These Dialogues were written twenty-three hundred years ago, and the thought of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and that of contemporary times, have all come under their influence. They have been praised as the corrective for the excesses to which the human mind is subject, and as setting forth the chief lines of the Western view the moral as they have never been delineated before or since in philosophy, politics, logic and psychology. It has been held that a return to the insights of the dialogues is a return to our roots. But the dialogues have also had their enemies. They have been attacked as politically aristocratic and as philosophically mystical. However, few serious and fair students of the dialogues have ever denied their suggestiveness and the extent to which they stimulate thought.