Opening paragraphs..............................

      There is always a spirit of the times.  Even in deep antiquity, strong and almost identical impulses drove forward the elites in societies separated by unbridged chasms of space.  We cannot perhaps explain these coordinations.  But we can profitably study them.  Two and a half millennia ago, in the fifth century B.C., in three advance areas, where literacy existed but was still in its infancy, three outstanding individuals echoed one another in insisting that the distinction between their civilizations and the surrounding barbarism must be reinforced by systematic moral education.

-Paul Johnson,   Socrates:  A Man For Our Time

As a public service:  Johnson's other two outstanding individuals are Confucius and Ezra the Scribe