  Socrates’ exposure and criticism of the ancients’ error no doubt hints at what Plato sees as his philosophical forerunners’ failure to recognize the essential stability of values. Plato sees the two of them — Socrates and himself — as responsible for that all-important breakthrough. The way in which the ancient name-makers prove to have understood cosmology so much better than they did ethics mirrors Plato’s relative valuation of the Presocratic philosophers in the same two disciplines.