out of the past

Reprints from the classics; biographies of famous homosexuals. ONE believes that the public as a whole is quite unaware of the great and decisive contributions made to civilization by homosexual men and women in every age, as a result of much suppression of the truth, distortion of facts and ignorance indulged by certain critics, historians and biographers.

PLATO

In this issue appears the first of a series of extracts from one of the dialogues of Plato called THE SYMPOSIUM. For those who are not at least partially familiar with the Greek Classics, some introductory comments and explanations are in order.

At the time when Socrates was condemned to death in Athens, in the year 399 B.C., Plato was about twenty-eight years of age. With Aristotle, Plato had been one of the 'pupils' of Socrates, if such can be called the many men of Athens who, in an informal fashion, were followers of Socrates and ardent admirers of Socratic wisdom.

This great triumvirate of intellects-Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle-has, during two thousand years, exercised a dominating influence on Western thought and culture second only to that of the Christ, Himself. Their teachings, taken as a whole, outline structures of thought and provide interpretations of experience which are so true to the human psyche that there is very little in modern philosophy which does not partake of their essence. Just as music is developed from the basic properties of sound and tonal effect, so is philosophy evolved from the basic properties of human thought and experience; and to the prodigious brainwork of these three men we owe perhaps the most diligent exposure of philosophic questions and materials that the modern world possesses.

Unlike Socrates who, so far as we know, left no writings, both Plato and Aristotle wrote prolifically. And unlike Aristotle, who wrote in the coldest and strictest of prose, and who was not at all given to eulogizing his teacher, Plato composed his writings in the most poetic and fluent style, and, effacing himself entirely, set his teacher, Socrates, as the hero and centre of all of his philosophic speculations.

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