# The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III (Jowett, 2nd ed.) - Author: Plato - Source: Internet Archive item `dialoguesofplato03platuoft` (https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofplato03platuoft) - Note: OCR plain text from a scanned public-domain edition; minor OCR artifacts may remain. --- (g) THE DIALOGUES OF PLATO JOWETT VOL. III. SouDon M ACM ILL AN AND CO. PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF THE DIALOGUES OF PLATO TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH ANALYSES AND INTRODUCTIONS B. JOWETT, M.A. MASTER OF BAI.I.IOI, COLLEGE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD DOCTOR IN THEOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF I.KYUF.N IN FIVE VOLUMES VOL. Ill SECOND EDITION REVISED AND CORRECTED THROUGHOUT, WITH ADDITIONS AND AN INDEX OF SlWyECTS AND PROPER NAMES AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M DCCC LXXV r [ All rights reserved] 5 C fr |7' CONTENTS. THE REPUBLIC TIMAEUS . CRITIAS y PACE I INTRODUCTION. THE Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist. The Politicus or Statesman is more ideal ; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws ; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same perfection of style ; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humour or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and speculation, or to connect the State with philosophy. Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a still larger work which was to have included an ideal history of Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy. Again, Plato may be regarded as the 'captain' (upxnyos) or leader of a goodly band of followers ; for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are ne legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another world ; in the early Church he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on politics. Even the frag ments of his words when 'repeated at second hand' (Sym. 215 D), have in all ages ravished the hearts of men, who have seen reflected in them their own higher nature. He is the father of idealism in philo sophy, in politics, in literature. And many of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the VOL. III. B 2 THE REPUBLIC. reign of law, and the equality of the sexes, have been anticipated in a dream by him. The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature of which is first hinted at by Cephalus, the just and blameless old man — then discussed on the basis of proverbial morality by Socrates and Pole- marchus — then caricatured by Thrasymachus and partially explained by Socrates — reduced to an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and having become invisible in the individual reappears at length in the ideal State which is constructed by Socrates. The State introduces the subject of education, of which the first outline is drawn after the old Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality, and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, and greater harmony of the individual and the State. But this leads to the conception of a higher State, in which ' no man calls anything his own,' and in which there is neither ' marrying nor giving in marriage,' and ' kings are philosophers ' and 'philosophers are kings;' and there is another and higher education, in tellectual as well as moral and religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth only but of the whole of life. Such a State soon begins to degenerate, and is hardly to be realized in this world. The old quarrel of poetry and philosophy which has been more lightly touched in the earlier books of the Republic is then fought out to the end. Poetry is discovered to be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and Homer, as well as the dramatic poets, having been condemned as an imitator, is sent into banishment along with them. And the idea of the State is supplemented by the revelation of a future life. The division into books, like all similar divisions 1, is probably later than the age of Plato. The natural divisions are five in number; — (i) Book I and the first half of Book II down to p. 368, which is intro ductory; the first book containing a refutation of the popular and sophistical notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at a definite conclusion. To this is appended a restatement of the nature of justice according to common opinion, and an answer is demanded to the question — What is justice, stripped of appearances ? The second division (2) includes the remainder of the second and the whole of the third and fourth books, which are mainly occupied with the construction of the first State and the first education . 1 Cp. Sir G. C. Lewis in the Classical Museum, vol. ii. p. i. INTR OD UCTION. 3 The third division (3) consists of the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, in which philosophy rather than justice is the subject of enquiry, and the second State is constructed on principles of communism and ruled by philosophers, and the contemplation of the idea of good takes the place of the social and political virtues. In the eighth and ninth books (4) the perversions of States and the individuals which correspond to them are reviewed in succession ; and the nature of pleasure and the principle of tyranny are further analysed in the individual character. The tenth book (5) is the conclusion of the whole, in which the relations of philosophy to poetry are finally determined, and the happiness of the citizens in this life, which has now been assured, is crowned by the vision of another. Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted ; the first (Books I — IV) containing the description of a State framed generally in accordance with Hellenic notions of religion and morality, while in the second (Books V— X) the Hellenic State is transformed into an ideal kingdom of philosophy, of which all other governments are the perversions. These two points of view are really opposed, and the opposition is only veiled by the genius of Plato. The Republic, like the Phaedrus (see vol. i. p. 85 foil.), is an imperfect whole; the higher light of philosophy breaks through the regularity of the Hellenic temple, which at last fades away into the heavens (592 B). Whether this imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement of the plan ; or from the im perfect reconcilement in the writer's own mind of the struggling elements of thought which are now first brought together by him ; or, perhaps, from the composition of the work at different times — are questions, like the similar question about the Iliad and the Odyssee, which are worth asking, but which cannot have a distinct answer. In the age of Plato there was no regular mode of publication, and an author would have the less scruple in altering or adding to a work which was known only to a few of his friends. There is no absurdity in supposing that he may have laid his labours aside for a time, or turned from one work to another ; and such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the case of a long than of a short writing. In all attempts to determine the chrono logical order of the Platonic writings on internal evidence, this uncertainty about any single Dialogue being composed at one time is a disturbing element, which must be admitted to affect longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws, more than shorter ones. But, on the other hand, C 2 4 THE REPUBLIC. the seeming discrepancies of the Republic may only arise out of the discordant elements which the philosopher has attempted to unite in a single whole, perhaps without being himself able to recognise the inconsistency which is obvious to us. For there is a judgment of after ages which few great writers have ever been able to anticipate for themselves. They do not perceive the want of connexion in their own writings, or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough to those who come after them. In the beginnings of literature and philosophy, amid the first efforts of thought and language, more inconsistencies occur than now, when the paths of speculation are well worn and the meaning of words precisely defined. For consistency, too, is the growth of time ; and some of the greatest creations of the human mind have been want ing in unity. Tried by this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues, accord- . ing to our modern ideas, appear to be defective, but the deficiency is no proof that they were composed at different times or by different hands. And the supposition that the Republic was written uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort is confirmed by numerous references from one part of the work to another. The second title, ' Concerning Justice,' is not the one by which the Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity, and, like the other second titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore be as sumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and others have asked whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the construction of the State is the principal argument of the work. The answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth ; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society. The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body. In Hegelian phraseology the State is the reality of which justice is the idea. Or, described in Chris tian language, the kingdom of God is within, and yet is imagined to be a Church or external kingdom. Or, to use a Platonic image, justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed, the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same or different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of the individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and punishments in another life. The virtues are based on justice, of which common honesty in buying and INTRODUCTION. 5 selling is the shadow, and justice is based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is reflected both in the institutions of / states and in the motions of the heavenly bodies (cp. Tim. 47). The^ Timaeus, which takes up and continues the political rather than the ethical side of the Republic, yet contains many indications that the same law is supposed to reign over nature and over man. Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient and modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which all works, whether of nature or of art, are referred to design. Now in ancient writings, and indeed in literature generally, there remains often a large element which was not comprehended in the original design. For the work grows under the author's hand ; new ideas occur to him in the act of writing ; he has not thought out the argument to the end before he begins. The reader who seeks to find some one idea under which the whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the ordinary explana tions of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself to have found the true argument ' in the representation of human life in a State per fected by justice, and governed according to the idea of good.' There may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can hardly be said to express the design of the writer. The truth is, that we may as well speak of many designs as of one ; nor need anything be excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind is naturally led by the association of ideas. To Plato himself, the question 'what was the prin cipal argument of the Republic,' would have been hardly intelligible, and therefore need not longer detain us (cp. the Introduction to the Phaedrus, p. 85, 86). Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah or 'the day of the Lord ' only convey, to us at least, their great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of good — about human perfection, which is justice — about poets and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind — about 'the world' which is the embodi ment of them. We have no need to discuss whether such a State is practicable or not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came first in the mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas 6 THE REPUBLIC. has nothing to do with their truth ; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest ' marks of design ' — justice more than the external framework of the State, the idea of good more than justice. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books of the Republic that he reaches the ' summit of speculation,' at the same time that he fails most to satisfy the requirements of a modern reader, and these, notwithstanding their defects, may therefore be regarded as the most important, as they are also the most original, portions of the work. It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the con versation was held (the year 411 B.C. which is proposed by him will do as well as any other) ; for a writer of fiction, and especially a writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of chronology, only aims at general probability. Whether all the persons mentioned in the Republic could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty \vhich would have occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty years later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any more than to Shakespeare in a parallel case) ; and need not greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be another of those questions having no answer ' which are worth asking,' because the investigation shows that we cannot argue historically from the dates in Plato, and have therefore no need to waste time in inventing far-fetched reconcilements of them in order to avoid chronological difficulties, such, for example, as the conjecture of C. F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the brothers but the uncles of Plato, or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato intentionally left anachronisms indicating the dates at which some of his Dialogues were written. The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Cephalus appears in the introduction only, Polemarchus drops at the end of the first argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence at the close of the first book. The main discussion is carried on by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Among the company are Lysias the orator and Euthydemus the sons of Cephalus and brothers of Polemarchus, an un known Charmantides— these are mute auditors ; also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts (340 A), and there, as in the Dialogue which bears his name, appears as the friend and ally of Thrasymachus. • INTRODUCTION. 7 Cephalus, the father of Polemarchus and his two brothers, is the patriarch of the house who has been appropriately engaged in offering a sacrifice. He is the pattern of an old man who has almost done with life, and is at peace with himself and with all mankind. He feels that he is drawing nearer to the world below, and seems to linger around the memory of the past. He is eager that Socrates should come to visit him, fond of the poetry of the last generation, happy in the con sciousness of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the tyranny of youthful lusts. His love of conversation, his kindness, his indifference to riches, even his garrulity, are interesting traits of character. He is not one of those who have nothing to say, because their whole mind has been absorbed in making money. Yet he acknowledges that money has a value in taking away the temptation to dishonesty. The respectful attention shown to him by Socrates, who must however be asking questions of him as of all men, should also be noted. The moderation with which old age is pictured by him as a very tolerable portion of existence is characteristic, not only of him, but of Greek feeling generally, and contrasts with the exaggeration of Cicero in his work on old age. The evening of life is described by Plato in the most expressive manner, yet with the fewest possible touches. As Cicero remarks, the aged Cephalus would have been out of place in the discussion which follows, and which he could neither have under stood nor taken part in without a violation of dramatic propriety (cp. Lysimachus in the Laches, 89). His ' son and heir ' Polemarchus has the frankness and impetuousness of youth ; he is for detaining Socrates by force in the opening scene, and will not 'let him off' (449 B) on the subject of women and children. Like Cephalus, he is limited in his point of view, and represents the proverbial stage of morality which has rules of life rather than prin ciples ; and he quotes Simonides as his father had quoted Pindar. But after appealing to this authority he has no more to say; the answers which he makes are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glau- con and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them ; he belongs to the pre-Socratic age. He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. From his brother Lysias (contra Eratosth. p. 121) we learn that he fell a victim to the thirty tyrants, but no allusion is 8 THE REPUBLIC. here made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus and his family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated to Athens. The ' Chalcedonian giant/ Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard in the Phaedrus (p. 267), is the personification of the Sophists according to Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst charac teristics. He is vain and blustering, refusing to discourse unless he is paid, fond of making an oration, and hoping in that way to escape the inevitable Socrates; but a mere child in argument, and unable to foresee that the next 'move' (to use a Platonic expression) will 'shut him up' (487 B). He has reached the stage of framing general notions, and in this respect may be regarded as in advance of Cephalus and Polemarchus. But he is incapable of defending them in a discus sion, and vainly tries to cover his confusion with banter and insolence. He can only make an irrelevant appeal to the experience of daily life. Whether such doctrines as are attributed to him by Plato were really held either by him or by any other Sophist is uncertain : — in the eagerness for generalization such fundamental errors might easily grow up, and are certainly put into the mouths of speakers in Thucydides ; but we are concerned at present with Plato's description of him, and not with the historical reality. The inequality of the contest adds greatly to the humour of the scene. He is utterly helpless in the hands of Socrates, who knows how to touch all the springs of vanity and weakness in him. His determination to cram down their throats, or put ' bodily into their souls ' his own words, elicits a cry of horror from Socrates. The state of his temper is quite as worthy of remark as the process of the argument. Nothing is more amusing than his complete submission when he has been once thoroughly beaten. At first he seems to carry on the discussion with reluctance, but soon with ap parent good-will, and he even testifies his interest at a later stage by one or two occasional remarks (v. 450 A, B). When attacked by Glaucon (vi. 498 C, D) he is humorously protected by Socrates ' as one who has never been his enemy and is now his friend.' When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal respond ents, Glaucon and Adeimantus, appear on the scene : here, as in Greek tragedy (cp. Introd. to Phaedo), three actors are introduced. At first sight the two sons of Ariston may seem to wear a family likeness, like the two friends Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo. But on a nearer examination of them the similarity vanishes, and they are seen to be INTRODUCTION. 9 distinct characters. Glaucon is the impetuous youth who can 'just never have enough of fechting ' (cp. the character of him in Xen. Mem. iii. 6) ; the man of pleasure who is acquainted with the mysteries of love (v. 474 D) ; the 'juvenis qui gaudet canibus,' and who improves the breed of animals (v. 459 A) ; the lover of art and music (iii. 398 D, E) who has all the experiences of youthful life. He is full of quickness and penetration, piercing easily below the clumsy platitudes of Thrasymachus to the real difficulty; he turns out to the light the seamy side of human life, and yet does not lose faith in the just and true. It is Glaucon who seizes what may be termed the ludicrous relation of the philosopher to the world, to whom a state of simplicity is 'a city of pigs/ who is always prepared with a jest (iii. 398 C; iv. 427 ; v. 450, 451, 468 C; vi. 509 C; ix. 586) when the argument offers him an opportunity, and is ever ready to second the humour of Socrates and to appreciate the ridiculous, whether in the connoisseurs of music (vii. 531 A), or in the lovers of theatricals (v. 475 D), or in the fantastic behaviour of the citizens of democracy (viii. 557 foil.). His weak nesses are several times alluded to by Socrates (iii. 402 E; v. 474 D, 475 E), who, however, will not allow him to be attacked by his brother Adeimantus (viii. 548 D, E). He is a soldier, and, like Adeimantus, has been distinguished at the battle of Megara (368 A, anno 456?). The character of Adeimantus is deeper and graver, and the profounder objections are commonly put into his mouth. Glaucon is more demon strative, and generally opens the game ; Adeimantus pursues the argu ment further. Glaucon has more of the liveliness and quick sympathy of youth; Adeimantus has the maturer judgment of a grown-up man of the world. In the second book, when Glaucon insists that justice and injustice shall be considered without regard to their consequences, Adeimantus remarks that they are regarded by mankind in general only for the sake of their consequences ; and in a similar vein of reflection he urges at the beginning of the fourth book that Socrates fails in making his citizens happy, and is answered that happiness is not the direct aim, but the indirect consequence of the good government of a State. In the discussion about religion and mythology, Adeimantus is the respondent (376-398), but at p. 398 C, Glaucon breaks in with a slight jest, and carries on the conversation in a lighter tone about music and gymnastic to the end of the book. It is Adeimantus again who volunteers the criticism of common sense on the Socratic method io THE REPUBLIC. of argument (vi. 487 B), and who refuses to let Socrates pass lightly over the question of women and children (v. 449). It is Adeimantus who is the respondent in the more argumentative, as Glaucon in the lighter and more imaginative portions of the Dialogue. For example, throughout the greater part of the sixth book, the causes of the cor ruption of philosophy and the conception of the idea of good are discussed with Adeimantus. At p. 506 C, Glaucon resumes his place of principal respondent ; but he has a difficulty in apprehending the higher education of Socrates, and makes some false hits in the course of the discussion (526 D, 527 D). Once more Adeimantus returns (viii. 548) with the allusion to his brother Glaucon whom he compares to the contentious State ; in the next book (ix. 580) he is again super seded, and Glaucon continues to the end (x. 621 B). Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the successive stages of morality, beginning with the Athenian gentleman of the olden time, who is followed by the practical man of that day regulating his life by proverbs and saws; to him succeeds the wild generalization of the Sophists, and lastly come the young disciples of the great teacher, who know the sophistical arguments but will not be convinced by them, and desire to go deeper into the nature of things. These too, like Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, are clearly distin guished from one another. For neither in the Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of Plato, is a single character repeated. The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly consistent. In the first book we appear to have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted in the earliest Dialogues of Plato and in the Apology. He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well as to argue seriously. But in the sixth book his enmity towards the Sophists abates ; he acknow ledges that they are the representatives rather than the corrupters of the world (vi. 492 A). He also becomes more dogmatic and construc tive, passing beyond the range either of the political or the specula tive ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage (vi. 506 C) Plato himself seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who had passed his whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and not to be always repeating the notions of other men. There is no evidence that either the idea of good or the conception of a per fect state were comprehended in the Socratic teaching, though he INTR OD UCTION. 1 1 certainly dwelt on the nature of the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen. Mem. i. 4 ; Phaed. 97) ; and a deep thinker like him, in his thirty or forty years of public teaching, could hardly have failed to touch on the nature of family relations, for which there is also some positive evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem. i. 2, 51 foil.) The Socratic method is nominally retained ; and every inference is either put into the mouth of the respondent or represented as the common discovery of him and Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, the affectation of which grows wearisome as the work advances. The method of enquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help of interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points of view. The nature of the process is truly characterized by Glaucon, when he describes himself as a companion who is not good for much in an investigation, but can see what he is shown (iv. 432 C), and may, perhaps, give the answer to a question more aptly than another (v. 474 A; cp. 389 A). Neither can we be absolutely certain that Socrates himself taught the immortality of the soul, which is unknown to his disciple Glaucon in the Republic (x. 608 D; cp. vi. 498 D, E) ; nor is there any reason to sup pose that he used myths or revelations of another world as a vehicle of instruction, or that he would have banished poetry or have denounced the Greek mythology. His favourite oath is retained, and a slight men tion is made of the daemonium, or internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as a phenomenon peculiar to himself (vi. 496 C). A real element of Socratic teaching, which is more prominent in the Republic than in any of the other Dialogues of Plato, is the use of example and illustration (TO. (popriKa ovna 7rpo0oiw) envy. . Ideas of measure, equality, order,_ unity, proportion,, still linger in the writings of moralists ; and the true spirit of the fine arts is better conveyed by such terms than by superlatives. 'When workmen strive to do better than well, They do confound their skill in covetousness.' (King John, Act iv. Sc. 2.) The harmony of the soul and body (402 D), and of the parts of the C 2 20 THE REPUBLIC. soul with one another (442 C), a harmony 'fairer far than that of musical notes/ is the true Hellenic mode of conceiving the perfection of human nature. ^ In what may be called the epilogue of the discussion with Thrasyma- chus, Plato argues that evil is not a principle of strength, but of discord and dissolution, just touching the question which has been often treated in modern times by theologians and philosophers, of the negative nature of evil (cp. on the other hand, x. 610). In the last argument we trace the germ of the Aristotelian doctrine of an end and a virtue directed towards the end, which again is suggested by the arts. The final re concilement of justice and happiness and the identity of the individual and the State are also intimated. Nothing is concluded ; but the ten dency of the dialectical process, here as always, is to enlarge our con ception of ideas, and to widen their application to human life. BOOK II. Thrasymachus is pacified, but the intrepid Glaucon in sists on continuing the argument. He is not satisfied with the in direct manner in which, at the end of the last book, Socrates had contrived to dispose of the question ' Whether the just or the unjust is the happier.' He begins by dividing goods into three classes : — first, goods desirable in themselves; secondly, goods desirable in them selves and for their results; thirdly, goods desirable for their results only. He then asks Socrates in which of the three classes he would place justice. In the second class, replies Socrates, among goods desirable for themselves and also for their results. ' Then the world in general are of another mind, for they say that justice belongs to the troublesome class of goods which are desirable for their results only. Socrates answers that this is the doctrine of Thrasymachus which he rejects. Glaucon thinks that Thrasymachus was too ready to listen to the voice of the charmer, and proposes to consider the nature of justice and injustice in themselves and apart from the results and rewards of them which the world is always dinning in his ears. He will first of all speak of the nature and origin of justice ; secondly, of the manner in which men view justice as a necessity and not a good ; and thirdly, he will prove the reasonableness of this view. ' To do injustice is said to be a good ; to suffer injustice an evil.' As the evil is discovered by experience to be greater than the good, the sufferers, who cannot also be doers, make a compact that they will INTRODUCTION. 