the first major European philosopher after Plato to turn to Indian religion. Schopenhauer had a bust of Buddha in his room and kept a poodle called Atma (‘World-Soul’). The Jesuit philosopher Coplestone has noticed, incidentally, that Bergson, whose influence on Eliot is undoubted, is himself ...”

“... language is or isn’t goes a long way back, by scholarly tradition if not in historical fact to Plato and the dialogue known as the Cratylus. In this, two incompatible views of language are set in opposition. According to one view, argued for by Hermogenes, language is an institution founded on convention and on that alone. The forms that any particular ...”

“... such as Aristotle, whom Mill calls ‘the greatest observer of his own or any other age’, and Plato, whom he calls ‘the greatest dialectician’, studied men and nature straight on. After them, according to Mill, ‘nature was studied not in nature, but in Plato or Aristotle ...’ It is, Mill is saying, one thing to ...”

“... Think of ancient Egyptian art, with its extreme conservatism and conventionalism, prompting Plato to remark, admittedly with some exaggeration, that it had remained unchanged for ten thousand years. Novelty and originality were simply not merits in the Egyptian aesthetic and it was just such austere conservatism that ...”