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Greatest teacher of all times.

This famous painting -1797- is the work of the French painter -Jacques Louis David--in the Neo-Classical style--characterized by classical austerity and severity after the wild abandon of the Rococo.This frame is incomplete as it leaves out Plato sitting dejectedly at the foot of Socrates bed on the left.So is the red-robed disciple who hands the goblet of Hemlock to a very confident and defiant Socrates--only Crito is shown clutching at the knee of his "guru"--Socrates.Oft repeated slide in the practicals of the final semester paper on Western Aesthetics in the National Museum Institute-New Delhi

I just could not read The Dialogues of Plato after many attempts. Finally, I borrowed audio lectures of Prof. Michael Sugrue that were produced by the Teaching Company http://www.teach12.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=463 The lectures were brilliant. Here is Prof Sugrue on Marcus Aurelius http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLD09Qa3kMk

Thanks for these fantastic lectures Arun...liberating !!

I am not learned enough to comment on Socrates and the Sophists but on a superficial level I am horrified by the lurid labels that have been attached to Socrates' disciple Plato by modern writers such as Karl Popper. I see this more as bankrupt capitalistic theorizing. On a different plane Spengler wrote ".. there is nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates, Epicurus, and especially Diogenes, sitting beside the Ganges, whereas Diogenes in a western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool". I would only warn that in the distant past the Indus was also known as the Ganges and Saraswati was a western river.

Kierkegaard, whom I respect greatly, but do not understand fully, also described Socrates as a destroyer.

I must say that I would not go with Plato who wanted the poets to be driven out of his ideal republic. Whether this was also the view of Socrates is not certain.

Even such a learned authority as Amartya Sen terms Plato as authoritarian but don't we need some controls over the bankers whose greed almost brought ruin to the whole world?

Dr Pal...it all means only one thing ...more the minds, more the opinions !

In a time frame so broad and ancient....one would have influenced the other and a kind of ameloration would naturally happen. A lot of these ideas might have come from civilizations we are not even aware of as yet....

@ Paresh Very interesting questions! Scholars such as W. K. C. Guthrie, (author of the multi-volume History of Greek Philosophy) and even Bertrand Russell imagined that Greek culture was a purely European phenomenon, but it is far from that. The reverse is also true. Buddhism is a religion in the development of which Indians and people of many other countries participated. The great Ashoka was Diodotus-1, a half-Greek. As Toynbee and others noted, Hellenism and Buddhism have many aspects in common. Buddhism was born in Indus-Saraswati-Baluchistan-Seistan area, not Nepal. Gomata was Gotama. (Go-mata = Gut-ama). It is thus not at all surprising that during the struggle between Darius-1 and Bardiya-Gomata, the Greeks supported the latter. As you yourself note, there are many similarities between the doctrines of Pythagoras and Gotama. But was Phythagoras a real person? If we go to an earlier phase – Orphism - a similar scenario unfolds. E. R. Dodds and others traced its roots to Asia Minor but as Thomas McEvilley has shown, the roots lie further east. In his words, “Would the Greeks, without Indian influence, have generated the doctrines of monism and ethical reincarnationism? Would Indian thinkers, without Greek influence, have systematized the dialectic in the mode originated by Zeno, or the Syllogism in a mode similar to that of Philodemus? There is no reason to think the answer to either question should be affirmative.”

I am a great admirer of Greek art but surprisingly there is little discussion in the literature about the debt of the Greeks to earlier Eastern art, especially Sumerian. The Gudea statues are fantastic art creations which are so close to our Buddhist art tradition yet no Indian art commentator has written about this. In the preface to the book `Sumerians' by A. Parrot, the learned French art-critic and erstwhile culture minister André Malraux writes, "If Delacroix, hundred years ago, had been shown the works illustrated in this volume, he would not have seen them; they lay outside his range of vision and, had his attention been directed to them, they would have seemed to him devoid of any aesthetic value. ... Now, however, not only have they been discovered, but the scales have fallen from our eyes and they have become visible to us for what they are: authentic works of art in their own right, not just museum pieces."

Socrates did not write much but that does not belittle his greatness. Plato on the other hand displays great respect for Eastern religion as well as culture. In a famous dialogue (Protagoras), he related how Zeus took pity on mortals, who had not yet formed large societies and lacked power to subdue other beasts and gave them a moral sense and the capacity for law and Justice. A. L. Basham wrote that this is very similar to the Buddhist account of the first king Mahasammata who brought back order in a chaotic society. In my mind this is an echo of Shem, the progenitor of the Jews.

Paresh, Ranajit, Russell and Guthrie are correct: there was no pollination of eastern philosophy to western philosophy. Eastern philosophies are intrinsically entwined with religion and mysticism; whilst this does feature as one half of their thoughts (with unique qualifications not found in eastern philosophies), the defining characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy is its dependence on deductive logic, which the Greeks rectified as a coherent system stemming from geometry. The rationalistic side of Greek philosophy was dependent on the ordered structure of the observable world, something that was solidified in pure mathematics (the ordered, coherent and structured world of number) - there is nothing comparable in eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophies never invented pure mathematics. For example, there is nothing comparable to the Milesian School of philosophy in Ionia; nor is there for the Atomists, which is truly a scientific doctrine. Monism, and Parmenides, arguably developed as a result of Pythagoras and pure mathematics, which he invented. Resurrection, likewise, as a coherent philosophy stems from Pythagoras (in the west), and is again predicated on his mathematics. 'Mono' simply means 'one'; Pythagoras's 'monad', and it's symbol, represents the totality of beings. Parmenidianism / Eleatic School is a continuation from that. But then there are complete contrasts: see Heraclitus and Empedocles. Some of the 'similarities' you list are spurious. The Greeks were Indo-Europeans, so obviously certain mythologies will be very similar to ones stipulated in the north of the Indian sub continent. Certain themes of Proto-Indo-European society and religion reverberated in specific traditions of their descendant Indo-European and Indo-Iranian peoples. There's enormous similarities in certain Germanic and Celtic mythologies and Hinduism, but it would be specious to try argue for direct influence of one on the other in those particular cultures.