The Memoirs of Socrates: The Last Rational Man

During the month between the conviction and the execution of the original teacher of wisdom (or philosopher) Socrates, these memoirs were dictated in the hope of correcting the "conventional wisdom" of history and the foolishness of Sophists as of 399 BCE with the knowledge and wisdom of the real man called Socrates.

The 24 centuries of human history that followed were irrevocably twisted by his one-time associate-the creatively dishonest dramatic genius Plato.

During the last 30 years of Socrates' lifetime (and the first 30 of Plato's), while the evermore "educated" (Big Government) Oligarchy thrived, the common citizen majority, the middle-class as they are now thought of, lost their property, their liberty and their lives.

From a generation before Socrates' birth through the first 40 years of his real-world life, the common citizens of Athens rose from centuries of poverty and oppression to true liberty and the opportunity for personal wealth and glory in the greatest and freest political society of the then known western world. Athens and its Delian League in the 5th century BCE was the equivalent of, or better than, America in the 20th century-if one were a common citizen without inherited advantages (or other social "connections").

What had preceded the decline in the formative 70 or more good years in Athens? And how did the generation-long decline occur?

Far more than the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides documented caused that decline.

Internal corruption proliferated as wealth and Sophisticated Higher Education for the affluent Oligarchy grew even before the Great War began. The socially prestigious Oligarchy re-acquired dominance and the common citizen majority were ground down into unthinking followers.

Sound familiar?

Socrates' sarcastic memoirs reveal the tragic history of the internal decline of once-dominant Athenian culture, all told in a rational chronology of historical fact.

For additional information and author bio, see www.STLevin.com

The author, born and living in New York City (for as long as Socrates lived in Athens) has watched his culture and country first rise to supreme greatness and then decline. For the last 40-50 years that cascading decline was inseparable from the coterminus rise of professions and professionalized higher education in influence and expense. As the years passed, this no longer seemed coincidental. For over 30 years, from endless but skeptically critical rereading of Plato and Xenophon and Herodotus and Thucydides, and the less complete study of more modern interpreters of same such as George Grote in the 19th century and Bertrand Russel, Karl Raymond Popper and Thomas Sowell in the 20th, certain patterns of thought and culture were revealed. This book is a product of an non-credentialed amateur's quest for the truth of "why" and "how" this American decline pattern is a repetition of happened more than 24 centuries ago in the freest and wealthiest society the western world had ever known - up until then.