" In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and precepts of life, we may be tempted to reverse the game, and to paint a picture of the founders of the Academy and the Lyceum as two frightened men standing in the self-same Cave, facing the wall, chained to their places in a catastrophic age, turning their back on the flame of Greece's heroic era, and throwing grotesque shadows which are to haunt mankind for a thousand years and more. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe