The following fragment turned up recently scrolled around a four inch cardboard tube.  It is regarded to be a forgery.   Its provenance is questionable and the typing is atypical of its purported age.    Still, it has a fascination about it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Socrates: Plato, what do you consider the highest arrogance?

Plato: Certainly, it must be that of he who is so puffed up with himself that he disdains all other men and puts himself over them.

Socrates: It might seem so and yet what would you say of a person who insists that his god is supreme above the gods of all other persons.

Plato: Well, Socrates, I must amend my choice. A man as you describe would surely be the most brazen of all men. And he would have to be a moron as well. Surely, there can exist no such person.

Socrates: No, not in a modern democracy, Plato. But there have been such as I described in former times of deep superstition. And such an one might arise again if public education should fail a nation.

Plato: That could never happen. It would require a man of the grossest ignorance of the history of the numberless gods of human imagination. He would have to claim that his god is preferred and elevated over all the former gods as well as the gods to be invented in
future.

Socrates: Exactly, and he would presume that this god of his will last for eternity unlike the established natural history of gods. He would be a rash and selfish person.

Plato: You pose an interesting but very unlikely possibility. The now faded glory and limp impotence of the gods of our ancestors is a clear lesson that guides thinking persons against faith in contemporary gods for they in turn must pass and be forgotten.

Socrates: You are right, there is nothing so abject and forlorn as an abandoned god. One almost weeps for them. And that is indeed sufficient lesson for any educated citizen. But let me press the matter further. Are we so sure, Plato, that future nations will regard civil peace and public education as we do?

Plato: But the history of the horrors and misery wrought by the devotees of rival gods must be a safeguard for all time.

Socrates: So one would hope, Plato, and yet.......
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here the fragment ends, torn off at its perforations. We suppose that only future events will illuminate the validity of their dialogue.
© 2004 William van Druten