concluding that he was indeed wiser than all others, for he alone recognized his own ignorance.

and bring his darkened mind back into the archetypal light, the true source of being.

Platonic archetypes form the world and also stand beyond it. They manifest themselves within time and yet are timeless. They constitute the veiled essence of things.

At its basis was a view of the cosmos as an ordered expression of certain primordial essences or transcendent first principles, variously conceived as Forms, Ideas, universals, changeless absolutes, immortal deities, divine archai, and archetypes.

To sum up: From the Platonic perspective, the fundamentals of existence are the archetypal Ideas, which constitute the intangible substrate of all that is tangible. The true structure of the world is revealed not by the senses, but by the intellect, which in its highest state has direct access to the Ideas governing reality.

only through self-knowledge, through an understanding of one’s own psyche and its proper condition, that one could find genuine happiness.

Nothing in this world is, because everything is always in a state of becoming something else.

The archetypal Horse, which gives form to all horses,

The larger world opened by Athens’s earlier triumphs had destabilized its ancient certainties and now seemed to require a larger order—universal, yet conceptual—within which events could be comprehended. The Sophists’ teachings provided no such order, but rather a method for success.