21 have neither, and this compact or mean is called justice, but is really the impossibility of doing injustice. No one would observe such a compact if he were not obliged. Let us suppose that the just and unjust have two rings, like that of Gyges in the well-known story, which make them invisible, and then no difference will appear in them, for every one will do evil if he can. And he who abstains will be regarded by the world as a fool for his pains. Men may praise him in public out of fear for themselves, but they will laugh at him in their hearts. (Cp. Gorgias, 483 B.) ' And now let us frame an ideal of the just and unjust. Imagine the unjust man to be master of his craft, seldom making mistakes and easily correcting' them ; having gifts of money, speech, strength— the greatest villain bearing the highest character: and at his side let us place the just in his nobleness and simplicity — being, not seeming — without name or reward — clothed in his justice only — the best of men who is thought to be the worst, and let him die as he has lived. I might add (but I would rather put the rest into the mouth of the panegyrists of injustice — they will tell you) that the just man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and will at last be crucified [literally impaled\ — and all this because he ought to have preferred seeming to being. How different is the case of the unjust who clings to appearance as the true reality I His high character makes him a ruler ; he can marry where he likes, trade where he likes, help his friends and hurt his enemies; having got rich by dishonesty he can worship the gods better, and will therefore be more loved by them than the just.' I was thinking what to answer, when Adeimantus, like an Homeric hero, ' brother helping brother,' desired to join in the already unequal contest. He considered that the most important point of all had been omitted : ' the grand error has been that men are taught to be just for the sake of rewards ; parents and guardians make reputation the incentive to virtue. And other advantages are promised by them of a more solid kind ; e. g. wealthy marriages, and high offices which depend upon the good opinion of mankind. There is the picture in Homer of fat sheep and heavy fleeces, rich corn-fields and trees top pling with fruit, which the gods provide in this life for the just. And the Orphic poets add a similar picture of another. Musaeus gets his heroes down in the world below, and has the saints feasting on couches, 22 THE REPUBLIC. with garlands on their heads, enjoying as the meed of virtue a gross" paradise of immortal drunkenness. Some go further, and speak also of a fair posterity in the third and fourth generation. But the wicked are drowned by them in a slough of despond, or made to carry water in a sieve. Our description of the infamy and sufferings of the just is transferred by them to the unjust. This is all that their imagina tion supplies. ' Take another kind of argument which is found both in poetry and prose: — "Virtue," as Hesiod says, "is honourable but difficult" — " steep is the way and narrow is the gate ;" but vice is easy and pro fitable — " broad is the way and many walk therein." And you may often see the wicked in great prosperity and the righteous afflicted by the will of heaven. And mendicant prophets knock at rich men's doors, promising to atone for the sins of themselves or their fathers in a pleasant easy manner with festive games, or with charms and invocations to get rid of an enemy good or bad by divine help and at a small charge ; — they appeal to a heap of books professing to be written by Musaeus and Orpheus, and carry away the minds of whole cities, and promise to " get souls out of purgatory ;" and if we refuse to listen to them, no one knows what will happen to us. ' When a lively-minded ingenuous youth hears all this, what will be his conclusion ? " Will he," in the language of Pindar, " make justice his high tower, or fortify himself with crooked deceit?" Justice, he reflects, without the appearance of justice, is misery and ruin ; injustice has the promise of a glorious life. Appearance is master of truth and lord of happiness. To appearance then he will turn, — he will put on the show of virtue and trail behind him the fox of Archilo- chus. I hear some one saying that "wickedness is not easily con cealed," to which I reply that " nothing great is easy." And even if there is a risk of being discovered, union and force and rhetoric .will do much ; and although they cannot prevail over the gods, still how do we know that there are gods? Only from the poets, who acknowledge that they may be appeased by sacrifices. Then why not sin and pay for indulgences out of your sin? For if the righteous are unpunished, the wicked may be unpunished and have the pleasure of sinning too. But is there not a danger of the world below ? Nay, my friends, says the argument, there are mysteries and atoning power who will set that matter right, as the poets, who INTR OD UCTION. 2 3 are the sons of the gods, tell us, and this is confirmed by the authority of the State. ' On what principle can we resist such arguments in favour of in justice? Add good manners, and, as the wise tell us, we shall fare well both with gods and men ; we shall make the best of both worlds. Who that is not a miserable caitiff will refrain from smiling at the praises of justice ? Even if a man knows the better part he will not be angry with other men; for he knows also that more than human virtue is needed to save a man, and that he only praises justice who is incapable of injustice. ' And the origin of the evil is that all men from the beginning, heroes, poets, instructors of youth, have always asserted " the temporal dispensation," the honours, glories, profits, expediencies of justice. Had they been taught in early youth the power of justice and injustice inherent in the soul, and unseen by any human or divine eye, they would not have needed others to be their guardians, but every one would have been the guardian of himself. And this is what I want you to show, Socrates ;— other men use arguments which rather tend to strengthen the position of Thrasymachus that " might is right ; " but from you I expect better things. And please, as Glaucon said, to exclude reputation ; let the just be thought unjust and the unjust just, and do you still prove to us the superiority of justice.'. . . The thesis, which for the sake of argument has been maintained by Glaucon, is the converse of that of Thrasymachus— not right is the interest of the stronger, but right is the necessity of the weaker. Start ing from the same premises he carries the analysis of society a step further back;— might is still right, but the might is the. weakness of the many combined against the strength of the few. There have been theories in modern as well as in ancient times which have a family likeness to the speculations of Glaucon ; e. g. that power is the foundation of right ; or that a monarch has a divine right to govern well or ill ; or that virtue is self-love or the love of power ; or that war is the natural state of man; or that private vices are public benefits. All such theories have a kind of plausibility from their partial agreement with experience. For human nature oscillates between good and evil, and the motives of actions and the origin of institutions may be explained to a certain extent on either hypothesis according to the character or point of view of a particular thinker. 24 THE REPUBLIC. But theories of this sort do not represent the real nature of the State, which is based on a vague sense of right gradually corrected and enlarged by custom and law (although capable also of perversion), any more than the origin of society, which is to be sought in the family and in the social and religious feelings of man. Nor do they represent the average character of individuals, which cannot be ex plained simply on a theory of evil, but has always a counteracting element of good. And as men become better such theories appear more and more untruthful to them, because they are more conscious of their own disinterestedness. A little experience may make a man a cynic; a great deal will bring him back to a truer and kindlier view of the mixed nature of himself and his fellow men. The two brothers ask Socrates to prove to them that the just is happy when they have taken from him all that in which happiness is ordinarily supposed to consist. Not that there is (i) any absurdity in the attempt to frame a notion of justice apart from circumstances. For the ideal must always be a paradox when compared with the ordinary conditions of human life. Neither the Stoical ideal nor the Christian ideal is true as a fact, but they may serve as a basis of education, and may exercise an ennobling influence. An ideal is none the worse because ' some one has made the discovery ' that no such ideal was ever realized. (Cp. v. 472 D.) And in a few exceptional individuals who are raised above the ordinary level of humanity, the ideal of happiness may be realized in death and misery. This may be the state which the reason deliberately approves, and which the utilitarian as well as every other moralist may be bound in certain cases to prefer. Nor again, (2) must we forget that Plato, though he agrees generally with the view implied in the argument of the two brothers, is not ex pressing his own final conclusion, but rather seeking to dramatize one of the aspects of ethical truth. He is developing his idea gradually in a series of positions or situations. He is exhibiting Socrates for the first time undergoing the Socratic interrogation. Lastly, (3) the word ' happiness ' involves some degree of confusion because associated in the language of modern philosophy with conscious pleasure or satisfaction, which was not equally present to his mind. Glaucon has been drawing a picture of the misery of the just and the happiness of the unjust, to which the misery of the tyrant in Book IX is INTRODUCTION. 25 the answer and parallel. And still the unjust must appear just ; that is ' the homage which vice pays to virtue.' But now Adeimantus, taking up the hint which had been already given by Glaucon (358 C), proceeds to show that in the opinion of mankind justice is regarded only for the sake of rewards and reputation, and points out the advantage which is given to such arguments as those of Thrasymachus and Glaucon by the conventional morality of mankind. He seems to feel the difficulty of ' justifying the ways of God to man.' Both the brothers touch upon the question, how far the morality of actions is determined by their con sequences (cp. iv. 420 foil.) ; and both of them go beyond the position of Socrates, that justice belongs to the class of goods not desirable for themselves only, but desirable for themselves and for their results, to which he recalls them. In their attempt to view justice as an internal principle, and in their condemnation of the poets they anticipate him. The common life of Greece is not enough for them ; they must penetrate deeper into the nature of things. It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue. May we not more truly say that the old-fashioned notion of justice is enlarged by Socrates, and becomes equivalent to universal order or well-being, first in the State, and secondly in the individual ? He has found a new answer to his old question 'whether the virtues are one or many,' viz. that one is the ordering principle of the three others. In seeking to establish the purely internal nature of justice, he is met by the fact that man is a social being, and he tries to harmonise them as well as he can. There is no more inconsistency in this than was inevitable in his age and country ; there is no use in turning upon him the cross lights of modern philosophy, which, from some other point of view, would appear equally inconsistent. Plato does not give the final solution of philo sophical questions for us ; nor can he be judged of by our standard. The remainder of the Republic is developed out of the question of the sons of Ariston. Three points are deserving of remark in what immediately follows: — First, that the answer of Socrates is altogether ii.Jirect. He does not say that happiness consists in the contemplation of the idea of justice, and still less will he be tempted to affirm the Stoical paradox that the just man can be happy on the rack. But first he dwells on the difficulty of the problem and insists on restoring man to his natural condition, before he will answer the question at all. He 26 THE REPUBLIC. too will frame an ideal, but his ideal comprehends not only abstract justice, but the whole relations of man. Under the fanciful illustration of the large letters he implies that he will only look for justice in society, and that from the State he will proceed to the individual. His answer in substance amounts to this, — that under favourable conditions, i.e. in the perfect State, justice and happiness will coincide, and that when justice has been once found, happiness may be left to take care of itself. That he falls into some degree of inconsistency, when in the tenth book (612 A) he claims to have got rid of the rewards and honours of justice, may be admitted; for he has left those which exist in the perfect State. And the philosopher ' who retires under the shelter of a wall ' (vi. 496) can hardly have been esteemed happy by him, at least not in this world. Still he maintains the true attitude of moral action. Let a man do his duty first, without asking whether he will be happy or not, and happiness will be the inseparable accident which attends him. ' Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.' Secondly, it may be remarked that Plato preserves the true character of Greek thought in beginning with the State and in going on to the individual. First ethics, then politics is the order of ideas to us; the reverse is the order of history. Only after many struggles of thought does the individual assert his right as a moral being. In early ages he is not one, but one of many, the citizen of a State which is prior to him ; and he has no notion of good or evil apart from the law of his country or the creed of his church. And to this type he is constantly tending to revert, whenever the influence of custom, or of party spirit, or the recollection of the past becomes too strong for him. Thirdly, we may observe the confusion or identification of the indi vidual and the State, of ethics and politics, which pervades early Greek speculation, and even in modern times retains a certain degree of in fluence. The subtle difference between the collective and individual action of mankind seems to have escaped early thinkers, and we too are sometimes in danger of forgetting the conditions of united human action ; either elevating politics into ethics, or lowering ethics to the standard of politics. The good man and the good citizen only coincide in the perfect State ; and this perfection cannot be attained by legislation acting upon them from without, but, if at all, by education fashioning them from within. INTRODUCTION. 27 . . . Socrates praises the sons of Ariston, ' inspired offspring of the renowned hero/ as the elegiac poet terms them ; but he is at a loss to understand how they can argue so eloquently on behalf of injustice while their character shows that their own arguments have no influence on them. He does not know how to answer them, although he is afraid of deserting justice in the hour of need. He therefore makes a condition, that having weak eyes he shall be allowed to read the large letters first and then go on to the smaller. He means to say, that he •must be allowed to look for justice in the State first, and shall then pro ceed to the individual. This is agreed, and Socrates begins to construct the State. Society arises out of the wants of man. His first want is food ; his second a house ; his third a coat. The sense of these needs and the possibility of satisfying them by exchange, draw individuals together on the same spot ; and this is the beginning of a State, which we take the liberty to invent, although necessity is the real inventor. There must be first a husbandman, secondly, a builder, thirdly, a weaver, to which may be added a cobbler. Four or five citizens at least are re quired to make a city. Now men have different natures, and one man will do one thing better than many; and business waits for no man. Hence there must be a division of labour into different employments ; into wholesale and retail ; into workers, and makers of workmen's tools ; into shepherds and husbandmen. A city which includes all this will have far exceeded the limit of four or five, and yet not be very large. But then again imports will be required, and imports necessitate exports, and this implies variety of produce in order to attract the taste of pur chasers; also merchants and ships. In the city too we must have a market and money and retail trades, otherwise buyers and sellers will never meet, and the valuable time of the producers will be wasted in vain efforts at exchange. If we add hired servants the State will be complete, and we may guess that somewhere in the intercourse of the citizens with one another justice and injustice will appear. Here follows a rustic picture of their way of life. They build houses, and produce corn and wine, and make coats and shoes. They are lightly clad in summer while at their work, but well shod and clothed in winter. Their principal food is flour and meal, of which they make noble puddings, and these they serve up on a mat of reeds or clean 28 THE REPUBLIC. leaves. They repose on couches strewn with yew and myrtle, passing their time in pleasant converse with one another, hymning the gods over their wine, and taking care not to have too many children. ' Yes, Socrates/ said Glaucon, 'but you should give them a relish.' Yes, I replied, and a relish they shall have — salt and olives and cheese and potherbs and chestnuts which they will roast at the fire, indulging in moderate potations. Fed on such a diet they will live in peace and health, and bequeath a similar life to their descendants. Glaucon said, ' Tis a city of pigs, Socrates.' Why, I replied, what do you want more ? 'Only the conveniences of life, which every one has, — sofas to lie upon, tables to eat from, also meats and sweets.' I see that you want not only a State, but a luxurious State ; and possibly in the more complex frame we shall sooner find justice and injustice. Then our ideas will have to enlarge themselves; the fine arts must go to work— every instrument and ornament of luxury in furniture and dress and food will be wanted in every form. There will be dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians, cooks, barbers, tire-women, nurses, artists; and we must not forget the swineherds and neatherds too for the animals, and physicians to cure the disorders of which luxury is the source. And to feed all these superfluous mouths we shall need a part of our neighbours' land, and they will want a part of ours : and this is the origin of war, which may be traced to the same causes as other political evils. Our city will now require the slight addition of a camp, and the citizen will be converted into a soldier. But then our old doctrine of the division of labour must not be forgotten. The art of war cannot be learned in a day, and there must be a natural aptitude for military duties. There will be some war like natures who have this aptitude — dogs keen of scent and swift of foot to pursue, and strong of limb to fight. And as spirit is the founda tion of courage, such natures, whether of men or animals, will be full of spirit. And here arises a difficulty : — these spirited natures are apt to bite and devour one another ; the union of gentleness to friends and fierce ness against enemies appears to be an impossibility, and the guardian of a State requires both qualities. Who then can be a guardian ? After a pause, Socrates adds that the image of the dog suggests a way of escape. For in dogs too there is a double character of gentleness to friends and enmity to strangers. Your dog is a philosopher and judges by the rule of knowing or not knowing ; and philosophy, whether in man or beast, is the parent of gentleness. And the human watchdogs too INTRODUCTION. 29 must be philosophers or lovers of learning which will make them gentle. And how are they to be learned without education ? But what is education? Is any better than the old-fashioned sort which is comprehended under the name of music and gymnastic ? Music includes literature, and literature is of two kinds, true and false. 'What do you mean?' he said. I mean that children hear stories before they learn gymnastics, and that the stories are mostly untrue, or have only one or two grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood. Now early life is very impressible, and children ought not to be allowed to learn what they will have to unlearn when they grow up ; and in order to prevent this we must have a censorship of nursery tales, banishing some and keeping others. Some of them are very improper, as we may see in the great instances of Homer and Hesiod, who really are to blame, for they not only tell lies but bad lies ; stories about Uranus and Saturn, which are immoral as well as false, and which should never be spoken of to young persons or indeed at all; or, if at all, then in a mystery after the sacrifice, not of an Eleusinian pig, but of some unprocurable animal. Shall our youth be encouraged to beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be incited to war by seeing the wars of the gods and giants embroidered on the robe of Athene ? Shall they hear the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother, and of Zeus sending him flying for helping her when she was beaten? Even if such tales are capable of a mystical interpre tation, the interpretation is not obvious to the young at the age when impressions are most powerful. But if any one asks what tales are to be allowed, to that, Adeimantus, you and I answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay down the principles according to which books are to be written, but to write them is the duty of others. And our first principle is, that God is to be represented as he is ; not as the author of all things, but of good and of good only. We are not to be told that he is the steward of good and evil, or that he has two casks full of destinies, as Homer says; or that Athene and Zeus in cited Pandarus to break the treaty ; or that God caused the sufferings of Niobe, or of Pelops, or the Trojan war ; or that he picks a quarrel with men when he wants to destroy them. Either these were not the actions of the gods, or God was just, and men were all the better for being punished. But that the deed was evil, and God the author of 30 THE REPUBLIC, the deed, is not to be said or sung in any well-ordered common wealth by old or young, and is suicidal, immoral, impious. This is our first and great principle, — God is the author of good only. And the second principle is like unto it : — With God is no vari ableness or change of form; he is no Proteus. Reason teaches us this; for if we suppose a change in God, he must be changed either by another or by himself. By another ? — but the best works of nature and art and the noblest qualities of mind are least liable to be changed by any external force. By himself? — but he cannot change for the better, and he will hardly change for the worse. He remains for ever fairest and best in his own image. Therefore we refuse to listen to the poets who tell us of the goddess Here begging in the likeness of a priestess or of other deities who prowl about at night in strange disguises; all that blasphemous nonsense with which mothers fool the manhood out of their children is got at secondhand from the poets and ought to be suppressed. But some one will say that God, who is himself unchangeable, may take a form in relation to us. Why should he ? For gods as well as men hate the lie in the soul or principle of falsehood; and as for any other form of lying which is used for a purpose and is regarded as innocent in certain exceptional cases — . what need have the gods of this ? For they are not ignorant of an tiquity like the poets, nor are they afraid of their enemies, nor is any madman a friend of theirs. God then is true, he is absolutely true; he changes not, he deceives not, by day or night, by word or sign. This is our second great principle, — God is true. Away with the lying dream of Agamemnon in Homer, and the accusation of Thetis against Apollo in Aeschylus. . . . In order to give clearness to his conception of the State, Plato pro ceeds to trace the first principles of mutual need and of division of labour in an imaginary community of four or five citizens. Gradually this community increases ; the division of labour extends to countries ; imports necessitate exports; a medium of exchange is required, and retailers sit in the market-place to save the time of the producers. These are the steps by which Plato constructs the first or primitive State, introducing the elements of political economy by the way. As he is going to frame a second or civilized State, the simple naturally comes before the complex. But although, like Rousseau, he indulges in a 'picture of primitive life, which has indeed often had a great influence INTRODUCTION. 31 on the imagination of mankind, he does not seriously mean to say .that one is better than the other (cp. Politicus, p. 272); nor can any inference be drawn from the description of the first state taken apart from the second, such as Aristotle appears to draw in the Politics, book iv. 4, 12. The disappointment of Glaucon at the ' city of pigs/ the ludicrous description of the ministers of luxury in the more refined state, and the afterthought of the necessity of doctors, the illustration of the nature of the guardian taken from the dog, the desirableness of offer ing some almost unprocurable victim when impure mysteries are to be celebrated, the behaviour of Zeus to his father and of Hephaestus to his mother, are touches of humour which have also a serious mean ing. In speaking of education Plato rather startles us by affirming that a child must be trained in falsehood first and in truth afterwards. Yet this is not very different from saying that children must be taught through the medium of imagination as well as reason ; that their minds .' can only develope gradually, and that there is much which they must ' learn without understanding (cp. iii. 402 A). This is also the sub stance of Plato's view, though he must be acknowledged to have drawn the line somewhat differently from modern ethical writers re specting truth and falsehood. To us economies or accommodations would not be allowable unless they were required by the human facul ties or necessary for the communication of knowledge to the simple and ignorant. We should insist that the word was inseparable from the intention, and that we must not be falsely true ; i. e. speak or act falsely in support of what was right or true. But Plato would limit the use of fictions only by requiring that they should have a good moral effect, and that such a dangerous weapon as falsehood should be employed by the rulers alone and for great objects. A Greek in the age of Plato attached no importance to the ques- |j|, tion whether his religion was an historical fact. He was just begin ning to be conscious that the past had a history; but he could see nothing beyond Homer and Hesiod. Whether their narratives were true or false did not seriously affect the political or social life of Hellas. Men only began to suspect that they were fictions when they recognised them to be immoral. And so in all religions : the con sideration of their morality comes first, afterwards the truth of the documents in which they are recorded, or of the events natural or 32 THE REPUBLIC. supernatural which are told of them. But in modern times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than in Catholic, we have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the moral ; and some have refused to believe in religion at all, unless a superhuman accu racy was discernible in every part of the record. The facts of an ancient or religious history are amongst the most important of all facts ; but they are frequently uncertain, and we only learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when we place ourselves above them. These reflections tend to show that the difference between Plato and ourselves, though not unimportant, is not so great as might at first sight appear. For we should agree with him in placing the moral before the historical truth of religion; and, generally, in disre garding those errors or misstatements of fact which necessarily occur in the early stages of all religions. We know also that changes in the traditions of a country cannot be made in a day; and are there fore tolerant of many things which science and criticism would con demn. A singular conception which occurs towards the end of the book is the lie in the soul; this is connected with the Platonic and Socratic doctrine that involuntary ignorance is worse than voluntary. The lie in the soul is a true lie, the corruption of the highest truth, the decep tion of the highest part of the soul, from which he who is deceived has the least power of delivering himself. For example, to represent God as false or immoral, or, according to Plato, as deluding men with appearances or as the author of evil; or again, to affirm with Pro tagoras that 'knowledge is sensation,' or that 'being is becoming,' or with Thrasymachus 'that might is right/ would have been regarded by Plato as a lie of this hateful sort. The greatest unconsciousness of the greatest untruth, e. g. if, in the language of the Gospels, ' he who was blind ' were to say ' I see,' is another aspect of the state of mind which Plato is describing. The lie in the soul may be further compared with the sin against the Holy Ghost (Luke xii. 10), allowing for the difference between Greek and Christian modes of speaking. To this is opposed the lie in words, which is only such a deception as may occur in a play or poem, or allegory or figure of speech, or in any sort of accommodation, — which though useless to the gods may be useful to men in certain cases. Socrates is here answering the question which he had himself raised, i. 331 C, about the propriety INTRODUCTION. 33 of deceiving a madman. He is also contrasting the nature of God and man. For God is Truth, but mankind can only be true by appear ing sometimes to be partial, or false. Reserving for another place the greater questions of religion or education, we may note further, (i) the approval of the old traditional education of Greece; (2) the preparation which Plato is making for the attack on Homer and the poets ; (3) the preparation which he is also making for the use of economies in the State ; (4) the familiar use of the allegorical interpretation of the poets in the age of Plato, which here, as in the Phaedrus, is rejected by him ; (5) the contemptuous and at the same time euphemistic manner in which here as below (iii. 390) he alludes to the Chronique Scandalense of the gods. BOOK III. There is another motive in purifying religion, which is to banish fear ; for no man can be courageous who is afraid of death, or who believes the tales which are repeated by the poets con cerning the world below. A gentle request should be made to them by the authorities not to abuse hell, accompanied by an intimation that their tales are untrue, and the reverse of inspiring to heroes. The licenser is desired to expunge obnoxious passages, such as the chilling words of Achilles : — ' I would rather be a serving-man than rule over all the dead ;' and the verses which tell of the squalid mansions, the senseless shadows, the flitting soul mourning over her lost strength and youth, the soul with a gibber going beneath the earth like smoke, the souls of the suitors which flutter about like bats — all this sort of thing Homer and the other poets must not be angry at our erasing. The terrors and horrors of Cocytus and Styx, ghosts and sapless shades, and the rest of their Tartarian nomenclature, must vanish. Such tales may have their use ; but they frighten people out of their wits, and are not the proper food for soldiers. As little can we admit the sorrows and sympathies of the Homeric heroes : — Achilles, the son of a god dess, lying first on his back, and then on his face, then starting up and sailing along the sea-shore; or Priam, the cousin of the gods, crying aloud, rolling in the mire. A good man is not altogether prostrated at the loss of children or fortune. Neither is death terrible to him ; and therefore lamentations over the dead should not be practised by men of note; they should be the concern of women and of inferior per sons only, whether women or men. Still worse is the attribution of such weakness to the gods ; as when the goddesses say, ' Alas ! my VOL. III. D 34 THE REPUBLIC. travail!' and worst of all, when the king of heaven himself laments his inability to save Hector, or sorrows over the impending doom of his dear Sarpedon. Such a character of God, if not ridiculed by our young men, is likely to be imitated by them. Nor should our citizens be given to excess of laughter—' Such violent delights ' are followed by a violent re-action. The description in the Iliad of the gods shaking their sides at the clumsiness of Hephaestus would not be admitted by you, says Socrates, addressing Glaucon. 'Byrne?— No,' replies the other, ' but you attribute to me what I never said.' Truth should have a high place among the virtues, for falsehood is of no use to the gods and is useful only as a medicine in the case of men. The State physician or ruler may occasionally employ this medicine, but the subject must not in return tell a lie to the ruler ; any more than the patient would tell a lie to his physician, or the sailor to his captain. If the ideal State is ever realized, the false word of any common man should be regarded as treason. In the next place our youth must be temperate, and temperance con sists in obedience to the rulers and abstinence from sensual pleasures. That is a lesson which Homer teaches in some places : ' The Achaeans marched breathing prowess in silent awe of their leaders;' — and a very different lesson in other places : ' O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog, and the heart of a stag.' Language of the latter kind is not likely to impress the lesson of self-control on the minds of youth. The same may be said of his praises of eating and drinking and of his dread of starvation ; also of the verses in which he tells with much circumstance of the rapturous loves of Zeus and Here, which made the former forget his intention of honouring Achilles ; or of how Hephaestus detained Ares and Aphrodite in a net on a similar occasion. There is a nobler strain heard in the words :— ' Endure, my soul, thou hast endured worse.' Nor must we allow our citizens to receive bribes, or to say, ' Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings;' or to applaud the ignoble advice of Phoenix to Achilles that he should get money out of the Greeks before he assisted them; or the meanness of Achilles himself in taking gifts from Agamemnon; or his requiring a ransom for the body of Hector ; or his cursing of Apollo ; or his insolence to the river- god Scamander ; or his dedication to the dead Patroclus of his own hair which had been already dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius ; or the fit of cruelty which made Cheiron's pupil drag the body of Hector round the walls, and slay the captives at the pyre, especially as he is INTR OD UCTION. 3 5 avaricious also, which seems to be a contradiction. The amatory ex ploits of Peirithous and Theseus, Zeus' and Poseidon's sons are equally unworthy. Either these sons of gods were not the sons of god, or they were not such as the poets imagine them, any more than the gods them selves are the authors of evil. The youth who believes that such things are done by those who have the blue blood of heaven flowing in their veins will be too ready to imitate their example. Enough of gods and heroes ; — what shall we say about men ? What the poets and story-tellers say? — that the wicked prosper and the righteous are afflicted, or that justice is another's gain? Not this at all events, which is the opposite of the truth. But in raising the question at all we are anticipating the definition of justice, and had therefore better defer the enquiry. Enough of the subject of poetry ; next follows style. Now all poetry is a narrative of events past, present, or to come ; and narrative is of three kinds, the simple, imitative, and a composition of the two. An instance will make my meaning clear. The first scene in Homer is of the last or mixed kind, being partly description and partly dialogue. But if you throw the dialogue into the ' oratio obliqua' (I am no poet and therefore I drop the metre), the priest came and (do not say ' spoke these words,' but) prayed the gods that the Achaeans might take Troy and have a safe return if Agamemnon would only give him back his daughter, and the other Greeks assented, but Agamemnon was wroth, and so on, — then the whole becomes descriptive, and the poet is the only speaker left; or, if you omit the narrative, the whole becomes dialogue. These are the three styles — which of them is to be admitted into our State ? ' Do you ask whether tragedy and comedy are to be admitted?' Yes, but perhaps there is something more involved; and indeed the question has been already answered, for we have decided that one man cannot in his life play many parts. And therefore he cannot both live and act, or compose both tragedy and comedy, or be a rhapsodist and actor at once. Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and as our guardians have their own business already, which is the care of freedom, they will have enough to do without imitating. But if they imitate they should not imitate any meanness or baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his face. We cannot allow men to play the parts of women, young or old, quarrelling or weeping, scolding their husbands, or setting up their D 2, 36 THE REPUBLIC. necks against the gods,— least of all when making love or in labour. They must not represent slaves, or bullies, or cowards, or drunkards, or madmen, or blacksmiths, or neighing horses, or bellowing bulls, or sounding rivers, or a raging sea. A good or wise man will be willing to perform good and wise actions, but he will be ashamed to play an inferior part which he has never practised ; and he will prefer the de scriptive style with as little imitation as possible. The man who has no self-respect, on the contrary, will imitate anybody and anything ; sounds of nature, cries of animals ; he will whistle like the wind, rattle like hail, growl like thunder, and play on any instrument ; also he will bark like a dog, baa like a sheep, and crow like a cock ; his whole performance will be imitation of gesture and voice. Now in the descriptive style there are few changes, but in the dramatic there are a great many. Poets and musicians use either, or a compound of both, and this compound is very attractive to youth and their teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in which one man plays one part only, and a cobbler is a cobbler, and a ploughman a ploughman, is not adapted for complexity. And when one of these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will fall down and worship him as a sweet creature, and a holy and wonderful being; he shall be anointed with myrrh and have a garland of wool set upon his head— but then we shall bid him turn about and go to the next city, for we are patrons of the rough, honest poet, and will not depart from our original models (ii. 379 foil.; cp. Laws, vii. 817.) Next as to the music. A song or ode has three parts, — the subject, the harmony, and the rhythm; of which the two last are dependent upon the first. As we banished strains of lamentation, so we may now banish the mixed Lydian harmonies, which are the harmonies of lamentation ; and as our citizens are to be temperate, we may also banish convivial harmonies, such as the Ionian and pure Lydian. Two remain, — the Dorian and Phrygian, the first for war, the second for peace ; the one expressive of courage, the other of obedience, or instruction, or religious feeling. And as we reject varieties of harmony, we shall also reject the queer, many-stringed, variously-shaped instruments which give utterance to them, and in" particular the flute, which is more complex than any of them. The lyre and the harp may be permitted in the town, and the Pan's-pipe in the fields. Thus we have made a purgation of music, and will now make a purgation of metres. They should be like the har monies, simple and suitable to the occasion. There were four notes of INTRODUCTION. 37 the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre -f f f , which have all their characters, and the feet have different characters as well as the rhythms. But about this you and I must ask Damon, the musician, who speaks, if I remember rightly, of a martial measure as well as of dactylic, trochaic, and iambic rhythms, which he arranges so as to compensate and equalize with one another. We only venture to affirm the general principle that the style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style; and that the simplicity and harmony of the soul should be reflected in them. This principle of simplicity has to be learnt by every one in the days of his youth, and may be gathered anywhere from painting and embroidery, or any other creative and constructive art, as well as from the forms of plants and animals ; it runs through nature as well as art, and has a wide kindred in the world. Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or unseemliness. Sculpture and painting as well as music must conform to the law of simplicity. And he who violates it cannot be allowed to work in our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For images of deformity are like a hurtful pasture, and day by day, little by little, our guardians gather evil from them, which becomes a festering mass of evil in the soul. Place them only where they may breathe the air of health and beauty, amid fair sights and sounds, and they will quickly drink in from surrounding objects sweet and harmonious in fluences ; and this is the great power of music, which more than any other influence enters into the soul and gives the sense of deformity and beauty. At first the effect is unconscious ; but when reason arrives then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as the friend whom he always knew. As in learning to read, first we acquire the elements or letters separately, and afterwards their combinations, and do not recog nize the reflections of them in the water until we know the letters them selves; — in like manner we must first attain the elements or essential forms of temperance and courage and liberality and magnificence and the like, and then trace the combinations of them in life and experience. There is a music of the soul which answers to the harmony of the world ; and the fairest object of a musical soul is the fair mind in the fair body. Some defect in the latter may be excused, but not in the former. True love is the daughter of temperance, and temperance is utterly opposed to the madness of bodily pleasure. Enough has been said of music, which makes a fair ending with love. 38 THE REPUBLIC. Next we pass on lo gymnastics ; about which I would remark, that the soul is related to the body as a cause to an effect, and therefore if we educate the mind we may leave the education of the body in her charge, and need only give a general outline of the course to be pursued. In the first place the guardians must abstain from strong drink, for they should be the last persons to lose their wits. Whether the habits of the palaestra are suitable to them is more doubtful, for the ordinary gym nastic is a sleepy, heavy sort of thing, and when left off suddenly is apt to be dangerous. And our warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, having all their senses about them, and must also be inured to all changes of food and climate. Hence they will require a finer sort of training and a simpler gymnastic, which will be twin sister to their simple music ; and for their diet a rule may be found in Homer, who gives his heroes no fish although they were living at the sea-side, nor boiled meats which involve an apparatus of pots and pans ; and, if I am not mistaken, he nowhere mentions sweet sauces. Sicilian cookery, and Attic con fections, and Corinthian courtezans, which are to gymnastic what Lydian and Ionian melodies are to music, must not be allowed among our citizens. Where gluttony and intemperance prevail the town begins to fill with doctors and pleaders, who open their halls for practice ; and law and medicine give themselves airs as soon as the freemen of a State go out and buy them. But what can show a more disgraceful state of • education than the importation of justice from abroad because you have 'none of your own at home ? And yet there is something more dis graceful still in the further stage of the same disease, when men have learned to take a pleasure and pride in the twists and turns of the law ; not considering how much better it would be for them so to order their lives as to have no need of a nodding justice. And there is a similar disgrace in employing a physician, not for the cure of wounds or epidemic disorders, but because a man has blown himself out like a bladder, and has got more diseases than he knows the names of, or than ever ex isted in the days of Asclepius. For observe how simple is the Homeric practice of medicine. Eurypylus after he has been wounded drinks a posset of Pramnian wine, which is of a heating nature ; and yet the sons of Asclepius blame neither the damsel who gives him the drink, nor Patroclus who is attending on him. The truth is that this modern system of nursing diseases was introduced by Herodicus the trainer; who, being of a sickly constitution, by a compound of training and INTRODUCTION. 39 medicine tortured first himself and then a good many other people, and died a long time after he ought to have died. But Asclepius was a statesman, and refused to practise this art, because he knew that the citizens of a well-ordered State have no leisure to be ill, and therefore he adopted the rough 'kill or cure' method, which artisans and labourers employ. ' They must be at their business/ they say, ' and have no time for swathing and dieting: if they recover, well; and if they don't, there is an end of them.' Whereas the rich man is supposed to be a gentleman who can afford to be ill. Do you know a maxim of Phocylides, — that ' when a man begins to be rich ' (or, perhaps, a little before) ' he should practise virtue?' But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent with an ordinary occupation, and yet consistent with the practice of virtue ? A man ought to be thinking of something, and he says that philosophy gives him the headache, and never does anything because he is always unwell. And this was the reason why Asclepius and his sons practised no such art. They were in the interest of the public, and did not wish to preserve useless lives, or raise up a puny offspring to wretched sires. Honest diseases they honestly cured ; and if a man was wounded, like Eurypylus in Homer, he might drink a sack posset, and he recovered all the same. But they would have nothing to do with persons whose lives were of no use either to themselves or to others, even though they might have made large fortunes out of them. And as to the story of Pindar, that Asclepius was slain by a thunderbolt for restoring a rich man to life, that is a lie ; following our old rule we must say either that he did not take bribes, or that he was not the son of a god. Glaucon then asks Socrates whether the best physicians and the best judges will not be those who have had severally the greatest experience of diseases and of crimes. Socrates draws a distinction between them. The physician should have had experience of disease in his own body, for he cures with his mind and not with his body. But the lawyer con trols mind by mind ; and therefore he should have no experience of evil in his own person. Where then is he to gain experience ? How is he to be wise and also innocent ? When young a good man is apt to be deceived by evil doers, because he has no pattern of evil in himself; and therefore the judge should be advanced in years ; his youth should have been innocent, and he should have acquired an insight into evil by extended observation of others. This is the ideal of a judge; the criminal turned detective is wonderfully suspicious and cautious, but VOL. TIL 40 THE REPUBLIC. when he is in company with good men who have the experience of age, he is at fault, for he foolishly imagines that every one is as bad as him self. Vice may be known of virtue, but cannot know virtue. This is the sort of medicine and this the sort of law which will prevail in our State ; they will be healing arts to better natures ; but the evil body will be left to die by the one, and the evil soul will be put to death by the other. And the need of either will be greatly diminished by good music which will give harmony to the soul, and good gymnastic which will give health to the body. Not that this division of music and gymnastic really corresponds to soul and body ; for they are equally concerned with the soul, which requires both of them, and is tamed by the one and aroused and sustained by the other. The two together supply our guardians with their twofold nature. The passionate disposition which has too much gymnastic is hardened and brutalized, the gentle or philosophic character which has too much music becomes enervated. While a man is singing and twittering and pouring music like water through the funnel of his ears, the edge of his soul gradually wears away, and the passionate or spirited element is melted out of him. Too little spirit is easily wasted ; too much is converted into nervous irritability. So, again, the athlete by feeding and training has his courage doubled, but he soon grows stupid ; his senses are never purged, and like a wild beast he is ready to do everything by blows and nothing by counsel or policy. There are two principles in man, reason and passion, and the gods have given two arts corresponding to them, and not to the soul and body, as some vainly say — music and gymnastic; the unity of which makes a harmony higher far than the concord of musical notes. And the true musician is he who attempers them — he shall be the presiding genius of our State. The next question is, Who are to be our rulers ? First, the elder must rule the younger; and the best of the elders will be the best guardians. He who guards 'best is he who loves best, and he who loves others has an interest in them and sympathy with them. Those then must be selected by us who have always been devoted to the good of their country. And a watch must be put over them to discover whether at every epoch of life they have retained the same opinions and held out against force and enchantment. For time and persuasion and the love of pleasure may enchant a man into a change of purpose, and force may compel him. And therefore we must choose for our guardians men of known INTRODUCTION. 41 firmness, who have been tried by many tests, like gold in the refiner's fire, and have been passed first through dangers then through pleasure, and at every age have come out of such trials victorious and without stain in full command of themselves and their principles; having all their faculties in harmonious exercise for their country's good. Those who attain this degree of virtue are worthy of the highest honours both in life and death. It would perhaps be better to speak of the others whom we before called guardians as auxiliaries or allies, and to reserve the higher title for the more select class. And now for one noble, useful lie, a lie upon a grand scale, to be the corner-stone of our State, — in the belief of which, O that we could train our rulers ! and at any rate let us make the attempt with the rest of the world. I know not how to give utterance to my ideas, and yet what I am going to tell is only a republication of the Phoenician story of Cadmus and his earthborn men — which has often happened in past times, but not in our own ; for the age of miracles has ceased, and the world is an unbelieving world. I am ashamed to look you in the face as I repeat the audacious tale, which I would have you impart in regular gradation, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. The lie is as follows : — The citizens shall be told that their youth was a dream, and that during all that time in which they seemed to be undergoing a process of education they were really being fashioned in the womb of the earth, their alma mater and true parent, who sent them up when they were ready ; and that they are bound to protect and cherish her whose children they are, and to regard each other as brothers and sisters. ' I do not wonder at your being ashamed to propound such a fiction.' There is more behind. These brothers and sisters have dif ferent natures, and some of them God made to rule, whom he fashioned of gold ; others he made of silver, to be helps ; others again to be hus bandmen and craftsmen, and these were formed by him of brass and iron. But sometimes a golden parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son, and then nature orders a transposition of ranks ; the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards his offspring if he has to descend in the social scale ; for an oracle says ' that the State will come / to an end if governed by a man of brass.' Is there any possibility of making our citizens believe all this ? ' Not in the present generation, but in the next, perhaps, yes.' Now let the earthborn men go forth under the command of their 42 THE REPUBLIC. rulers, and look about and pitch their camp in a high place, which will be safe against enemies descending upon the fold, and also against insurrections from within. There let them sacrifice and set up their tents; for soldiers they are to be and not shopkeepers, the watchdogs and guardians of the sheep ; and luxury and avarice will turn them into wolves and tyrants. Their habits and their dwellings should correspond to their education. They should have no property; their pay should only meet their expenses ; and they should have common meals. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God, and this divine gift in their souls they must not alloy with that earthly dross which passes under the name of gold. They only of the citizens may not touch it, or be under the same roof with it, or drink from it ; it is the accursed thing. Should they ever acquire houses or lands or money of their own, they will become householders and tradesmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of helpers, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and the rest of the State, will be at hand. The religious and ethical aspect of Plato's education will hereafter be considered under a separate head. Some lesser points may be more conveniently noticed in this place. i. The constant appeal to the authority of Homer, whom, with grave irony, Plato, after the manner of his age, summons as a witness about ethics and psychology, as well as about diet and medicine; attempting to distinguish the better lesson from the worse (390), sometimes altering the text from design (388, and, perhaps, 3«9) 5 more than once with a comical air of earnestness : ' By heaven ! that is a reach of thought more than human.' I must lay the exaggeration to your door, for you made me utter my fancies. ' Nay,' he said, ' go on with the image, for I suspect that there is more behind.' There is, I said ; and bearing in mind our two suns or principles, imagine further their corresponding worlds — one of the visible, the other of the intel ligible — you may assist your fancy by figuring the distinction under the image of a line divided into two unequal parts, and may again subdivide each part into two lesser segments representative of the stages of know ledge in either sphere. The lower half of the lower or visible sphere will consist of shadows and reflections, and the upper half of the same sphere will contain real objects in the world of nature or of art. The sphere of the intelligible will also have two divisions, — one of mathe matics, in which there is no ascent but all is descent ; no inquiring into premises, but only drawing of inferences. In this division the mind works with figures and numbers, the images of which are taken not from the shadows, but from the objects, although the truth of them is seen only with the mind's eye ; and they are used as hypotheses without being analysed. Whereas in the other division reason uses the hypotheses as stages or steps in the ascent to the idea of good, to which she fastens them, and then again descends, walking firmly in the region of ideas, and of ideas only, in her ascent as well as descent, and finally resting in them. ' I partly understand,' he replied ; ' you mean that the ideas of science are superior to the hypothetical, metaphorical conceptions of geometry and the other arts or sciences, whichever is to be the name of them; and the latter conceptions you refuse to make subjects of pure intellect, because they have no first principle, although when resting on a first principle, they pass into the higher sphere.' You understand me very well, I said. And now to those four divisions of knowledge you may assign four corresponding faculties — pure intelligence to the highest sphere; active intelligence to the second; to the third, faith; to the fourth, INTRODUCTION. 77 the perception of likenesses— and the clearness of the several faculties will be in the same ratio as the truth of the objects to which they are related. Like Socrates, we may recapitulate the virtues of the philosopher. In language which seems to reach beyond the horizon of that age and country, he is described as ' the spectator of all time and all existence.' He has the noblest gifts of nature, and makes the highest use of them. All his desires are absorbed in the love of wisdom, which is the love of truth. None of the graces of a beautiful soul are wanting in him ; neither can he fear death, or think much of human life. The ideal of modern times hardly retains the simplicity of the antique ; there is not the same originality either in truth or error which characterized the Greeks. The philosopher is no longer living in the unseen, nor is he sent by an oracle to convict mankind of ignorance ; nor does he regard knowledge as a system of ideas leading upwards by regular stages to the idea of good. The eagerness of the pursuit has abated ; there is more division of labour and less of comprehensive reflection upon nature and human life as a whole ; more of exact observation and less of anti cipation and inspiration. Still, in the altered conditions of knowledge, the parallel is not wholly lost ; and there may be a use in translating the conception of Plato into the language of our own age. The phi losopher in modern times is one who fixes his mind on the laws of nature in their sequence and connexion, not on fragments or pictures of nature ; on history, not on controversy ; on the truths which are acknow ledged by the few, not on the opinions of the many. He is aware of the importance of ' classifying according to nature,' and will try to ' sepa rate the limbs of science without breaking them.' (Phaedr. 265 E.) There is no part of truth, whether great or small, which he will dishonour ; and in the least things he will discern the greatest. (Parmen. 130 C.) Like the ancient philosopher he sees the world pervaded by analogies, but he can also tell ' why in some cases a single instance is sufficient for an induction ' (Mill's Logic 3, 3, 3), while in other cases a thousand examples would prove nothing. He inquires into a portion of knowledge only, because the whole has grown too vast to be embraced by a single mind or life. He has a clearer conception of the divisions of science and of their relation to the mind of man than was possible to the ancients. Like Plato, he has a vision of the unity of knowledge, not as the beginning of philosophy to be attained by a study of elementary mathematics, but as 78 THE REPUBLIC. the far-off result of the working of many minds in many ages. He is aware that mathematical studies are preliminary to almost every other ; at the same time, he will not reduce all varieties of knowledge to the type of mathematics. He too must have a nobility of character, without which genius loses the better half of greatness. Regarding the world as a point in immensity, and each individual as a link in a never-ending chain of existence, he will not think much of his own life, or be greatly afraid of death. Adeimantus objects first of all to the form of the Socratic reasoning, thus showing that Plato is aware of the imperfection of his own method. He brings the accusation against himself which might be brought against him by a modern logician — that he extracts the answer because he knows how to put the question. In a long argument words are apt to change their meaning slightly, or premises may be assumed or con clusions inferred with rather too much certainty or universality ; the variation at each step may be unobserved, and yet at last the divergence becomes considerable. Hence the failure of attempts to apply arith metical or algebraic formulae to logic. The imperfection, or rather the higher and more elastic nature of language, does not allow words to have the precision of numbers or of symbols. And this quality in language impairs the force of an argument which has many steps. The objection, though fairly met by Socrates in this particular in stance, may be regarded as implying a reflection upon the Socratic mode of reasoning. And here, as at p. 506 B, Plato seems to intimate that the time had come when the negative and interrogative method of Socrates must be superseded by a positive and constructive one, of which examples are given in some of the later dialogues. Adeimantus further argues that the ideal is wholly at variance with facts ; for expe rience proves philosophers to be either useless or rogues. Contrary to all expectation (cp. p. 497 for a similar surprise) Socrates has no hesi tation in admitting the truth of this, and explains the anomaly in an allegory, first characteristically depreciating his own inventive powers. In this allegory the people are distinguished from the professional politicians, and, as at pp. 499, 500, are spoken of in a tone of pity rather than of censure under the image of ' the noble captain who is not very quick in his perceptions.' The uselessness of philosophers is explained by the circumstance that mankind will not use them. The world in all ages has been divided INTRODUCTION. ;9 between contempt and fear of those who employ the power of ideas and know no other weapons. Concerning the false philosopher, Socrates argues that the best is most liable to corruption ; the finer nature is more likely to suffer from alien conditions. There are some kinds of excellence which spring from a peculiar delicacy of constitution ; this is evidently true of the poetical and imaginative temperament, which often seems to depend on impressibility, and hence can only live in a certain atmo sphere. The man of genius has greater pains and greater pleasures, greater powers and greater weaknesses, and often a greater play of character than is to be found in ordinary men. He can assume the disguise of virtue or disinterestedness without having them, or veil personal enmity in the language of patriotism and philosophy— he can say the word which all men are thinking, and is ever ready to take various forms as the situation changes. An Alcibiades, a Mirabeau, or a Napoleon the First, are born either to be the authors of great evils in states, or ' of great good when they are drawn in that direction.' Yet the thesis, < corruptio optimi pessima,' cannot be maintained generally or without regard to the kind of excellence which is corrupted. For the alien conditions which are corrupting to one nature, may be the elements of culture to another. In general a man can only receive his highest development in a congenial state or family, among friends or fellow-workers. But also he may sometimes be stirred by adverse circumstances to such a degree that he rises up against them and reforms them. And while weaker or coarser characters will extract good out of evil, say in a corrupt state of the church or of society, and live on happily, allowing the evil to remain, the finer or stronger natures may be crushed or spoiled by surrounding influences— may become misanthrope and philanthrope by turns ; or in a few instances, like the founders of the monastic orders, or the Reformers, owing to some peculiarity in them selves or in their age, may break away entirely from the world and from the church, sometimes into great good, sometimes into great evil, sometimes into both. And the same holds in the lesser sphere of a convent, a school, a family. Plato would have us consider how easily the best natures are over powered by public opinion, and what efforts the rest of mankind will make to get possession of them. The world, the church, their own pro fessions, any political or party organization, are always carrying them off their legs and teaching them to apply high and holy names to their So THE REPUBLIC. own prejudices and interests. The ' monster ' corporation to which they belong judges right and truth to be the pleasure of the community. The individual becomes one with his order ; or, if he resists, the world is too much for him, and will sooner or later be revenged on him. This is, perhaps, a one-sided but not wholly untrue picture of the maxims and practice of mankind when they ' sit down together at an assembly,' either in ancient or modern times. When the higher natures are corrupted by politics, the lower take possession of the vacant place of philosophy. This is described in one of those continuous images in which the argument, to use a Platonic expression, ' veils herself,' and which is dropped and reappears at inter vals. Then arises the question, — Why the citizens of states are inimical to philosophy ? The answer is, that they do not know her. And yet there is also a better mind of the many ; they would believe if they were taught. But hitherto they have only known a conventional imitation of philosophy, words without thoughts, systems which have no life in them ; a [divine] person uttering the words of beauty and freedom, the friend of man holding communion with the Eternal, and seeking to frame the state in that image, they have never known. The same double feeling respecting the mass of mankind has always existed among men. The first thought is that the people are the enemies of truth and right ; the second, that this only arises out of an accidental error and con fusion, and that they do not really hate those who love them, if they could be educated to know them. In the latter part of the sixth book, three questions have to be con sidered: ist, the nature of the longer and more circuitous way, which is contrasted with the shorter and more imperfect method of Book IV ; and, the heavenly pattern or idea of the state ; 3rd, the relation of the divisions of knowledge to one another and to the corresponding faculties of the soul. i. Of the higher method of knowledge in Plato we have only a glimpse. Neither here nor in the Phaedrus or Symposium, nor yet in the Philebus or Sophist, does he give any clear explanation of his mean ing. He would probably have described his method as proceeding by regular steps to a system of universal knowledge, which inferred the parts from the whole rather than the whole from the parts. This ideal logic is not practised by him in the search after justice, or in the analysis of the parts of the soul ; there, like Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, INTRODUCTION. 81 he argues from experience and the common use of language. But at the end of the sixth book he conceives another and jnare perfect method, in which ajl ideas are only steps or gmHpg or mnmpntc nf thought, forming a con nected whole which is self-supporting, and in which consistency is the test of truth. He does not explain to us in detail the nature of the pro cess. Like many other thinkers both in ancient and modern times his mind seems to be filled with a vacant form which he is unable to realize. He supposes the sciences to have a natural order and connexion in an age when they can hardly be said to exist. He is hastening on to the ' end of the intellectual world ' without even making a beginning of them. In modern times we hardly need to be reminded that the process of acquiring knowledge is here confused with the contemplation of absolute knowledge. In all science a priori and a posteriori truths mingle in various proportions. The a priori part is that which is derived from the most universal experience of men, or is universally accepted by them ; the a posteriori is that which grows up around the more general prin ciples and becomes imperceptibly one with them. But Plato errone ously imagines that the synthesis is separable from the analysis, and that the method of science can anticipate science. In entertaining such a vision of a priori knowledge he is sufficiently justified, or at least his meaning may be sufficiently explained by the similar attempts of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and even of Bacon himself, in modern philo sophy. Nor can we deny that in ancient times knowledge must have stood still, and the human mind been deprived of the very instru ments of thought, if philosophy had been strictly confined to the results of experience. 2. Plato supposes that when the tablet has been made blank the artist will fill in the lineaments of the ideal state. Is this a pattern laid up in heaven, or mere vacancy on which he is supposed to gaze with wondering eye ? The answer is, that such ideals are framed partly by the omission of particulars, partly by imagination perfecting the form which experience supplies. (Phaedo 74.) Plato represents these ideals in a figure as belonging to another world; and in modern times the idea will sometimes seem to precede, at other times to co-operate with the hand of the artist. As in science, so also in creative art, there is a synthetical as well as an analytical method. One man will have the whole in his mind before he begins; to another the processes of mind and hand will be simultaneous. VOL. III. G 82 THE REPUBLIC. 3. There is no difficulty in seeing that Plato's divisions of knowledge are based, first, on the fundamental antithesis nf gfnsifrfc and intellectual which pervades the whole pre-Socratic philosophy ; in which is implied also the opposition of the permanent and transient, of the universal and particular. But the age of philosophy in which he lived seemed to re quire a further distinction; — numbers and figures were beginning to separate from ideas. The world could no longer regard justice as a cube, and was learning to see, though imperfectly, that the abstractions of sense were distinct from the abstractions of mind. Between the Eleatic being or essence and the shadows of phenomena, the Pytha gorean principle of number found a place, and was, as Aristotle remarks, a conducting medium from one to the other. Hence Plato is led to introduce a third term which had not hitherto entered into the scheme of philosophy. He had observed the use of mathematics in educa tion ; they were the best preparation for higher studies. The subjective relation between them further suggested an objective one ; although the passage from one to the other is really imaginary. (Metaph. i, 6, 4.) For metaphysical and moral philosophy has no connexion with mathe matics ; number and figure are the abstractions of time and space, not the expressions of purely intellectual conceptions. When divested of metaphor, a straight line or a square has no more to do with right and justice than a crooked line with vice. The figurative association was mistaken for a real one; and thus the three latter divisions of the Platonic proportion were constructed. There is more difficulty in comprehending how he arrived at the first term of the series, which is nowhere else mentioned, and has no refer ence to any other part of his system. Nor indeed does the relation of shadows to objects correspond to the relation of numbers to ideas. Probably Plato has been led by the love of analogy (cp. Timaeus, p. 32 B) to make four terms instead of three, although the objects per ceived in both divisions of the lower sphere are equally objects of sense. He is also preparing the way, as his manner is, for the shadows of images at the beginning of the seventh book, and the imitation of an imitation in the tenth. The line may be regarded as reaching from unity to infinity, and is divided into two unequal parts, and subdivided into two more; each lower sphere is the multiplication of the preceding. Of the four faculties, faith in the lower division has an intermediate position, contrasting equally with the vagueness of the perception of INTRODUCTION. 83 shadows (etW/a) and the higher certainty of understanding (8icu/oia) and reason (vouj). The difference between understanding and mind or reason («/oCff) is analogous to the difference between acquiring knowledge in the parts and the contemplation of the whole. True knowledge is a whole, and is at rest ; consistency and universality are the tests of truth. To this self-evidencing knowledge of the whole the faculty of mind is supposed to correspond. But there is a knowledge of the understanding which is incomplete and in motion always, because unable to rest in the subordi nate ideas. Those ideas are called both images and hypotheses — images because they are clothed in sense, hypotheses because they are assump tions only, until they are brought into connexion with the idea of good. The method of Socrates is hesitating and tentative, awaiting the fuller explanation of the idea of good, and of the nature of dialectic in the seventh book. The imperfect intelligence of Glaucon, and the reluctance of Socrates to make a beginning, mark the difficulty of the subject. The allusion to Theages' bridle and to the oracular sign, which here, as always in Plato, is only prohibitory ; the reference to a future state of existence, which is unknown to Glaucon in the tenth book ; the surprise in the answers at 487 E and 497 B; the fanciful irony of Socrates, where he pretends that he can only describe the strange position of the phi losopher in a figure of speech; the original remark that the Sophists, after all, are only the representatives and not the leaders of public opinion; the picture of the philosopher standing aside in the shower of sleet under a wall; the 'right noble thought' that the highest truths demand the greatest exactness ; the hesitation of Socrates in returning once more to his well-worn theme of the idea of good ; the ludicrous earnestness of Glaucon— are characteristic and interesting features. BOOK VII. After this I took up my parable, and said : Imagine human beings living in a sort of underground den which has a mouth wide open towards the light; they have been there from childhood, and, having their necks and legs chained, can only see before them. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall built along the way, like that over which marionette players show their puppets. Above the wall are seen moving figures, who hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers by G 2 84 THE REPUBLIC. are talking and others silent. ' A strange parable,' he said, ' and strange captives.' They are ourselves, I replied ; and they see nothing but the shadows which the fire throws on the wall of the cave ; to these they give names, and if we add an echo which returns from the wall, the voices of the passengers will seem to proceed from the shadows. Sup pose now that you suddenly turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real images ; will they believe them to be real ? Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to something which they are able to behold without blinking ? And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent into the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be darkened with the excess of light ? Some time will pass before they get the habit of perceiving at all ; and at first they will be able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water ; then they will recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is. Last of all they will conclude :— This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in passing from darkness to light ! How worthless to them will seem the honours and glories of the den or cave out of which they came ! As Homer says : ' Better to be the servant of a poor master than a prince over all the dead.' And now imagine further, that they descend into their old habitations ; — in that underground dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to compete with them in the measurement of the shadows on the wall ; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a visit to the sun and lost his eyes — men should not do such things — and if they find anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to death, if they fcan catch him. Which things are an allegory : The cave or den is the 'World of sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to know ledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last seen and with difficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the author of good and right— parent of the lord of light in this world and of truth and un derstanding in the other. He who attains to the beatific vision is always going upwards ; he is unwilling to descend into political assemblies and courts of law ; for his eyes are apt to blink at the images or shadows of images which they behold in them — he cannot enter into the ideas of those who have never in their lives understood the relation of the shadow to the substance. Now blindness is of two. INTRODUCTION. 85 kinds, and may be caused either by passing out of darkness into light or out of light into darkness, and a man of sense will distinguish be tween them, and will not laugh equally at both of them, but the blindness which arises from fulness of light he will deem blessed, and pity the other ; or if he laugh at the blinking idiot looking up at the sun, he will have more reason to laugh than the inhabitants of the den at those who descend from above. There is a further lesson taught by this parable of ours. Some persons fancy that instruction is like giving eyes to the blind, but we say that the faculty of sight was always there, and that the soul only requires to be turned round towards the light. And this is conversion; other virtues are almost like bodily habits, and may be acquired in the same manner, but intelligence has a diviner life, and is indestructible, turning either to good or evil according to the direction given. Did you never observe how the mind of a clever rogue peers out of his eyes, and the more clearly he sees, the more evil he does ? Now if you take such an one and circumcise his passions, and cut away from him the leaden weights which drag him down and keep the eye of his soul fixed upon the ground, the same faculty in him will be turned round, and he will behold the truth as clearly as he now discerns his meaner ends. And have we not decided that our rulers must neither be so uneducated as to have no fixed rule of life, nor so over-educated as to be unwilling to leave their paradise for the business of the world? And we must choose out the natures who are most likely to ascend to the light and knowledge of the good, and not allow them to do as they do now. I mean to say that they must not be allowed to remain in the region of light, but must be forced down again among the captives in the den to partake of their labours and honours. ' Is not this hard ? and what if they had rather not ? ' You should remember, my friend, that our purpose in framing the State was not that our citizens should do what they like, but that they should serve the State for the common good of all. May we not fairly say to our philosopher, — Friend, we do you no wrong ; for in other States philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the gardener, but you we have trained to be the rulers and kings of our hive, and therefore we must insist on your de scending into the darkness of the den ? You must, each of you, take your turn, and become able to use your eyes in the dark, and with a little practice you will see ten thousand times as well as those who quarrel about the shadows, whose knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours is a 86" THE REPUBLIC. waking reality. It may be that the saint or philosopher who is best fitted, may also be the least inclined to rule, but necessity is laid upon him, and he must no longer live in the heaven of ideas. And this will be the salvation of the State. For those who rule must not be those who are desirous to rule ; and, if you can offer to our citizens a better life than that of rulers generally is, there will be a chance that the rich, not only in this world's goods, but in virtue and wisdom, may bear rule. And the only life which is better than the life of political ambition is that of philo sophy, which is also the best preparation for the government of a State. Then now comes the question, — How shall we create our rulers ; what way is there from darkness to light? How like departed spirits may they be raised from the world below into the upper air ? The change is effected by philosophy, which is not the turning over of an oyster shell, but the conversion of a soul from night to day, from becoming to being. And what training will draw the soul upwards? Our former education had two branches,— gymnastic, which was occupied with the body, and music, the sister art, which infused a natural harmony into mind and literature ; but neither of these sciences gave any promise of doing what we want. What have we left? All that remains to us is that universal science which is the primary element of all the rest. 'What is that?' A small matter— one, two, three— or in other words, number, of which I say that all arts and sciences are partakers. ' Very true.' Including the art of war ? < Yes, certainly.' Then there is some thing very ludicrous about Palamedes in the tragedy, coming in and saying that he had invented number, and counted the ranks and set in order the ships. For if Agamemnon could not count his feet (and with out number how could he ?) he must have been a pretty sort of general indeed. No man should be a soldier who cannot count, and indeed he is hardly to be called a man. But I am not speaking of these practical applications of arithmetic, for number, in my view, is rather to be re garded as a conductor to thought and being. I will explain what I mean by the last expression :— Things sensible are of two kinds; the one class invite or stimulate the mind, while in the other the mind acquiesces. Now the stimulating class are the things which suggest contrast and relation. For example, suppose that I hold up to the eyes three fingers— a fore finger, a middle finger, a little finger— the sight equally recognizes all three fingers, but cannot distinguish which is first, second, or third. Or again, suppose two objects to be relatively great INTRODUCTION. 87 and small, these ideas of greatness and smallness are supplied not by the sense, but by the mind. And the perception of their contrast or relation quickens and sets in motion the mind, which is puzzled by the confused intimations of sense, and has recourse to number in order to find out whether the things indicated are one or more than one. Number replies that they are two and not one, and are to be distinguished from one another. Again, the sight beholds great and small, but only in a confused chaos, and not until they are distinguished does the question arise of their respective natures, leading on to the distinction between the visible and intellectual. And that was what I meant when I spoke of stimulants to the intellect ; I was thinking of the contradictions which arise in perception. The idea of unity, for example, like that of a finger, does not arouse thought unless involving some conception of plurality ; but when the one is also the opposite of one, the contradiction gives rise to reflection. An example of this is afforded by any object of sight ; and what is true of one is true of all number. It raises the mind out of the foam and flux of generation to the contemplation of being, having lesser military and retail uses also. The retail use is not required by us ; but as our guardian is to be a soldier as well as a philosopher, the military one may be retained. No science can be more suitable for our higher purpose, when pursued for the sake of knowledge only, and not in the spirit of a shopkeeper. Great is the power of arithmetic in giving abstraction ; for numbers are pure abstractions, and the true arith metician indignantly denies that his unit is capable of division. You may divide, but he insists that you are only multiplying ; his one is nolf material or divisible into parts, but an unvarying and absolute equality ;"' and this shows the purely intellectual character of his study. Note also the great power which arithmetic has of sharpening the wits ; no other discipline is equally severe, or an equal test of ability in general, or equally improving to a stupid man. Let our second branch of education be geometry. ' I can easily see,' replied Glaucon, 'that. in manoeuvring an army or taking up a position, the skill of the general will be more than doubled by his knowledge of geometry.' Not much will be required for this purpose ; the use of geometry, to which I refer, is the assistance given by it in the contem plation of the idea of good, and the compelling the mind to. look at true being, and not at generation only. Yet the present mode of pur suing these studies, as any one who is the least of a mathematician is 88 THE REPUBLIC. aware, is mean- and ridiculous; they are made to look downwards to the arts, and not upwards to eternal existence. The geometer is always talking of squaring, subtending, apposing, as if he had in view action ; whereas knowledge is the real object of the study. It should elevate the soul, and create the mind of philosophy ; it should raise up what has fallen down, not to speak of lesser uses in war and military tactics, and in the improvement of the faculties. Shall we propose as a third branch of our education — astronomy? ' Very good,' replied Glaucon ; ' the knowledge of the heavens is good at once for husbandry, navigation, military tactics.' I like your way of giving useful reasons for everything in order to conciliate the world. Nor do I deny that there is a difficulty in proving to mankind that education is not only useful information but an illumination and puri fication of the soul — better than ten thousand eyes, for by that alone is truth seen. Now, will you appeal to mankind in general or to the phi losopher ? or would you prefer to look to yourself only ? ' Every man is his own best friend.' Then take a step backward, for we are out of order, and insert the third dimension which is of solids, after the second which is of planes, and then you may proceed to solids in motion. But the properties of the third dimension can hardly be said to be as yet discovered. Solid geometry is not popular and has not the patronage of the State, nor is the use of it fully recognized ; the difficulty is great, and the votaries of the study are full of conceit and impatient of direction. Still the charm of the pursuit wins upon men, and, if government would lend a little assistance, there might be great progress made. ' Very true/ replied Glaucon, 'I admit the charm; and I understand you now to begin with plane geometry, and to place next geometry of solids, which you omitted as being a pursuit likely to raise a smile ; thirdly, astronomy, or the motion of solids.' Yes, I found the more haste the less speed. 'Very good,' he said; 'and, now that the missing link is supplied, let us proceed to astronomy, about which I am willing to speak in your lofty strain. No one can fail to see that the contemplation of the heavens draws the soul upwards.' I am an exception, then; astronomy as studied at present appears to me to draw the soul not upwards, but downwards. Star-gazing is just looking up at the ceiling— no better; a man may float on his back by land or by water— he may look up or look down, but there is no science in that. The vision of knowledge of which I speak is seen not with the eyes, but with the mind. All the INTRODUCTION. 89 magnificence of the heavens is but the embroidery of a copy which falls far short of the divine Original, and teaches nothing about the absolute harmonies or motions of things. Their beauty is like the beauty of figures drawn by the hand of Daedalus or any other great artist, which may be used for illustration, but no mathematician would seek to obtain from them true conceptions of equality or numerical relations. How ridiculous then to look for these in the map of the heavens, in which the imperfection of matter comes in everywhere as a disturbing element, marring the symmetry of day and night, of months and years, of the sun and stars in their courses. Only by problems can we place astronomy on a truly scientific basis. Let the heavens alone, and exert the in tellect. Still, mathematics admit of other applications, as the Pythagoreans say, and we agree. There is a sister science of harmonical motion adapted to the ear as astronomy is to the eye, and there may be other applications also. Let us inquire of the Pythagoreans about them, not forgetting that we have an aim higher than theirs, which is the relation of these sciences to the idea of good. The error which pervades astronomy also pervades harmonics. The musicians put their ears in the place of their minds. ' Yes,' replied Glaucon, ' I like to see them laying their ears alongside of their neighbours' faces — some saying, " that 's a new note," others declaring that the two notes are the same.' Yes, I said ; but you mean the gentlemen who are always twisting and torturing the strings of the lyre, and who quarrel about the tempers of the strings, as though they were human beings. These empirics are not the people of whom I am speaking; I refer rather to the Pythagorean harmonists, whom we were about to consult. Their error is, that they investigate only the numbers of the consonances which are heard, and ascend no higher, — of the true numerical harmony which is unheard, and is only to be found in problems, they have not even a conception. ' That last,' he said, ' must be a marvellous thing.' A thing of value, I replied, if pursued with a view to the good — if pursued in any other spirit, useless. All these sciences are the prelude of the strain, and are profitable if they are regarded in their natural relations to one another. 'I dare say, Socrates,' said Glaucon ; ' but such a study will be an endless busi ness.' What study do you mean— of the prelude, or what ? For all these things are only the prelude, and you surely do not suppose that a mere mathematician is also a dialectician ? ' Certainly not. In all my expe- 90 THE REPUBLIC. rience I have hardly ever known a mathematician who could reason.' And yet, Glaucon, is not true reasoning that hymn of dialectic which is the music of the intellectual world, and which was by us compared to the effort of sight, when from beholding the shadows on the wall we arrived at last at the images which gave the shadows ? Even so the dia lectical faculty withdrawing from sense arrives by the pure intellect at the contemplation of the idea of good, and never rests but at the very end of the intellectual world. And the royal road out of the cave into the light, and the blinking of the eyes at the sun and turning to con template the shadows of reality — not the shadows of an image only; this progress and gradual acquisition of a new faculty of sight by the help of the mathematical sciences, is the elevation of the soul to the contemplation of the highest ideal of being. ' I agree in what you say, as far as I understand you. But now, leaving the prelude, let us proceed to the hymn. What, then, is the nature of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither?' Dear Glaucon, you cannot follow me here. There can be no revelation of the absolute truth to one who has not been disciplined in the previous sciences. But that there is a science of absolute truth, which is attained in some way very different from those now practised, I am confident. For all other arts or sciences are relative to the wants and opinions of men, and are designed for generation and production, or again for the preservation and support of life ; and the mathematical sciences are but a dream and hypothesis, never attaining to the dignity of true knowledge, because never analysing their own principles. Dialectic only does away with hypotheses, and rises to the principle which is above them, converting and gently leading the eye of the soul out of the barbarous slough of ignorance into the light of the upper world, with the help of the sciences which we have been describing — sciences, as they are often termed, although they require some other name, implying greater clearness than opinion and less clearness than science, and this in our previous sketch was understanding. And so we get four names— two for intellect, and two for opinion, — reason or mind, understanding, faith, knowledge of shadows — which make a proportion — being : becoming : : intellect : opinion — and science : belief: : understanding : knowledge of shadows. Dialectic may be further described as that science which defines and explains the essence or being of each nature, which distinguishes and abstracts the good, and is ready to do battle against all opponents in the cause of INTRODUCTION. 91 good. To him who is not a dialectician life is but a sleepy dream ; and many a man is in his grave before he is well waked up. And would you have the children of your ideal State, who are to be your governors, intelligent beings, or stupid as posts ? ' Certainly not the latter.' Then you must train them in dialectic, which will teach them to ask and answer questions, and is the coping-stone of the sciences. I dare say that you have not forgotten how our rulers were chosen ; and the process of selection may be carried a step further : — As before they must be constant and valiant, and, as far as possible, good-looking, and of noble manners, but now they must also have the qualities which will be likely to profit by education ; that is to say, they must be quick at learning, for the soul soon gets tired of mental gymnastics in which the toil is not divided with the body. And they must be retentive, solid, diligent, laborious natures, who combine intellectual with moral virtues, — not lame and one-sided, diligent in bodily exercise and indolent in mind, "or con versely; — not a maimed soul, which hates falsehood and yet uninten tionally is always losing the pearl of truth in the mire of ignorance ; not a bastard or feeble person, but sound in wind and limb, and in perfect condition for the great gymnastic trial of the mind. Justice herself can find no fault with natures such as these, who will be the saviours of our State ; disciples of another sort would only make philosophy more ridi culous than she is at present. Forgive my enthusiasm ; I had forgotten that we were not in earnest, and became excited ; when I see her tram pled under foot, I am angry at the authors of her disgrace. ' I did not notice that you were more excited than you ought to have been.' But I felt that I was. Now do not let us forget another point in the selec tion of our disciples — that they must be young and not old. For Solon is mistaken in saying that an old man can be always learning — he can no more learn than he can run. Youth is the time of study, and here we must remember that the mind is free and dainty, and, unlike the body, must not be made to work against the grain. Learning in youth should be a sort of play, in which the natural bent is detected. As in training them for war, the young dogs should at first only taste blood ; but when the necessary gymnastics are over which during two or three years divide life between sleep and bodily exercise, then the education of the soul will become a more serious matter. At twenty years of age, after various trials in which ' muscular philosophy ' is not to be neglected, a selection must be made of the more promising disciples, with whom 92 THE REPUBLIC. a new epoch of education will begin. The sciences which they have hitherto learned in fragments will now be viewed in a more comprehen sive way, and brought into relation with each other and with true being ; the power of combining them is the test of speculative and dialectical ability. And afterwards there shall be trials for still higher honours; and at thirty a further selection shall be made of those who are able to withdraw from the world of sense into the abstraction of ideas. But at this point, judging from present experience, there is a danger that dia lectic may be the source of many evils. The danger may be illustrated by a parallel case: — Imagine a person who has been brought up in wealth and luxury amid a crowd of flatterers, and who is suddenly in formed that he is a supposititious son. He has hitherto honoured his reputed parents and disregarded the flatterers, and now he does the reverse ; — this is just what happens with a man's principles. There are certain doctrines which he learnt at home and which had a sort of parental authority over him. Presently he finds that imputations are cast upon them ; a troublesome querist comes and asks, ' What is the just and good?' or proves that virtue is vice and vice virtue, and his mind becomes unsettled, and he ceases to love, honour, and obey them as he has hitherto done. He is seduced into the life of pleasure, and becomes a lawless person and a rogue. The case of such speculators is very pitiable, and, in order that our thirty years' old pupils may not deserve this pity, let us take every possible care that young persons do not study philosophy too early. For a young man is a sort of puppy who only plays with an argument ; he pulls and tears at all who come near him ; and is reasoned into and out of his opinions every day ; he soon begins to believe nothing, and brings himself and philosophy into discredit. A man of thirty has too much sense to run on in this way ; he will argue and not merely contradict, and the moderation of his character will increase the honour of the pursuit. As we said before, the students of philosophy must be orderly and constant, not any chance aspirant or intruder. What time shall we allow for this second gymnastic training of the soul? — say, twice the time required for the gymnastics of the body; six, or perhaps five years, to commence at thirty, and then for fifteen years let the student go down into the den, and com mand armies, and gain experience of life. At fifty let him return to the end of all things, and have his eyes uplifted to the idea of good, and order his life after that pattern ; if necessary, taking his turn at the INTRODUCTION. 93 helm of State, and training up others to be his successors. When his time comes he shall depart in peace to the islands of the blest. He shall be honoured with sacrifices, and be worshipped as a god if the Pythian oracle approves ; and at any rate, he shall be revered as a man. ' You are a statuary, Socrates, and have made a perfect image of our governors/ Yes, and of our governesses, for the women will share in all things with the men. And you will admit that our State is not a mere aspiration, but may really come into being in the way which we have described, when there shall arise philosopher-kings, one or more, who will despise the pomps and vanities of this present world, and will be the servants of justice only in the administration of the State. ' And how will they commence their administration?' The first step will be to send away into the country all those who are more than ten years of age, and begin on those who are left. ... At the commencement of the sixth book, Plato anticipated his explanation of the relation of the philosopher to the world in an alle gory; in this, as in other passages, following the order which he pre scribes in education, and proceeding from the concrete to the abstract. At the commencement of Book VII, under the figure of a cave having an opening towards a fire and a way upwards to the true light, he returns to view the divisions of knowledge, exhibiting familiarly, as in a picture, the result which had been hardly won by a great effort of thought in the previous discussion; at the same time casting a glance onward at the dialectical process, which is represented by .the way leading from darkness to light. The shadows, the images, the reflection of the sun and stars in the water, the stars and sun themselves, severally correspond, — the first, to the realm of fancy and poetry, — the second, to the world of sense, — the third, to the abstractions or universals of sense, of which the mathematical sciences furnish the type, — the fourth and last to the same abstractions, when seen in the unity of the idea, from which they derive a new meaning and power. The true dialectical pro cess begins with the contemplation of the real stars, and not mere reflec tions of them, and ends with the recognition of- the sun, or idea of good, as the parent not only of light but of warmth and growth. To the divi sions of knowledge the stages of education partly answer ; — first, there is the early education of childhood and youth in the fancies of the poets, and in the laws and customs of the State;— then there is the training 94 THE REPUBLIC. of the body to be a warrior athlete, and a good servant of the mind ; — and thirdly, after an interval follows the education of later life, which begins with mathematics and proceeds to philosophy in general. There seem to be two great aims in the philosophy of Plato,— first, to realize abstractions ; secondly, to connect them. According to him, the true education is that which draws men from becoming to being and to a comprehensive survey of all being. He desires to develop in the human mind the faculty of seeing the universal in all things ; until at last the particulars of sense drop away and the universal alone remains. He never understood that abstractions, as Hegel says, are 'mere ab stractions' — of use when employed in the arrangement of facts, but adding nothing to the sum of knowledge when pursued apart from them, or with reference to an imaginary idea of good. Still the exercise of the faculty of abstraction has enlarged the powers of the human mind, and played a great part in the education of the human race. Plato appreciated the value of this, and saw that the faculty might be quickened by the study of number and relation. All things in which there is opposition or proportion are suggestive of reflection. The dull impression of sense evokes no power of thought or of mind, but when objects of sense ask to be compared and distinguished, then philosophy begins. The science of arithmetic first suggests such distinctions. There follow in order the other sciences of plain and solid geometry, and of solids in motion, one branch of which is astronomy or the harmony of the spheres, — to this is appended the sister science of the harmony of sounds. Plato seems also to hint at the possibility of other applications of arithmetical or mathematical proportions. The modern mathematician will readily sympathise with Plato's delight in the properties of pure mathematics. He will not be disinclined to say with him : — Let alone the heavens, and study the beauties of number and figure in themselves. He too will be apt to depreciate their appli cation to the arts. He will observe that Plato has a conception of geometry, in which figures are to be dispensed with ; thus in a distant and shadowy way seeming to anticipate the possibility of working geometrical problems by a more general mode of analysis. He will remark with interest on the backward state of solid geometry, which, alas ! was not encouraged by the aid of the State in the age of Plato ; and he will recognise the grasp of Plato's mind in his ability to conceive of one science of solids in motion including the earth as well as the INTRODUCTION. 95 heavens,— not forgetting to notice the intimation to which allusion has been already made, that besides astronomy and harmonics the science of solids in motion may have other applications. Still more will he be struck with the comprehensiveness of view which led Plato, at a time when these sciences hardly existed, to say that they must be studied in relation to one another, and to the idea of good, or common principle of truth and being. But he will also see (and perhaps without surprise) that in that stage of physical and mathematical knowledge, Plato has lallen into the error of supposing that he can construct the heavens a priori by mathematical problems, and determine the principles of har mony irrespective of their adaptation to the human ear. The illusion was a natural one in that age and country. The simplicity and certainty of astronomy and harmonics seemed to contrast with the variation and complexity of the world of sense ;— hence the circumstance that there was some elementary basis of fact, some measurement of distance or time on which they must ultimately rest, was overlooked by him. The modern predecessors of Newton fell into errors at least equally great ; and Plato can hardly be said to have been very far wrong, or may even claim a sort of prophetic insight into the subject, when we con sider that the greater part of astronomy at the present day consists of abstract dynamics, by the help of which most astronomical discoveries have been made. The metaphysical philosopher from his point of view recognizes mathematics as an instrument of education, — which strengthens the power of attention, developes the sense of order and the faculty of construction, and enables the mind to grasp under simple formulae the quantitative differences of physical phenomena. But while acknowledg ing their value in education, he sees also that they have no connexion with our higher moral and intellectual ideas. In the attempt which Plato makes to connect them, we easily trace the influences of the old Pythagorean notions. There is no reason to suppose that he is speak ing of the ideal numbers at p. 525 E; but he is describing numbers which are pure abstractions, to which he assigns a real and separate existence, which, ' as the teachers of the art ' (meaning probably the Pythagoreans) would have affirmed, repel all attempts at subdivision, and in which unity and every other number are conceived of as absolute. The truth and certainty of numbers, when thus disengaged from pheno mena, gave them a kind of sacredness in the eyes of an ancient philoso- 96 THE REPUBLIC. pher. Nor is it easy to say how far ideas of order and fixedness may have had a moral and elevating influence on the minds of men, ' who/ in the words of the Timaeus, ' might learn to regulate their erring lives according to them '(470). It is worthy of remark that the old Pytha gorean ethical symbols still exist as figures of speech among ourselves. And those who in modern times see the world pervaded by universal law, may also see an anticipation of this last word of modern philo sophy in the Platonic idea of good, which is the source and measure of all things, and yet only an abstraction. (Cp. Philebus, sub fin.) Two passages seem to require more particular explanations. First, that which relates to the analysis of vision. The difficulty in this passage may be explained, like many others, from differences in the modes of conception prevailing among ancient and modern thinkers. To us, the perceptions of sense are inseparable from the act of the mind which accompanies them. The consciousness of form, colour, distance, is in distinguishable from the simple sensation, which is the medium of them. Whereas to Plato sense is the Heraclitean flux of sense, not the vision of objects in the order in which they actually present themselves to the experienced sight, but as they may be imagined to appear confused and blurred to the half-awakened eye of the infant. The first action of the mind is aroused by the attempt to set in order this chaos, and the reason is required to frame distinct conceptions under which the confused im pressions of sense may be arranged. Hence arises the question, ' What is great, what is small?' and thus begins the distinction of the visible and the intelligible. The second difficulty relates to Plato's conception of harmonics. Three classes of harmonists are distinguished by him : — first, the Pytha goreans, whom he proposes to consult (as in the previous discussion on music he will consult Damon) and who are acknowledged to be masters in the art, but are nevertheless deficient in the knowledge of its higher import and relation to the good; secondly, the mere empirics, whom Glaucon appears to confuse with them, and whom both he and Socrates ludicrously describe as experimenting by mere auscultation on the in tervals of sounds. Both of these fall short in different degrees of the Platonic idea of harmony, which must be studied in a purely abstract way, first by the method of problems, and secondly as a part of universal knowledge in relation to the idea of good. The allegory has a political as well as a philosophical meaning. The INTR OD UCTION. 97 den or cave represents the narrow sphere of politics or law (cp. the description of the philosopher and lawyer in the Theaetetus, 172-176), and the light of the eternal ideas is supposed to exercise a disturbing influence on the minds of those who return to this lower world. In other words, their principles are too wide for practical application ; they are looking far away into the past and future, when their business is with the present. The ideal is not easily reduced to the conditions of actual life, and may often seem to be at variance with them. And at first, those who return are unable to compete with the inhabitants of the den in the measurement of the shadows, and are derided and persecuted by them ; but after a while they see the things below in far truer proportions than those who have never ascended into the upper world. The difference between the politician turned into a philosopher and the philosopher turned into a politician, is symbolized by the two kinds of disordered eyesight, the one which is experienced by the captive who is transferred from darkness to day, the other, of the heavenly messenger who volun tarily for the good of his fellow-men descends into the den. In what way the brighter light is to dawn on the inhabitants of the lower world, or how the idea of good is to become the guiding principle of politics, is left unexplained by Plato. Like the nature and divisions of dialectic, of which Glaucon impatiently demands to be informed, perhaps he would have said that the explanation could not be given except to a disciple of the previous sciences. (Compare Symposium 210 A.) Some modern elements of thought may be noted in this part of the Republic. We seem to hear the echo of our own times in the com plaints which Plato utters respecting the dangers of speculation in youth. The minds of young men become unsettled, and their extravagance brings discredit on philosophy and on themselves. They argue about the laws and opinions in which they have been brought up, and soon begin to think that one thing is as good as another. Their position is ingeniously compared to that of a supposititious son, who has made the discovery that his reputed parents are not his real ones, and, in consequence, they have lost their authority over him. The distinction between the mathematician and the dialectician is also noticeable. Plato is very well aware that the faculty of the mathematician is quite dis tinct from the higher philosophical sense which recognizes and combines first principles (531 E). The contempt which he expresses at p. 533 for distinctions of words, the danger of involuntary falsehood, the apology VOL. III. H 98 THE REPUBLIC. which Socrates makes for his earnestness of speech, are highly charac teristic of the Platonic style and mode of thought. The quaint notion that if Palamedes was the inventor of number Agamemnon could not have counted his feet ; the art by which we are made to believe that this State of ours is not a dream only ; the gravity with which the first step is taken in the actual creation of the State, namely, the sending out of the city all who had arrived at ten years of age, in order to expedite the business of education by a generation, are also truly Platonic. (For the last, compare the passage at the end of the third book (415 D), in which he expects the lie about the earthborn men to be believed in the second generation.) EOOK VIII. And so we have arrived at the conclusion, that in the perfect State wives and children are to be in common; and the education and pursuits of men and women, both in war and peace, are also to be common, and kings are to be philosophers and warriors. And a further conclusion is, that our soldiers are to live in common houses, and to have all things in common ; they are to be warrior athletes receiving no pay, but only their food from the other citizens. Now let us return to the point at which we digressed, and recover the track. ' That is easily done/ he replied : ' You were speaking before we entered on the subject of women and children, of the State which you had con structed, and of the individual who answered to this, both of whom you affirmed to be good, although of both you were able to show still more excellent things; and you said that of inferior States there were four forms and four individuals corresponding to them, which although defi cient in various degrees, were all of them worth inspecting with a view to determining the relative happiness or misery of the best or worst man. Then Polemarchus and Adeimantus interrupted you, and this led to another argument, — and so here we are.' Suppose that we put ourselves again in the same position, and do you repeat your question. ' I should like to know what the constitutions are of which you spoke ?' Besides the perfect State there are only four of any note : — first, the famous Lace daemonian or Cretan commonwealth ; secondly, oligarchy, a State full of evils ; thirdly, democracy, which follows next in order ; fourthly, tyranny, which is the disease or death of all governments ; and there are other inter mediate forms which are more commonly found among barbarians than among Hellenes. Now, States are not made of ' oak and rock,' but of INTRODUCTION. 99 flesh and blood ; and therefore as there are five States there must be five human natures in individuals, which correspond to them. And first, there is the ambitious nature, which answers to the Lacedaemonian State; secondly, the oligarchical nature ; thirdly, the democratical ; and fourthly, the tyrannical. This last will have to be compared with the perfectly just, which is the fifth, that we may know which is the happier, and then we shall be able to determine whether the argument of Thrasymachus or our own is the more convincing. And as before we began with the State and went on to the individual, so let us do now — beginning with timocracy, let us go on to the timocratical man, and then proceed to the other forms of government, and the individuals who answer to them. But how did timocracy arise out of the perfect State ? Plainly, like all changes of government, from division in the rulers ; for a government which is united cannot be moved. But whence came division ? ' Sing, heavenly Muses/ as Homer says ; may we not suppose them to speak to us as to children, putting on a solemn face in jest ? ' And what will they say ? ' They will say that human things are fated to decay, and even the perfect State will not escape when the wheel comes full circle in a period short or long. Plants or animals have times of fertility and sterility, which the intelligence of the rulers alloyed by sense will not enable them to ascertain, and children will be born out of season. For whereas divine creations are in a perfect cycle or number, the human creation is in a number which declines from perfection, and has four terms and three intervals of numbers, increasing, waning, assimilating, dissimilating, and yet perfectly commensurate with each other. The base of the number with a fourth added (or which is 3 : 4), multiplied by five and cubed, gives two harmonies : — The first a square number, which is a hundred times the base (or a hundred times a hundred) ; the second, an oblong, being a hundred squares of the rational diameter of a figure the side of which is five, subtracting one from each square or two per fect squares from all, and adding a hundred cubes of three. This entire number is geometrical and contains the rule or law of generation. And when this law is neglected marriages will be unpropitious ; the infe rior offspring who are then born will in time become the rulers, and the State will decline, and education will fall into decay, and gymnastic be preferred to music, and the gold and silver and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass, and thus will division arise. Such is the Muses' answer to our question. ' And a true answer.' Of course ; for how can H 2 ioo THE REPUBLIC. the answer of the Muses be other than true ?— ' But what more have the Muses to say?' They say that the two races, the iron and brass, and the silver and gold, will draw the State different ways;— the one to trade and moneymaking, and the others having the true riches and not caring for money, will resist them — there will be a contest, which will end in a compromise ; they will agree to have private property, and will enslave their fellow-citizens who were once their friends and nur- turers. But they will retain their warlike character, and their chief occu pation will be to make war, and to control their subjects. This is the origin of that middle state which is intermediate between aristocracy and oligarchy. The new form of government resembles the ideal in obedience to rulers and contempt for trades and handicrafts, in the institution of com mon meals, and in "devotion to warlike and gymnastic exercises. But corruption has crept into philosophy, and simplicity of character, which was once her note, is now looked for only in the military class. Arts of war begin to prevail over arts of peace ; the ruler is no longer a philo sopher ; as in oligarchies, there springs up among them an extravagant love of gain — get another man's and save your own, is their principle ; and they have dark places in which they hoard their gold and silver, for the use of their women and others ; they take their pleasures by stealth, like boys who are running away from their father, the law ; and their education is 'not inspired by the Muse, but imposed by the strong arm of power. The leading characteristic of the State is party spirit and ambition. And what manner of man answers to such a State ? ' In love of contention,' replied Adeimantus, 'he will be like our friend Glaucon.' Perhaps, yes, he may be like him in that, but not in other ways; for he is self-asserting and ill-educated, yet fond of literature and of hear ing recitations, although himself not a speaker, — fierce with slaves, but not truly above them — obedient to rulers, and a lover of power and honour, which he hopes to gain by deeds of arms — fond, too, of gym nastics and of hunting. As he advances in years he grows more and more avaricious, having never known a saviour or guardian — that is to say, reason and music — which are the only saviours of men. His origin is as follows : — His father may probably have been a good man dwelling in an ill-ordered State, who has retired from public life and is ready to waive his rights in order that he may be at peace. His mother is angry INTRODUCTION. 101 at her loss of precedence among other women ; she is disgusted at the selfishness of her husband, and her woman's tongue expatiates to her son on the unmanliness and indolence of his father. ' Yes,' said Adeimantus, ' that is the way with all women.' Yes, I said, and you may observe also that the old family servant takes up the tale, and says to the youth : — ' When you are grown up you must be more of a man than your father, and proceed against debtors and avenge insults.' All the world are agreed that the man who minds his own business is an idiot, while a busybody is highly honoured and esteemed. The young man hears and sees this, and he also hears his father's words and sees his ways, and as he is naturally well disposed, although liable to be perverted by evil influences, he rests at a middle point and becomes ambitious and a lover of honour. And now, as ^Eschylus says, ' Set another man over against another city ; ' or rather, let the city come first. The next form of government is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the rich only. No eyes are needed to see how this form of government springs out of the last. ' How is that ? ' The private treasury is the beginning of the decline ; the possession of gold and silver leads to new fashions of expense, and the citizens and their wives break the law. One draws another on, and the multitude are infected; riches are thrown into the scale, and virtue kicks the beam; — lovers of money take the place of lovers of honour ; misers of politicians ; and, in time, political privileges are confined by law to the rich. The latter change is commonly effected by fear or violence. Thus much of the origin, — let us next consider the evils of oligarchy. Would a man who wanted to be safe on a voyage take a bad pilot because he was rich, or refuse a good one because he was poor ? And does not the analogy apply still more to the State? And there are yet greater evils : two nations are struggling together in one — the rich and the poor; and the rich dare not put arms into the hands of the poor, and are unwilling to pay for defenders out of their own money. And have we not already condemned that State in which the same persons are warriors as well as shopkeepers ? The greatest evil of all is that a man may sell his property and have no place in the State ; while there is one class which has enormous wealth, the other is entirely desti tute. But observe that these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones 102 THE REPUBLIC. of the hive ; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the ' unfeathered, two-legged things,' which we call drones, do not all agree in this respect, for some of them are without stings and some of them have dreadful stings ; in other words, there are paupers and there are rogues. In the cellars and underground places of an oligarchical city you will always find this scum of the earth, which in cludes nearly everybody but the governing class. And this state of things originates in bad education and in bad government. Like State, like man, — the change in the latter begins with the repre sentative of timocracy ; he walks at first in the ways of his father, who may have been a statesman, or general, perhaps ; and presently he sees him 'fallen from his high estate/ the victim of informers, dying in prison or exile, or by the hand of the executioner. The lesson which he learns from this is one of caution; he leaves the dangerous arena of politics, and makes money ; hoping to retrieve his father's losses, he represses his pride and saves pence. Avarice is enthroned as his bosom's lord, and assumes the style of the Great King, and the newest Persian fashions. The rational and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground, the one immersed in calculation, the other absorbed in the admiration of wealth. The love of honour turns to love of money ; the conversion is instantaneous. And the man goes through the same process as the State ; he is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one passion which is the master of the rest, a skinflint, a hoarder, who chooses a life which the vulgar approve : Is he not the very image of the State ? He has had no education, or he would never have allowed the blind god of riches to lead the dance within him. And being uneducated he will have many slavish desires, some beggarly, some knavish, breeding in his soul. Shall I tell you where you may detect him ? If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the power to defraud, he will prove that he is not without the will, and that his passions are only restrained- by fear and not by reason. He will be respectable in his dealings generally but when he has to spend another man's money, he will show that he has the desires of a drone. Hence he leads a divided existence; in which the better desires mostly prevail. But when he is contending for prizes and other distinctions, he is afraid to incur a loss which is to be repaid only by barren honour; in time of war he fights with a small part of his resources, and usually saves his money and loses the victory. INTRODUCTION. 103 Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the oligarchical man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an oli garchy ; they allow vice and extravagance among the citizens in order that they may be enriched by the sale of a spendthrift's property ; and no man can serve two masters, wealth and virtue. In this disorderly condition of things men of family often lose their property or rights of citizenship, and there they are, not only poor and in debt, but a fixture in the State, with their stings out and arms in their hands — ready for any desperate enterprise against the new owners of their property and against the State. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them ; he passes by on the other side, and leaves his sting — that is, his money— in any one else who will be his victim ; and many a man has to pay the parent or principal sum multiplied into a family of children, and is reduced into a state of dronage by him. The only way of diminishing this glaring evil is either to limit a man's use of his property, or to insist that the lender shall lend at his own risk, and have no protection from the law. But in an oligarchy the ruling class do not want to apply a remedy ; they are careful only of money, and as careless of virtue as the poorest of the citizens. Now there are occasions on which the governors and the governed meet together, — at festivals, on a journey, voyaging or fighting. The wiry, sunburnt pauper finds that in the hour of danger he is not despised ; he sees the rich man under an umbrella puffing and panting, and draws the conclusion which he privately imparts to his companions, — ' that our people are not good for much ; ' and as a sickly frame is made ill by a mere touch from without, or sometimes without external impulse is ready to fall to pieces of itself, so from the least cause, perhaps from some offer of aristocratic or democratic help, or with no cause at all, the city, like the sick man, falls ill and fights a battle for life or death. And democracy comes into power when the poor are the victors, killing some and exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the rest. The manner of life in such a State is that of democrats; there is freedom and plainness of speech, and every man does what is right in his own eyes, and has his own way of life. Hence arise the most various developments of character ; the State is like a piece of em broidery of which the colours and figures are the manners of men, and there are many who, like women and children, prefer this variety to real beauty and excellence. The State is not one but many, like a bazaar 104 THE REPUBLIC. at which you can buy anything. The great charm is, that you may do as you like ; you may govern if you like, let it alone if you like ; go to war and make peace if you feel disposed, and all quite irrespective of anybody else. When you condemn men to death they remain alive all the same ; a gentleman is desired to go into exile, and he stalks about the streets like a hero, and nobody sees him or cares for him. Take another look at the free and lordly nature of democracy, how grandly she sets her foot upon all our fine theories of education, — how little does she care for the training of her statesmen ! The only qualification which is demanded by her is the profession of patriotism. Such is democracy ; — a pleasing, lawless, various sort of government, distributing equality to equals and unequals alike. Let us now inspect the individual democrat ; and first, as in the case of the State, we will trace his antecedents. He is the son of a miserly oligarch, and has been taught by him to restrain the love of unnecessary pleasures. Perhaps for the sake of clearness I ought to explain the meaning of this latter term; necessary pleasures are those which are good, and which we cannot do without ; unnecessary pleasures are those which do no good, and of which the desire might be eradicated by early training. For example, the pleasures of eating and drinking are neces sary and healthy, up to a certain point ; beyond that point they are alike hurtful to body and mind, and the excess may be avoided. When in excess, they may be rightly called expensive pleasures, in opposition to the useful ones. And the drone, as we called him, was the slave of these unnecessary pleasures and desires, whereas the miserly oligarch is subject only to the necessary. The oligarch changes into the democrat in the following manner : — The youth who has had a mean and miserly bringing up, gets a taste of the drone's honey ; he meets with wild reckless companions, who intro duce him to every new pleasure. Thus the change begins ; and, as in the State, so in the individual, there are allies on both sides, temptations from without and passions from within ; there is reason also and external influences of parents and friends in alliance with the better nature ; and these two factions or armies are in violent conflict with one another. Sometimes the party of order prevails, but then again new desires and new disorders arise, and the whole mob of passions get possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the head, which they find unguarded — void of acquirements and virtues, best sentinels over the lives of men dear to IN TROD UCTION. 105 the gods. Falsehoods and illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into the country of the Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there. And if any offer of alliance or parley of indi vidual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and permit no one to enter, — there is a battle, and the victory is with them; and then they banish modesty, which they call folly, and thrust away temperance ; and all law and order are quickly despatched over the border by them and the rabble which are at their heels. And when the house is clean swept and garnished, their favourite is initiated by them in great mysteries; — they dress up the exiled vices in bright array, and bring them back again crowned with garlands, and give them new names. Insolence they call good breeding, anarchy freedom, waste magnificence, impudence courage. Such is the change from the use of the necessary pleasures to the unnecessary ones ; after this the youth is divided impartially between them ; and if he be fortunate and not too far gone in his badness, when he gets older and the turbulence of his passions begins to pass away, he receives back some of the exiles and lives in a sort of equilibrium ; he indulges first one pleasure and then another, as they offer ; and if reason comes and tells him that some pleasures are good and honourable, and others bad and vile, she is not admitted into the citadel — he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and he will have no invidious distinctions between them. Thus he lives in the fancy of the hour; sometimes he is drunken and lapped in wine and song ; then he will drink water only and get thin ; he takes to the gymnasium or he does nothing at all; then again he would be a philosopher or a politician, and he jumps up and says just what comes into his head ; or again, he would be a warrior or a man of business ; he is ' Every thing by starts and nothing long.' There remains still the finest and fairest of all men and all States- tyranny and the tyrant. Tyranny springs from democracy much in the same way that democracy springs from oligarchy. ' How do you mean?' Both arise from excess ; the one from excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom. ' The great natural good which makes life worth having/ says the democrat, 'is freedom/ And this exclusive love of freedom and regardlessness of everything else, is the cause of the change from democracy to tyranny. The State, served by evil cupbearers, swills the strong wine of freedom, and unless her rulers give her a io6 THE REPUBLIC. plentiful draught, breaks out and beats them; loyal citizens are called good for nothing, hereditary bondsmen and the like; equality and fraternity of governors and governed, is the approved principle. Anarchy is the law, not of the State only but of private houses, and is diffused over all. Father and son, citizen and foreigner, teacher and pupil, old and young, are all on a level ; fathers and teachers fear their sons and pupils, and the wisdom of the young man is a match for the elder, and the old imitate the jaunty manners of the young because they are afraid of being thought morose. Slaves whom you have bought with money are on a level with their masters and mistresses, and there is no difference between men and women. And why, as J^schylus says, should I not utter the word which comes to my lips ? The very animals in a demo cratic State have a freedom which is unknown in other places. The she- dogs are as good as their she-mistresses, and horses and asses march along with dignity and run their noses against anybody who comes in their way ; — such exuberance is there and superabundance of freedom. ' I have often experienced what you describe in my country walks.' At last the skins of the citizens become so sensitive that they cannot endure the yoke of laws, written or unwritten ; they would have no man call himself their master. Such is the fair, glorious beginning of things out of which tyranny springs. ' Glorious, indeed ; but what is to follow ? ' The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy ; there is a law of con traries; the greatness of anything goes before a fall. The excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the slavery. You will remember that in the oligarchy were found two classes — rogues and paupers, who were compared by us to drones with and without stings. These two classes are to the State what phlegm and bile are to the human body ; and the duty of the State- physician, or legislator, is to purge them away in the same manner that a bee-keeper would cut out the cells of drones. Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but of a much more dangerous sort than in the oligarchy ; there they are inert arfd unpractised, here they are full of life and animation ; and the keener sort speak and act, while the others buzz about the bema and prevent their opponents from being heard. And there is another class in democratic States, of respectable, thriving indi viduals, — these are like a sponge, to be squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions ; there is moreover a third class, who are the labourers and the artizans, and they make up the mass of the people. INTRODUCTION. 107 When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but there is a difficulty in bringing them together unless they are attracted by a little honey ; and the rich supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part for themselves and give the others a taste only. The possessions of the rich begin to be taken, and they are compelled to protect them selves; when they see the demagogues urging on their followers to do what they would not do of themselves, they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and become downright oligarchs in self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for treason. The people have some protector whom they nurse into greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs. The nature of the change is indicated in the old fable of the temple of Zeus Lycaeus : the story is, that he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims will be turned into a wolf. Even so the protector, who in his hour of popularity tastes human blood, and slays some and exiles others with or without pretence of law, and proclaims abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become a wolf — that is, a tyrant. Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes back from exile in full power; and then if his enemies can not get rid of him by legal means, they plot his assassination. Thereupon the friend of the people makes his well-known request to them for a body guard, which they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of their own. Then let the rich man make to himself wings, and not ' turn back to take anything in the house,' for he will never run away again if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector, instead of his vast bulk lying upon the earth, overstrides others, and stands like a colossus in the chariot of State, a full-blown tyrant now. Let us enquire into the nature of his happiness. In the early days of his tyranny he has a smile and ' Peace be with you,' for everybody ; he is not a ' dominus,' no, not he : he has only come to put an end to debt and the monopoly of land. Having got rid of foreign enemies, he makes himself necessary to the State by always going to war. War-taxes depress the poor and keep them at work ; this has the incidental advantage of preventing them from conspiring against him ; and he can only get rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy, — hence he must be always stirring up war. Then comes unpopularity; some of those who assisted in setting him up have the courage to tell him a piece of their minds. The consequence is, that he must put them out of the way ; he will always be keeping a sharp io8 THE REPUBLIC. look-out on the high spirited, the wise, the wealthy; and such is his blessed condition of life, that he is obliged to make a purgation of them. ' And what a purgation ! ' Yes, he purges away the good as the physician purges away the bad ; he has to choose between death and a hateful and shameful life. And the more hated he is, the more he will require trusty guards ; but whom will he trust, and where will he get them ? ' They will come flocking like birds, for pay.' You mean that he will hire drones out of foreign parts ; would he not rather obtain them on the spot? 'But how is that possible?' He will take the slaves from their owners and make them his body-guards ; these are his trusted friends, from whom alone he receives the tribute of love and admiration. Verily the tragedians are wise, and Euripides wiser than any of them, who says, — ' Tyrants are wise by converse with the wise ; ' and now, behold these wise men who are the companions of tyrants. Moreover, he magnifies tyranny as a state of superhuman glory; and this is an excellent reason, as the tragic poet will allow if he has any wit, why we should refuse to admit him into our State. ' I think that he may have wit enough for that.' He will go to other cities, and gather the mob about him with grand and plausible words, and change common wealths into tyrannies and democracies, — receiving honours and rewards, first of all from tyrants, secondly from democracies, but the higher he and his friends ascend constitution hill, the more their honour will fail and become 'too asthmatic to mount.' To return to the tyrant ; — how will he support that rare army of his ? First, by robbing the temples of their treasures, which will enable him to lighten the taxes ; then he will take all his father's property, and spend it on his com panions, male or female. Now his father is the demus, and if the demus gets angry, and says that a great hulking son ought not to be a burden on his parents, and tells him to depart and take his riotous crew with him, then will the parent know what a monster he has been fostering in his bosom, and that the son whom he would fain expel is too strong for him. ' You do not mean to say that he will beat his father ? ' Yes, he will, after having taken away his arms. ' Then he is a parricide, and a cruel, unnatural son to a parent whom he is bound to cherish and main tain.' And the people have jumped from the fear of slavery into slavery, out of the smoke into the fire. Thus liberty, when out of all order and reason, passes into the worst form of slavery. INTRODUCTION. 109 ... In the previous books Plato has described the ideal State ; now he returns to the perverted or declining forms, on which he had lightly touched at the end of book iv. These he describes in a succession of parallels between the individuals and the State, tracing the origin of either in the State or individual which has preceded them. He begins by asking the point at which he digressed ; and is thus led shortly to recapitulate the substance of the three former books, which also contain a parallel of the philosopher and the State. Of the first decline he gives no intelligible account ; he would not have liked to admit the most probable causes of the fall of his ideal State, which to us would appear to be the impracticability of communism or the natural antagonism of the ruling and subject classes. He throws a veil of mystery over the origin of the decline, which he attributes to ignorance of the law of population. Of this law the famous geometrical figure or number is the expression. Like the ancients in general, he had no idea of the gradual perfectibility of man or of the education of the human race. His ideal was not to be attained in the course of as:es, O ' but was to spring in full armour from the head of the legislator. When good laws had been given, he thought only of the manner in which they were likely to be corrupted, or of how they might be filled up in detail or restored in accordance with their original spirit. He appears not to have reflected upon the full meaning of his own words, 'in the brief space of human life, nothing great can be accomplished ' (x. 608 B) ; or again, as he afterwards says in the Laws (iii. 676), 'infinite time is the maker of cities.' The order of constitutions which is adopted by him represents an order of thought rather than a succession of time, and may be considered as the first attempt to frame a philosophy of history. The first of these declining States is timocracy, or the government of soldiers and lovers of honour, which answers to the Spartan State ; this is a government of force, in which education is not inspired by the Muses, but imposed by the law, and in which all the finer elements of organization have disappeared. The philosopher himself has lost the love of truth, and the soldier, who is of a simpler and honester nature, rules in his stead. The individual who answers to timocracy has some noticeable qualities. He is described as ill educated, but, like the Spartan, a lover of literature ; and although he is a harsh master to his servants he has no natural superiority over them. His character is based upon a reaction against the circumstances of his father, who in a troubled i io THE REPUBLIC. city has retired from politics, and his mother, who is dissatisfied at her own position, is always urging him towards the life of political ambition. Such a character may have had this origin, and indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a similar kind (vii. 34). But there is obviously no connection between the manner in which the timo- cratic State springs out of the ideal, and the mere accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a retired statesman. The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even less his torical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek history of a polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an oligarchy of wealth, or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The order of history appears to be different ; first, in the Homeric times there is the royal or patriarchal form of government, which a century or two later was suc ceeded by an oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and in which wealth was only the accident of the hereditary possession of land and power. Sometimes this oligarchical government gave way to a govern ment based upon a qualification of property, which, according to Aristotle's mode of .using words would have been called a timocracy ; and this in some cities, as at Athe-ns, became the conducting medium to democracy. But such was not the necessary order of succession in States; nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the endless fluc tuation of Greek history (like the tides in the Euripus), except, perhaps, in the almost uniform tendency from monarchy to aristocracy in the earliest times. At first sight there appears to be a similar inversion in the last step of the Platonic succession, for tyranny instead of being the natural end of democracy, in early Greek history appears rather as a stage leading to democracy ; the reign of Peisistratus and his sons is an episode which comes between the legislation of Solon and the con*- stitution of Cleisthenes; and some secret cause common to them all seems to have led the greater part of Hellas at her first appearance in the dawn of history, e. g. Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, and nearly every State with the exception of Sparta, through a similar stage of tyranny which ended either in oligarchy or democracy. But then we must remember that Plato is describing rather the contemporary history of the Sicilian States, which was an alternation between democracy and tyranny, than the ancient history of Athens or Corinth. The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later Greek de lighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives of INTR OD UCTION. 1 1 1 mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the conduct and actions of one were attributed to another in order to fill up the outline. There was no enormity which the Greek was not ready to believe of them ; the tyrant was the negation of government and law ; his assassination was glorious ; there was no crime, however unnatural, which might not with probability be attributed to him. In this, Plato was only following the common thought of his countrymen, which he embellished and exaggerated with all the power of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he drew from life; or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a personal acquaintance with Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of them would rather tend to render doubtful his ever having ' consorted ' with them, or entertained the schemes which are attributed to him in the Epistles, of regenerating Sicily by their help. Plato describes with a sort of amusement the follies .of democracy, of which the political condition is reflected in social life. He conceives democracy as a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host, which is the leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to think. But if he is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover of tyranny. His deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved for the tyrant, who is -the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness, and who in his utter helplessness and suspiciousness is leading an almost impossible existence, without that remnant of good which, in Plato's opinion, was required to give power to evil (book i. p. 352). This ideal of wickedness living in helpless misery, is the reverse of that other portrait of perfect injustice ruling in happiness and splendour, which first of all Thrasymachus, and afterwards the sons of Ariston had drawn, and is also the reverse of the king whose rule of life is the good of his subjects. Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding ethical gradation : the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not extinguishing but harmonising the passions, and training them in virtue ; in the timo- cracy and the timocratic man one virtue still remains, but has superseded all the rest — the constitution, whether of the State or of the individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly, upon the love of honour, which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue. In the second stage of decline the virtues have altogether disappeared, and the love of gain has succeeded ii2 THE REPUBLIC. to them; in the third stage, or democracy, the various passions are allowed to have free play, and the virtues and vices are impartially culti vated. But this freedom, which leads to many curious extravagances of character, is in reality only a state of weakness and dissipation. At last, one monster passion takes possession of the whole nature of man — this is tyranny. In all of them excess — the excess first of wealth and then of freedom, is the element of decay. The eighth book of the Republic abounds in pictures of life and fan ciful allusions ; the use of metaphorical language is carried to a greater extent than anywhere else in Plato. We may remark, first, the descrip tion of the two nations in one, which become more and more divided, as in the feudal ages, and perhaps in our own times, so also among the Greeks; the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean formula as equality among unequals; the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic of liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the tyrant. The proposal that mere debts should not be recoverable by law is a speculation which has often been entertained by reformers of the law in modern times, and is in harmony with the tendencies of modern legislation. Debt and land were the two great difficulties of the ancient lawgiver ; and we may be said to have al most, if not quite, solved the one of these difficulties but hardly the other. Still more remarkable are the corresponding portraits of individuals : there is the family picture of the father and mother and the old servant of the timocratical man, and the outward respectability and inherent meanness of the oligarchical ; the uncontrolled licence and freedom of the democrat, in which the young Alcibiades seems to be depicted, doing right or wrong as he pleases, and who at last, like the prodigal, goes into a far country (note here the play of language by which the democratic man is himself represented under the image of a State having a citadel and receiving embassies); and there is the wild-beast nature, which breaks loose in his successor. The hit about the tyrant being a parri cide ; the representation of the tyrant's life as an obscene dream ; the rhetorical surprise of the more miserable than the most miserable of men in book ix. ; the requirement that the poets will have the good sense to see that if they are the friends of tyrants they ought to be excluded from the State ; the continuous image of the drones, who are of two kinds, swelling at last into the monster drone having wings (see infra, book ix.), are among Plato's happiest touches. INTR OD UCTION. i r 3 There remains to be considered the great difficulty of this book of the Republic, the so-called number of the State. This is a puzzle almost as great as the Number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, and though apparently known to Aristotle, is referred to by Cicero as a proverb of obscurity (Ep. ad Att. vii. 13, 5). And some have imagined that there is no answer to the puzzle, and that Plato has been practising upon his readers. But such a deception as this is inconsistent with the manner in which Aristotle speaks of the number (Pol. v. 12. 7), and would have been ridiculous to any reader of the Republic who was acquainted with Greek mathematics. As little reason is there for sup posing that Plato intentionally used obscure expressions ; the obscurity only arises from our want of familiarity with the subject. On the other hand, Plato himself indicates that he is not altogether serious, and in describing his number as a solemn jest of the Muses, he appears to imply some degree of satire on the symbolical use of number. Our hope of understanding the passage depends principally on an accurate study of the words themselves ; on which a faint light is thrown by the parallel passage in the ninth book. Another help is the allusion in Aristotle, who makes the important remark that the latter part of the passage (from &v errirpiros nvdfifjv, K.T.\.) describes a solid figure1. Some further clue may be gathered from the appearance of the Pythagorean triangle, which is denoted by the numbers 3, 4, 5, and in which, as in every right-angled triangle, the squares of the two lesser sides equal the square of the hypothenuse (32 + 42 = 52 or 9 + 16 = 25). Plato begins by speaking of a perfect or cyclical number (cp. Tim. 39 D) ; i. e. a number in which the sum of the divisors equals the whole ; this is the divine or perfect number in which all lesser cycles or revo lutions are complete; he also speaks of a human or imperfect number, having four terms and three intervals of numbers which are related to one another as roots to powers, and which he describes as assimilating and dissimilating, waxing and waning ; in these he finds certain propor tions, which give two ' harmonies/ the one square, the other oblong ; but he does not say that the square number answers to the divine, or the oblong number to the human cycle. 1 Pol. v. 12,8 : — ' He says that the cause (of the change in the perfect state) is the instability of all things, and their changing in a certain period ; and that this is dependent on certain progressions of number, when a root in the ratio °f 3 : 4 joined with the number 5 gives two harmonies, meaning when the number of the diagram becomes solid.' VOL. III. I n4 THE REPUBLIC. Nor is there any trace in the passage that this second or imperfect number either has reference to a period of time, or is the number of the population of the State. Plato is only thinking of some progression of number with which he chooses to connect the regulation of births. There would be less confusion if, instead of being termed the number of the world and of the State (of which nothing is said in Plato), the two numbers were called respectively the divine and human number of mar riage or generation. For Plato does not suppose their influence to extend to anything but births. They preside over these in the same mysterious manner in which the stars preside over them, or in which, ac cording to the Pythagoreans, opportunity, justice, marriage, are repre sented by some number or figure. I need not repeat the translation and explanations of terms given in the text, in which I have supposed the number to be 8000. This inter pretation derives a certain degree of plausibility, — first, from the circum stance that the numbers suggested in the first half of the passage coincide with the series of numbers which denote the interval between royal and tyrannical pleasure ; secondly, the number 8000 is the ancient number of the Spartan citizens (Herod, vii. 34), and would be what Plato might have called ' a number befitting the population of a city ;' — the myste rious disappearance of the Spartan population may possibly have sug gested to him the first cause of his decline of States ; thirdly, the lesser or square ' harmony', of 400 might be a symbol of the guardians— the larger or oblong 'harmony', of the people, and the numbers 3, 4, 5 might refer to the three orders in the State or parts of the soul, the four virtues, the five forms of government. But in this explanation no clear connection is shown between the first and second half of the passage, nor are the words of Aristotle (orav ytjnjrai orepeos) sufficiently explained. And the phrase eVtVptros irvG^v seems to mean, not the number 3 with a third added (4), but the ratio of 4 : 3. For there would be no meaning in thus describing the number 4. And the connection with the Pythago rean triangle, the sides of which are represented by 3, 4, 5, would be lost. More may be urged in defence of the number 216, which is adopted by Schleiermacher and ably supported by Dr. Donaldson (Proc. of the Philolog. Society, vol. i. p. 81 foil.). According to the latter, the de'iov yewrjrov is the world (?) ; the avdp7reioi> either man or the State (?) ; avgrjo-fis 8vt>ap.evai re KCU Swaoreuo'/iei/at multiplications of the square by its square root (?) ; similar numbers are those whose factors, or the sides INTR OD UCTION. 1 1 5 of the figures represented by them, are in the same ratio, e. g. 3 and 27 ; increasing numbers are those which are less than the sum of their parts, e. g. 12 and 18; Trpoa-rjyopa is used of numbers which are express ible in the same terms of one another, e. g. 8, 12, 18, 27 (f), fara when expressible at all in terms of one another ; eWrpiros Trvd^v is the funda mental number ^ ; ap^oviav toyv K. T. A. a square number multiplied by TOO, — this is the first harmony. The second harmony is a cube of the same number, and is also described as 100 (IO-O/^KIJ /xeV T»/), multiplied by the sum of the three following terms: — (i) the square of the rational diameter of 5, less i, = 48 ; (2) two incommensurable diameters, i. e. the two first irrationals, 2 and 3; (3) the cube of 3, = 27, and divided by the cube of 3. The first series of numbers is 8 : 12 :: 18 : 27, or the cubes of 2 and 3 with their mean proportionals. The first harmony is (I x 5)2 = 100 x || = ^~-. The second harmony is The period of the world is defined by the first perfect number 6, that of the State by the cube of 6 = 216 = 53+43+ 3s; this, taking the roots of the cubes (5, 4, 3), represents the sides of the Pythagorean triangle, and has various other numerical and harmonic properties, e.g. 216 = 2s x 33 (cp. the first series); again, |-x5=fxio (the Pythagorean tetractys], and ^xf=2. The number 216 is also the period of Pythagorean metempsychosis. Other interpreters have suggested the number 5040, which is the num ber of citizens in the Laws; or 17,500, which is the addition of the square of 100(10,000)4-4800 + 2700, making a series 10,000: 7500 : 4800:2700, of which the first is supposed to be the perfect or square number, and the three last stand to one another in the ratios of 52 : 42 : 32. . The num ber has also been supposed to be 50, apparently because the number 50 is equivalent to the squares of the three sides of the sacred triangle, and this is the opinion of Philo; or 10, which multiplied to the fourth power gives 10,000, and is supposed to be the perfect number, as 5 is the im perfect number : or again, the number is said to be made up of the two progressions of the Pythagorean tetractys 1:2:4:8 and 1:3:9:27. All these explanations show curious coincidences of number, which may put us on our guard against accepting other coincidences, but none of them is self-proving. A later explanation — that of Weber — deserves more notice. He argues rightly for the substantial genuineness of the text; and supposes that the first division of the passage contains a general I 2 n 6 THE REPUBLIC. description of the proportions which are to be found in the second half ; and explains ' assimilating and dissimilating ' and ' waxing and waning ' numbers respectively as numbers which form squares or which form oblongs. The increments of number which give these proportions are said to ' equal ' and be ' equalled in power ' (bwa^vai KOL Swao-revopfvai), because they are obtained by multiplying powers of 3, 4, 5 — the numbers of the Pythagorean triangle, of which the hypothenuse is said to ' equal in power' the two lesser sides. The numbers themselves are 6400, 4800, 3600, and 2700, which are then gained afresh by multiplying the numbers 4x5 and 3x5 (fTTLTpiros Trv6fj.r)i> TTffj.Trd8i av£vyf\s) with the sides of the Pythagorean triangle : — First Series. Second Series. i. e. 3 x 4 x 5 = 60 3 x 3 x 5 = 45 4 x 4 x 5 = 80 4 x 3 x 5 = 60 5x4x5=100. 5x3x5 = 75. The former series squared, and multiplied with the second, gives the following results: — 6o2 = 3,600 60x45 = 2,700 8o2 = 6,400 80 x 60 = 4,800 ioo2= 10,000. 100x75 = 7,500. Thus two convenient series of numbers are obtained which agree with the description already given in the first part of the passage, and with the explanation of assimilating and dissimilating numbers as square and oblong. But there is no proof that this was the manner in which Plato intended the roots 3 : 5 and 4 : 5 to be multiplied. Nor is it likely that he would have used the term rp\s avfrdels to mean, not the raising of them to the third power, but the multiplication of them by 3, 4, 5. Nor is there any reason to suppose with Weber, that the words, 'this whole number is geometrical' refer only to the second of the two harmonies, or that the word re'Xeto? would be applied in such a passage as this (in which periods of revolution are spoken of) to any but a cyclical number ; or that the first harmony answers to the perfect number. And here we take leave of the difficulty, without attempting a further solution. The meaning of many words in the passage is so uncertain that there is little probability of our finding the answer to the riddle. Among uncertain expressions may be reckoned, Swd^evai, 8waa-T€vop.evat, ytis j and even the words ap(i.ovLa, TfXeios, IN TR OD UCTION. 1 1 7 are variously explained ; again, the clause beopevav . . . dvflv may be either taken as an explanation of a/5/5i;ro>i> or as a further subtraction of 100, so that the entire number becomes either 4900 or 4800. And there is the further uncertainty of the relation of the first to the second half of the passage, and of the two harmonies to one another. The discovery of the riddle would be useless, and would throw no light on ancient mathematics. The point of interest is that Plato should have used such a symbol, and that so much of the Pythagorean spirit should have prevailed in him. His general meaning is that divine creation is perfect, and represented or presided over by a perfect or cyclical number ; human generation is imperfect, and represented or pre sided over by an imperfect number or series of numbers. The number 5040, which is the number of the State in the Laws, is expressly based by him on utilitarian grounds, namely, the convenience of the number for division ; but in this passage he is thinking of Pythagorean symbols and not of utility. The contrast of the perfect and imperfect number may have been easily suggested by the corrections of the cycle, which were made first by Meton and secondly by Callippus ; (the latter is said to have been a pupil of Plato). Of the degree of importance or of exact ness to be attributed to the problem, the number of the tyrant in book ix. (729 = 365x2), and the slight correction of the error in the number 5040-7-12 (Laws, 771 C) may furnish a criterion. There is nothing surprising in the circumstance that those who were seeking for order in nature and had found order in number, should have imagined one to give law to the other. Plato believes in a power of number far beyond what he could see realized in the world around him ; and may even be thought to have a prophetic anticipation of the discoveries of Quetelet and others that numbers depend upon numbers; e.g. — in population, the numbers of births and the respective numbers of children born of either sex on the respective ages of parents, i. e. on other numbers. BOOK IX. Last of all comes the tyrannical man, about whom we have to enquire, Whence he is, and how does he live — in happiness or in misery ? There is, however, a previous question of the nature and number of the appetites, which I should like to consider first. Some of them are unlawful, and yet admit of being chastened and weakened in various degrees by the power of reason and law. ' What appetites do you mean?' I mean those which are awake when the reasoning powers ii8 THE REPUBLIC. are asleep, which get up and walk about naked without any self-respect or shame ; and there is no conceivable folly or crime, however cruel or unnatural, of which, in imagination, they may not be guilty. ' True/ he said, ' very true.' But when a man's pulse beats temperately ; and he has supped on a feast of reason and come to a knowledge of himself before going to rest, and has satisfied his desires just enough to prevent their perturbing his reason, which remains clear and luminous, and when he is free from quarrel and heat, — the visions which he has on his bed are least irregular and abnormal. I want you to bear in mind, for I have something more to say about this, that even in good men there is such an irregular wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. To return : — You remember what was said of the democrat ; that he was the son of a miserly father, and that he encouraged the saving desires and repressed the ornamental and expensive ones ; presently he got into fine company, and began to entertain a dislike to his father's narrow ways ; and being a better man than the corrupters of his youth, he came to a mean, and led a life, not of lawless or slavish passion, but of regular and successive indulgence. Now imagine a generation to have passed away. The youth has become a father, and has a son who is exposed to the same temptations, and has companions who lead him into every sort of iniquity, which they call liberty, and he has parents and friends who try to keep him right. The counsellors of evil find that their only chance of retaining him is to implant in his soul a monster drone, or love; while other desires buzz around him and mystify him with sweet sounds and scents, this monster love takes possession of him and carries him off, and puts an end to every true or modest thought or wish that remains in him. Love has of old been called a tyranny, and drunkenness is a tyranny, and a madman has in him the spirit of a tyrant, and is fancying that he can rule over gods and men. And the tyrannical man, whether made by nature or habit, is just a drinking, lusting, furious sort of animal. And how does such an one live ? ' That is for you to tell me, not for me to tell you.' Well then, I fancy that he will live amid revelries and harlotries, and love will dwell in the house, lord and master of all that is therein. Many desires require much money, and so he spends all that he has and borrows more ; and when he has nothing the young ravens arc still in the nest in which they were hatched, crying for food. Love, whose attendants they are, sets them on ; and they must be gratified by INTRODUCTION. 119 force or fraud, or if not, they become painful and troublesome ; and as the new pleasures take the place of the old ones, so the son will be for taking away the inheritance of his parents ; if they show signs of refusing, he will defraud and deceive them ; and if they openly resist, do not you think that he will possibly be guilty of some tyrannical action? ' I can only say, that I should not much like to be in their place.' But, O heavens, Adeirnantus, to think that for some new-fangled love of a harlot or for the waxen beauty of a youth, he will give up his old father and mother, best and dearest of friends, or even enslave them to the fancies of the hour. Truly a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother. He takes their property first ; and when that comes to an end, and he finds his lusts beginning to swarm in him, he turns burglar or pick pocket, or robs a temple. Love, attended by them, gets the better of the thoughts of his youth, and he becomes always in life and reality the monster that he was sometimes in sleep. Love is his tyrant, under the rule of whom he is strong in all violence and lawlessness ; ready for any deed of daring that will supply the wants of his rabble-rout, whether coming from without or generated within. In a well-ordered State there are only a few such, and these in time of war go out and become the mercenaries of a tyrant. But in time of peace they stay at home and do mischief; they are the thieves, burglars, footpads, cutpurses, man-stealers of the community; and if they are able to speak, they come out in another line as false-witnesses and informers. ' Yes.' said he, ' and a small catalogue of crimes truly, even if the perpetrators of them are not numerous.' Yes, I said ; but small and great are relative terms, and the greatest crimes which are done by them do not approach the tyrant; whom this class waxing numerous and strong create out of their number. If the people yield, well and good ; but, if they resist, then the old story is repeated — as he beat his father and mother, so now he beats his old fatherland and motherland, and places his mercenaries over them. Such men in their early days live with flatterers, and they themselves flatter others, and are all things to all men, in order to gain their ends ; but they soon discard them, when they have no need of them ; they are always either masters or servants, never the friends of anybody; no tyrant ever tasted the joys of friendship. And they are utterly trea cherous and unjust, if the nature of justice be at all understood by us. They are the waking reality of the dream which we described ; and he who is the most of a tyrant by nature, and leads the life of a tyrant for 120 THE REPUBLIC. the longest time, will be the worst of them, and being the worst of them, will also be the most miserable. Like man, like State, — the tyrannical man will answer to tyranny, which is the extreme opposite of the royal State ; for one is the best and the other the worst. We need not stop to enquire which is which, but may at once proceed to the next question, Which is the happier ? And great and terrible as is the outward appearance of the tyrant sitting upon a throne in the midst of his satellites, let us not be afraid to go in and ask; and the answer is, that the monarchical is the happiest, and the tyrannical the most miserable, of States. And may we not ask the same question about the men themselves, requesting some one to look into them who is able to penetrate the inner nature of man, and will not be struck all of a heap like a child by the vain pomp of tyranny. I will suppose that he is one who has lived with him, and has seen him in his undress when he is no longer a hero, and perhaps in the hour of trouble and danger. Let him who has seen all this speak to us of his happiness and misery. Assuming that we ourselves are the impartial judge for whom we seek, let us begin by comparing the individual and State, and ask first of all, whether the State is likely to be free or enslaved — Will there not be a little freedom and a great deal of slavery ? And the freedom is of the bad, and the slavery of the good ; and this is true of the man as well as of the State ; for his soul is full of meanness and slavery, and the better part is that which is enslaved, and the madman and beast have power over him. He cannot do what he would, and hrs mind is full of con fusion ; taking the whole man, he is the reverse of a freeman. And the State will be poor and not rich, and the man's soul will be poor. And the State will be full of groaning and lamentation and sorrow, and will be the most miserable of States, and the man will be full of sorrows, and the most miserable of men. No, not the most miserable, for there is yet a more miserable. 'Who is that?' The tyrannical man who has the misfortune also to become a public tyrant. ' There I suspect that you are right.' Say rather, I am sure, for the word ' suspect ' is out of place in such an enquiry as this of ours. He is like a wealthy owner of slaves, only he has more of them than any private individual ; and, as you know, the owners are not generally in any fear of their slaves. But why? Because the whole city is in a league which protects the in dividual. Suppose however that one of these owners and his household INTRODUCTION. 121 is carried off by a god into a wilderness, where there are no freemen to help him (he is the master say of about fifty slaves) ;— will he not be in an agony of terror ? — will he not be compelled to flatter his slaves and to promise them many things much against his will? And suppose the same god who carried him off were to surround him with neighbours who declare that no man has any right to have slaves, and that the owners of them should be punished with death. ' Still worse and worse ! He will be in the midst of his enemies.' And is not our tyrant such an imprisoned, captive soul, who is made up of fears and loves, who has a swarm of passions which he is incapable of indulging; living indoors always like a woman, and being jealous of those who have the freedom of going about and seeing the world ? Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station ? Master of others when he is not master of himself, like a sick man who is compelled to be an athlete, — he is the meanest of slaves and most abject of flatterers; wanting all things, and having all his desires craving abo.ut him ; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command ; he is more and more faithless, envious, unrighteous, the most wretched of men, and the cause of wretchedness to himself and to others. And so let us have a final trial and proclamation ; need we hire the herald, or shall I proclaim the result ? The son of Ariston (the best) is of opinion that the best and justest of men is also the happiest, and that this is he who is the most royal master of himself; and that the unjust man is he who is the greatest tyrant of himself and of his State. ' Let the proclamation be made.' And I add further — ' seen or unseen by gods or men.' This is our first proof. The second is derived from the three kinds of pleasure, which answer to the three elements of the soul — reason, passion, desire ; under which last is comprehended avarice as well as sensual appetite, while passion may be said to include ambition, party- feeling, love of reputation. Reason, on the other hand, is solely directed to the attainment of truth, and may be truly described as a lover of knowledge and wisdom, careless of money and reputation. In accord ance with the difference of men's natures, one of these three principles is in the ascendant — love of wisdom, love of honour, love of gain, having their several pleasures corresponding to them. Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will be found praising his own pleasures 122 THE REPUBLIC. and depreciating those of others. The money-maker will contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid advantages of gold and silver. The ambitious man will think knowledge which is without honour all smoke and nonsense ; whereas the philosopher will regard only the fruition of truth, which is not far from the heaven of pleasure, and will deem all other pleasures to be necessary rather than good. Now, how shall we decide between them ? ' I cannot say.' Well, is there any better cri terion than experience and knowledge? And which of the three has the truest knowledge and the widest experience ? The experience of youth makes the philosopher acquainted with the two kinds of desire, but the avaricious and the ambitious man never taste the pleasures of truth and wisdom. Honour he has equally with them ; for the wise man is honoured as well as the great and rich; they are 'judged of him/ but he is ' not judged of them,' for they never attain to the knowledge of true being. And his instrument is reason, whereas their measure is wealth and honour ; and if by reason we are to judge, his good will be the truest. And so we arrive at the result that the pleasure of the ra tional part of the soul, and a life passed in such pleasure is the pleasantest. He who has a right to judge judges thus. And next comes the life of ambition, and, in the third place, that of money. Twice has the just man overthrown the unjust — once more, as in an Olympian contest, first offering up a prayer to the saviour Zeus, let him try a fall. A wise man whispers* to me that the pleasures of the wise are true and pure ; all others are a shadow only. Let us examine this : Is not pleasure opposed to pain, and is there not a mean state which is neither? When a man is sick, nothing is more pleasant to him than health. But this he never found out while he was well. In pain he desires only to cease from pain ; his wishes reach no further. When he is in an ecstasy of pleasure, on the other hand, rest is painful to him. Thus rest or cessation is both pleasure and pain. But can that which is neither become both ? Again, pleasure and pain are motions, and the absence of them is rest ; but if so, how can the absence of either of them be the other ? Thus we are led to infer that the contradiction is an appearance only, and witchery of the senses. And these are not the only pleasures, for there are others which have no preceding pains. Pure pleasure then is not the absence of pain, nor pure pain the absence of pleasure ; although most of the pleasures which reach the mind through the body are of this character, and have not only their reactions when INTRODUCTION. 123 they depart, but their anticipations before they come. Shall I find a simile which will help to describe them ? There is in nature an upper, lower, and middle region, and he who passes from the lower to the middle imagines that he is going up and is already in the upper world ; and if he were taken back again would think, and truly think, that he was descending. All this" arises out of his ignorance of the true upper, middle, and lower regions. And a like confusion happens with pleasure and pain, and with many other things. The man who compares grey with black, calls grey white ; and the man who compares absence of pain with pain, calls the absence of pain pleasure. Again, hunger and thirst are inanitions of the body, ignorance and folly of the soul ; and food is the satisfaction of the one, and knowledge of the other. Now which is the purer satisfaction — that of eating and drinking, or that of knowledge ? Consider the matter thus : The satisfaction of that which has more ex istence is truer than of that which has less. And the invariable and immortal has a more real existence than the variable and mortal, and has a corresponding measure of knowledge and truth. And the soul has more existence and truth and knowledge than the body, and is therefore more really satisfied and has a more natural pleasure. Those who feast only on earthly food, are always going at random up to the middle and down again ; but they never pass into the true upper world, or have a taste of true pleasure. Like animals, their heads are always turned towards the ground, and their bodies are leaning on the dining-table ; they butt at one another with iron horns and hoofs, and kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust, for they are not filled with true being, and their vessel is leaky. (Cp. Gorgias, 243 A, foil.) Their pleasures are mixed with pain, and are mere shadows of pleasure, coloured and intensified by contrast, and therefore intensely desired ; and men go fight ing about them, as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen at Troy, in ignorance of the truth. The same may be said of the passionate element, whether the ruling motive be ambitious envy, party violence, or angry discontent. The desires of the ambitious soul, as well as of the covetous, have an inferior satisfaction. Only when under the guidance of reason do either of the other principles do their own business or attain the pleasure which is natural to them. When not attaining, they compel the other parts of the soul to pursue a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs. And the more distant they are from philosophy and reason, the more distant they will 124 THE REPUBLIC. be from law and order, and the more illusive will be their pleasures. The desires of love and tyranny are the farthest from law, and those of the king are nearest to it. There is one genuine pleasure, and two spurious ones : the tyrant goes beyond even the latter ; he has run away altogether from law and reason. Nor can the measure of his inferiority be told, except in a figure. The tyrant is the third removed from the oligarch, and has therefore not a shadow of his pleasure, but the shadow of a shadow only. The oligarch, again, is thrice removed from the king, and thus we get the formula 3x3, which is the number of a surface, representing the shadow which is the tyrant's pleasure, and if you like to cube this number of the beast you will find that the measure of the dif ference amounts to 729 ; the king is 729 times more happy than the tyrant. And this extraordinary number is nearly equal to the number of days and nights in a year (365x2 = 730); and is therefore concerned with human life. This is the measure of the interval between a good and bad man in happiness only, — what must be the difference between them in comeliness of life, in beauty and virtue ? Perhaps you may remember some one saying at the beginning of our discussion that the unjust man was profited if he had the reputation of justice ? Now that we have determined the nature of justice and in justice, let us make an ideal image of the soul like the fabulous mon sters of mythology, which will personify his words. First of all, fashion a multitudinous many-headed beast, having a ring of heads of all manner of animals, tame and wild, and able to produce and change them at pleasure. ' That would be no easy task for a statuary ; but as imagi nation can create anything, I will do as you say.' Suppose now another form of a lion, and another of a man ; the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second, and join them together and cover them outside with a human skin, in which you completely conceal all that is within. When this has been done, let us tell the supporter of injustice that he is feeding up the two beasts and starving the man, whom they torment and hate. The maintainer of justice, on the other hand, is aiming at strengthening the man; he is nourishing the gentle principle within him, and making an alliance with the lion heart, in order that he may be able to keep down the many-headed hydra, and bring all into unity with each other and with themselves. Thus in every point of view, whether in relation to pleasure, honour, or advantage, the just man is right, and the unjust wrong. INTRODUCTION. 125 Come then, let us reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally in error. ' Sweet sir/ we will say to him, ' is not the noblg that which sub jects the beast to the man, or rather to the God in man ; the ignoble, that which subjects the man to the beast?' He must assent. But if so, who would receive gold on condition that he was to degrade the noblest part of himself under the worst? — who would sell his son or daughter into the hands of brutal and evil men, for any amount of money ? And will he sell his own fairer and diviner part without any compunction to the most godless and foul? Would he not be a traitor worse than Eriphyle, who sold her husband's life for a necklace ? And intemperance is the letting loose of the multiform monster, and pride and sullenness are the growth and increase of the lion and serpent element, as on the other hand, luxury and effeminacy are caused by a too great relaxation of spirit. Flattery and meanness again arise when the spirited element is subjected to avarice, and the lion is habituated to become a monkey. The real disgrace of handicraft arts is, that those who are engaged in them have no control over themselves ; they have to flatter, instead of mastering their desires ; therefore we say that they should be placed under the control of the better principle in another because they have none of their own ; not, as Thrasymachus imagined, to the injury of the subjects, but for their good. And our intention in educating the young, is to give them self-control ; the law desires to nurse up in them a higher principle, and when they have acquired this, they may go their ways. 'What, then, shall a man profit, if he gain the whole world' and become more and more wicked ? Or what shall he profit by escaping discovery, if the concealment of evil prevents the cure ? Whereas if he had been punished, the brutal part of him would have been silenced, and the gentler element liberated ; and he would have begun to add to tem perance justice, and to justice wisdom, which is a union fairer far than the combination of beauty and health and strength in the body in the same degree that the soul is fairer than the body. He who has understanding will honour knowledge above all, and to this direct his energies ; in the next place he will keep under his body, not only for the sake of health and strength, but for the sake of creating in himself the most perfect harmony of body and soul. In the acquisition of riches, too, he will aim at order and harmony ; he will not be led by the admiration of the vulgar to heap up wealth without measure, but he will fear that the increase of wealth will disturb the constitution of his own soul. For the same 126 THE REPUBLIC. reason he will only accept such honours as will make him a better man ; any others he will decline. ' Then/ said he, ' he will not be a politician if this be his chief care.' By the dog of Egypt, he will, I said, in his own city, but probably not in his native country, unless by some divine ac cident. ' I understand you,' he said, ' to mean that he will be a citizen of the ideal city, which has no place upon earth.' But in heaven, I replied, there is a pattern, of such a city, and he who has eyes to see it may order his life after that image. Whether such a state is or ever will be matters not ; he will act according to that pattern and no other. .... The most remarkable points in the gth Book of the Republic are : — (i) the account of pleasure ; (2) the number of the interval which divides the king from the tyrant; (3) the pattern which is in heaven. i. Plato's account of pleasure is remarkable for moderation, and in this respect contrasts with the later Platonists and the views which are attributed to them by Aristotle. He is not, like the Cynics, opposed to all pleasure, but rather desires that the several parts of the soul shall have their natural satisfaction ; he even agrees with the Epicureans in describing pleasure as something more than the absence of pain. This is proved by the circumstance that there are pleasures which have no antecedent pains (as he also remarks in the Philebus), such as the plea sures of smell, and also the pleasures of hope and anticipation. In the previous book (pp. 558, 559) he had made the distinction between necessary and unnecessary pleasure, which is repeated by Aristotle, and he now observes that there are a further class of 'wild beast' pleasures, corresponding to Aristotle's Br^pior^. He dwells upon the relative and unreal character of sensual pleasures and the illusion which arises out of the contrast of pleasure and pain, pointing out the superiority of the pleasures of reason, which are at rest, over the fleeting pleasures of sense and emotion. The pre-eminence of royal pleasure is shown by the fact that reason is able to form a judgment of the lower pleasures, while the two lower parts of the soul are incapable of judging the pleasures of rea son. Thus, in his treatment of pleasure, as in many other subjects, the philosophy of Plato is ' sawn up into quantities' by Aristotle ; the analysis which was originally made by him became in the next generation the foundation of technical distinctions. Both in Plato and Aristotle we may observe the illusion under which the ancients fell of regarding the transience of pleasure as a proof of its unreality, and of confounding INTRODUCTION. 127 the permanence of the intellectual pleasures with the unchangeableness of the knowledge from which they are derived. Neither do we like to admit that the pleasures of knowledge, though more elevating, are not more lasting than other pleasures, and are almost equally dependent on the accidents of our bodily state. (Cp. Introd. to Philebus.) 2. The number of the interval which separates the king from the tyrant, and royal from tyrannical pleasures is 729, the cube of 9, which Plato characteristically designates as a number concerned with human life, because nearly equivalent to the number of days and nights in the year. He is desirous of proclaiming that the interval between them is im measurable, and invents a formula to give expression to his idea. Those who spoke of justice as a cube, of virtue as an art of measuring (Prot. 357 A), saw no inappropriateness in conceiving the soul under the figure of a line, or the pleasure of the tyrant as separated from the pleasure of the king by the numerical interval of 729. And in modern times we sometimes use metaphorically what Plato employed as a phi losophical formula. ' It is not easy to estimate the loss of the tyrant, except perhaps in this way/ says Plato. So we might say, that although the life of a good man is not to be compared to that of a bad man, yet you may measure the difference between them by valuing one minute of the one at an hour of the other (' one day in thy courts is better than a thousand'), or you might say that ' there is an infinite difference.' But this is not so much as saying, in homely phrase, ' they are a thousand miles asunder.' And accordingly Plato finds the natural vehicle of his thoughts in a progression of numbers; this arithmetical formula he draws out with the utmost seriousness, and both here and in the number of generation seems to find an additional proof of the truth of his speculation in forming the number into a geometrical figure. In speaking of the number 729 as proper to human life, he probably intended to intimate , that one year of the tyrannical =12 hours of the royal life. The simple observation that the comparison of two solids is effected by the comparison of the cubes of their sides, is the mathematical groundwork of this fanciful expression. There is some difficulty in explaining the steps by which the number 729 is obtained; the oligarch is removed in the third degree from the royal and aristocratical, and the tyrant in the third degree from the oligarchical, but we have to arrange the terms as the sides of a square and to count the oligarch twice over, 128 THE REPUBLIC. thus reckoning them not as = 5 but as = 9. The square of 9 is passed lightly over as only a step towards the cube. 3. Towards the close of the Republic, Plato seems to be more and more convinced of the ideal character of his own speculations. At the end of the gth Book the pattern which is in heaven takes the place of the city of philosophers on earth. The vision which has received form and substance at his hands, is now discovered to be at a distance. And yet this distant kingdom is also the rule of man's life. (Bk. vii. 540 E.) (' Say not lo ! here, or lo ! there, for the kingdom of God is within you.') Thus a note is struck which prepares for the revelation of a future life in the following Book. But the future life is present still ; the ideal of politics is to be realized in the individual. BOOK X. Many things pleased me in the order of our State, but there was nothing which I liked better than the regulation about poetry. The division of the soul throws a new light on our exclusion of imita tion. I do not mind saying to you, what I would rather not have you repeat to the poets and their votaries, that all poetry is an outrage on the understanding of the hearers, if they have not that balm of know ledge which heals error. I have loved Homer ever since I was a boy, and he appears to me to be the great author and master of tragic poetry. But much as I love the man, I love truth more, and therefore I must speak out : and first of all, let me ask you to explain what is imita tion, for really I do not understand ? ' How likely then that I shall understand ! ' That may very well be, for the duller often sees better than the keener eye. ' That is true, but in your presence I can hardly venture to say what I think.' Then suppose that we begin in our old fashion, with the doctrine of universals ; — let us assume the existence of beds and tables. There is one idea of a bed, or of a table, which the maker of each had in his mind when making them ; he did not make the ideas of beds and tables, but he made beds and tables according to the ideas. And is there not a maker of the works of all workmen ? ' A rare artist that ! ' Wait a little, and you may have some reason for your exclamation : He of whom 1 speak makes not only vessels but plants and animals, himself, and all other things; the earth and heaven, and things under the earth ; he makes the Gods also. ' He must be a wizard, indeed ! ' But do you not see that there is a sense in which you could do the same? You have only to take a mirror, and catch the INTRODUCTION. 129 reflection of the sun, and the earth, and plants and animals, and yourself in it,— there now you have made them. ' Yes, in appearance, but not in reality.' Exactly so ; and the painter is such a creator as you are with the mirror, and he is even more unreal than the carpenter, although neither the carpenter nor any other artist can be supposed to make the absolute bed. ' Not if philosophers may be believed.' Nor is there any reason for wondering that his bed has but an imperfect relation to the truth. Reflect : — Here are three beds ; one in nature, which is made by God ; another, which is made by the carpenter ; and the third, by the painter ; and there are three artists, who preside over them, — God, the maker of the bed, the painter. God only made one, nor could he have made more than one ; for if there had been two, there would always have been a third — more absolute and abstract than either, under which they would have been included. We may therefore conceive God to be the natural maker of the bed, and in a lower sense the carpenter is also the maker ; but the painter may be more properly described as the imitator of what the other two make ; he has to do with a creation which is thrice re moved from reality. And the tragic poet is an imitator, and, like every other imitator, is thrice removed from the king and from the truth. The painter imitates not the original bed, but the bed made by the carpenter. And this, without being really different, appears to be different, and has many points of view, of which only one is caught by the painter, who represents everything because he represents a piece of everything, and that piece an image. And he can paint any artist, although he knows nothing of their arts ; and this with sufficient skill to deceive children or simple people. Let us now imagine some one to come to us and tell us of his having met a man who knows all that everybody knows, and better than anybody. Should we not 'infer him to be a simpleton who has no discernment of truth and falsehood, and has met with a wizard or enchanter, whom he fancied to be all-wise? And when we hear persons saying that Homer and the tragedians know all the arts and all the virtues, must we not infer that the persons who say these things are under a similar delusion? they do not see that the poets are imitators, and that their creations are only imitations. ' Very true.' But if a person could create as well as imitate, he would rather leave some permanent work and not an imitation only ; he would rather be the receiver than the giver of praise. ' Yes, for then he would have more honour and advantage.' VOL. III. K 130 THE REPUBLIC. Let us now interrogate Homer and the poets. Friend Homer, say I to him, I am not going to ask you about medicine, or any art to which your poems incidentally refer, but about their main subjects, — war, military tactics, politics. If you are only twice and not thrice re moved from the truth — not an imitator or an image-maker, please to inform us what good you have ever done to mankind ? Is there any city which professes to have received laws from you, as Sicily and Italy have from Charondas, Sparta from Lycurgus, Athens from Solon ? Or was any war ever carried on by your counsels ? or is any notion or invention attributed to you, as there is to Thales and Anacharsis ? Or is there any Homeric way of life, such as Pythagoras taught, in which you in structed men, and which is called after you ? ' Nothing of the kind is recorded, and indeed that companion of Homer who had the misfortune to be called Flesh-child [Creophylus], was more unfortunate in his breeding than he was in his name, if, as tradition says, Homer in his lifetime was allowed by him and his other friends to starve.' Yes, that is the tradition ; but could this ever have happened if Homer had really been the educator of Hellas ? Would he not have had many attached followers ? If Protagoras and Prodicus persuaded their contemporaries that no one could manage house or State without them, (at which their admirers were so greatly delighted that they were ready to carry them about on their heads,) — is it at all likely that Homer and Hesiod would have been allowed to go about as beggars, I mean if they had really been able to do the world any good, — would not mankind have sought after them more than after gold and silver, and have followed them about in order to get education ? But they did not ; and therefore we may infer that Homer and all the poets are only imitators, who do but imitate the appearances of things. For as a painter by a knowledge of figure and colour can paint a cobbler without any practice in cobbling, so the poet can put the colours of language on any art, and give harmony and rhythm to the cobbler and also to the general ; and you know how mere narration, when deprived of the ornaments of metre, is like a face which has lost the beauty of youth and never had any other. Once more, the imitator has no knowledge of reality, but only of ap pearance. The painter paints, and the worker in metal or leather makes a bridle and reins, but neither understands the use of them— the know ledge of this is confined to the horseman ; and so of other things. Thus we have three arts : one of use, another of invention, a third of imitation ; INTRODUCTION. I3I and the user furnishes the rule to the two others. The flute-player will know the good and bad flute, and the maker will put faith in him; but the imitator will neither know nor have faith -neither science nor true opinion can be ascribed to him. Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind of play or sport,— and the tragic and epic poets are' imitators in the highest degree. And now let us enquire, what is the faculty in man which answers to imitation? Allow me to explain my meaning thus :— Objects are dif ferently seen when in the water and when out of the water, when near and when at a distance ; and the painter or juggler makes use of this variation to impose upon us. And the art of measuring and weighing and calculating comes in to assist our bewildered minds, and save them from the power of appearance ; for, as we were saying, two contrary opinions of the same about the same and at the same time, cannot both of them be true. But which of them is true is determined by the art of calculation ; and this is allied to the better faculty in the soul, as the arts of imitation are to the worse. And the same holds of the ear as well as of the eye, of poetry as well as painting. There is a further aspect of poetical imitation, which I invite you to consider. The imitation is of actions voluntary or involuntary, in which there is an expectation of a good or bad result, and present experience of pleasure and pain. But is a man in harmony with himself when he is the subject of these conflicting influences ? Is there not rather a contradiction in him ? Let me further ask, whether he is more likely to control sorrow when he is alone or when he is in company with others ? < The latter.' Feeling would lead him to indulge his sorrow, but reason and law control him and bid him be patient, since he cannot know whether his affliction is good or evil, and no human thing is of any great consequence, and sorrow is certainly a very great impediment to the good counsel which he so greatly needs. For when we stumble, we should not, like children, set up a cry, holding the part affected in our hands; but when the dice have once fallen, we should take the measures which reason prescribes, not making a lament, but finding a cure. And the better part of us is ready to follow reason' while the irrational principle is full of sorrow and distraction at the recollection of our troubles. Unfortunately, however, this latter furnishes the chief materials of the imitative arts. Whereas reason is ever in repose and cannot easily be displayed, especially to a mixed multitude who have o experience of her. Thus the poet is like the painter in two ways : K 2 I32 THE REPUBLIC. first he paints an inferior degree of truth, and secondly, he is concerned with an inferior part of the soul. He indulges the feelings, while he enfeebles the reason ; and we refuse to allow him to have authority over the mind of man ; for he has no measure of greater and less, and is a maker of images and very far gone from truth. But we have not yet mentioned the heaviest count in the indictment, the power which poetry has of injuriously exciting the feelings. When we hear Homer, or some tragedian, reciting at length the sorrows of heroes lamenting and beating their breasts, you know that we sympa thize with them and praise the poet ; and yet in our own sorrows such an exhibition of feeling is regarded as -effeminate and unmanly (cp. Ion, 535 E). Now, ought a man to feel pleasure in seeing another do what he hates and abominates in himself ? Remember that he gives way to a sentiment which in his own case he would control ; he is off his guard because the sorrow is another's ; and he thinks that he may indulge his feelings without disgrace, and will be the gainer by the pleasure. But a further consequence quickly follows. For he who begins by weeping at the sorrows of others, will end by weeping at his own. The same is true of comedy, — you may often laugh at buffoonery which you would be ashamed to utter, and the love of coarse merriment on the stage will at last turn you into a buffoon at home. Poetry feeds and waters the passions and desires, instead of withering and starving them ; she lets them rule instead of ruling them. And therefore, when we hear the encomiasts of Homer affirming that he is the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for the administration of human things, we may allow that they have good intentions as far as their light extends, and agree with them in thinking Homer a great poet and tragedian. But we shall continue to maintain our prohibition of all poetry which goes beyond hymns to the Gods and praises of famous men. Not pleasure and pain, but law and reason shall rule in our State. These are our reasons for expelling poetry; but lest she should charge us with discourtesy, let us also make an apology to her. We will say to her that there is an ancient quarrel between poetry and philo sophy, and many are the civilities which pass between them, such as the saying of ' the she-dog, yelping against her mistress/ and ' the philosophers who are ready to circumvent Zeus/ and the ' philosophers who are paupers;' and there are numberless other signs of ancient enmity between them. Nevertheless we are not enemies to her, or to the INTRODUCTION. 133 sister arts of imitation, and will gladly allow her to return upon the con dition that she will speak or sing in her own defence. For we acknow ledge that we are charmed by her; (you would acknowledge, would you not, that you are a lover of Homer?) but if she cannot show that she is useful as well as delightful, we must do violence to ourselves, and like rational lovers renounce our loves, though endeared to us by early associations. Having come to years of discretion, we know that poetry is not truth, and that a man should be careful how he introduces her to that state or constitution which he himself is; for there is a mighty issue at stake — mightier than appears — the good or evil of the human soul. And it is not worth while to forsake justice and virtue for the attractions of poetry, any more than for the sake of honour or wealth. ' I agree with you.' And yet the rewards of virtue are greater far than I have described. 'And can we conceive still greater honours ?' Why, yes; I said, in the brief span of life there can be no greatness worth mentioning. Shall an immortal being care about anything short of eternity ? ' I should think not; but what do you mean?' Do you not know that the soul is immortal ? ' Good heavens/ he said, looking hard at me, ' you do not mean to say that you can prove that.' Quite easily, I said. ' I should like to hear this argument, of which you make so light.' You would admit that there is an element of good and evil, which is the salvation and corruption of all things. And all things have their own corrupting element ; and if this does not destroy them nothing else will. And the soul has her own corrupting principles, which are in justice, intemperance, cowardice, and the like. But none of these destroy the soul in the same sense that disease destroys the body. The soul may be full of all iniquities, but is not by reason of them all brought any nearer to death. For nothing ever perished by external affection of evil, which was not destroyed from within. The body, which is one thing, cannot be destroyed by food, which is another, unless infected from within. Neither can the soul, which is one thing, be corrupted by the body, which is another, unless she herself is corrupted. And as no bodily evil can infect the soul, neither can any bodily evil destroy the soul. Nothing of the nature of fever or any other disease — not even the discerption of the body into the minutest fragments — can kill the soul, unless these things can be shown to render the soul unholy and unjust. But no one will ever prove that the souls of men will become 134 THE REPUBLIC. more unjust because of death. And if a person has the audacity to deny this, the answer is — then why do criminals require the hand of the executioner, and not die of themselves ? ' Truly,' he said, ' injustice would not be very terrible if it brought a cessation of evil ; but I should be inclined to think that the injustice which may destroy others may greatly quicken and stimulate the life of the unjust.' There you are right. If the natural inherent evil of the soul be unable to destroy the soul, hardly will anything else destroy her. But the soul which cannot be destroyed either by internal or external evil must endure for ever, and lasting for ever, must be immortal. Now if this be true, souls will always exist in the same number. They cannot diminish, because they cannot be destroyed ; nor yet increase, for the increase of the immortal must come from something mortal, and so all would end in immortality. Neither is the soul variable and diverse ; for that which is immortal must be of the fairest and simplest composition. If we would conceive her truly, she must be viewed pure as at birth by the light of reason ; then we shall behold justice and injustice far more clearly than now ; in her present condition we see her only like the sea-god Glaucus, knocked about and crushed by the waves, overgrown with sea-weed and shells, and anything but what she by nature is. Her true image is to be seen in philosophy, when she is holding converse with the divine and immortal and eternal ; — thereby we may conceive what she would be if she were wholly devoted to such pursuits; — now she is bruised and maimed in the sea, which is the world, and has been crushed against the rocks and covered with earth and stones, which adhere to her from the enter tainments of earth. Then you might see her true nature and know whether she is simple or not, — her state and form in this present world have been sufficiently described. Thus far I have said nothing of the rewards and honours which Homer and Hesiod attribute to her. Justice in herself has been shown to be best for the soul in herself, though a man may put on a Gyges' ring and have a helmet of Hades too. And now you shall repay me what you borrowed in the argument ; and I will enumerate the rewards of justice in life and after death. I granted, for the sake of argument, as you will remember, that evil might perhaps escape the knowledge of Gods and men, although this was really impossible. And now that I have shown that justice has reality, you must grant me also that she has the palm of appearance. In the first place, the just man is known INTRODUCTION. 135 to the Gods, and he is therefore the friend of the Gods, and he will receive at their hands every good, always excepting such evil as is the necessary consequence of former sins. All things therefore may be supposed to end in good to him, either in life or after death, even what appears to be evil ; for the Gods have a care of him who desires to be in their likeness. And what shall we say of men? Is not honesty the best policy ? The clever rogue makes a great start at first, but he looks foolish when he appears at the goal with his ears trailing on his shoulders and without a crown ; whereas the true runner perseveres to the end, and receives the prize. And you must allow me to repeat all the blessings which you attributed to the fortunate unjust, — they are rulers in the city, can marry and give their children in marriage to whom they like ; and the evils which you attributed to the unfor tunate just, do really fall in the end on the unjust, although, as you implied, their sufferings may be more genteelly veiled in silence. But all the blessings of this present life are as nothing when com pared with those which await good men after death. ' I should like to hear about them.' Come, then, and I will tell you a tale not taken from the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and yet a story of a valiant man, Er, the son of Armenius, who was supposed to have died in battle, and when he had been put on the funeral pyre and had lain there twelve days, he came to life again, and told what he had seen in the world below. He said that when his soul left the body, he went with a great company to a wonderful place, in which there were two chasms near together in the earth beneath, and two chasms corresponding to them in the heaven above. And there were judges sitting in the intermediate space, bidding the just ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand, having the seal of their judgment set upon them before ; and the unjust, having the seal behind, were bidden to descend in like manner by the way on the left hand. Him they told to look and listen, as he was to be their messenger and to carry to men the tidings of the world below. And he looked and saw the souls when they had been judged departing at either chasm ; some who came from earth, were dusty and worn with travel ; others, who came from heaven, were clean and bright. They seemed to have been a long way, and were glad to meet and rest in the meadow ; and there they discoursed with one another of the things which they had seen in the other world. Those who came from the earth wept at the remembrance of their sorrows, while the spirits from i36 THE REPUBLIC. heaven spoke of glorious sights and heavenly bliss. He said that for every evil deed they were punished tenfold, and the journey was of a thousand years' duration, because the life of man was reckoned as a hundred years — all the cruelties and treacheries and impieties which they had done they also suffered — and the rewards of virtue were in the same proportion. He added something hardly worth repeating about infants dying almost as soon as they were born. Of parricides and other murderers he had tortures still more terrible to narrate. He was present when one of the spirits asked, — Where is Ardiaeus the great? (Now this Ardiaeus was a horrible wicked tyrant, who had murdered his old father, and his elder brother, a thousand years before.) The answer was, ' He comes not hither, and will never come.' And I my self, he said, actually saw this sight of terror. For at the entrance of the chasm, as we were about to reascend, Ardiaeus appeared, and some other sinners — most but not all of whom had been tyrants — and just as they fancied that they were returning to life, the chasm gave a roar, and then fiery wild-looking men who knew the meaning of the sound, seized him and some others, and bound them hand and foot and threw them down, and dragged them along at the side of the road, lacerating them and carding them, and explaining to the passers-by, that they were going to be cast into hell. The greatest terror of the pilgrims ascending was lest they should hear the voice, and when there was silence one by one they passed up with joy. To these sufferings there were corresponding delights. Now when they had rested seven days, on the eighth day the souls of the pilgrims resumed their journey, and in four days came to a spot whence they looked down upon a column of light, in colour like a rainbow, only brighter and clearer. One day more brought them to the place, and looking along the column at the ends they saw the chain of light which encompasses heaven and earth, after the manner of the rope which fastens a trireme. At the extremities of the chain there was the distaff of Necessity, on which all the heavenly bodies turned; — the hook and spindle were of adamant, and the whorl of a mixed substance. And the form of the whorl was like a number of boxes fitting into one another with their edges turned upwards, making together a single whorl which was pierced by the spindle. Now the outer most had the rim broadest, and the inner whorls were smaller and smaller, and had their rims narrower. The largest (or fixed stars) was spangled INTR OD UCTION. 1 3 7 — the seventh (or sun) was brightest — the eighth (or moon) shone by the light of the seventh — the second and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) were most like one another and yellower than the eighth— the third (Jupiter) had the whitest light — the fourth (Mars) was red — the sixth (Venus) was in whiteness second. The whole had one motion, but while this was revolving in one direction the seven inner circles were moving in the opposite, with various degrees of swiftness and slowness. The spindle turned on the knees of Necessity, and a Siren stood hymning upon each circle, while Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, the daughters of Necessity, sat on thrones at equal intervals, singing of past, present, and future, responsive to the music of the Sirens ; Clotho from time to time guiding the outer circle with a touch of her right hand ; Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner circle ; Lachesis in turn putting forth her hand to guide both of them from time to time. On their arrival the pilgrims went to Lachesis, and there was an in terpreter who arranged them, and taking from her knees lots, and samples of lives, got up into a pulpit and said : ' Mortal souls, hear the \vords of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. A new period of mortal life has begun, and you may choose what divinity you please — the responsibility of choosing is with you — God is blameless.' After speaking thus, he cast the lots among them and each one took up the lot which fell near him. He then placed on the ground before them the samples of lives, many more than the souls present, and there were all sorts of lives of men and animals. There were tyrannies ending in misery and exile, and lives of men and women famous for their different qualities ; and also mixed lives, made up of wealth and poverty, sickness and health. And here, beloved Glaucon, is the great risk of human life, and therefore the whole of education should be directed to the acquisition of such a knowledge as will teach a man to refuse the evil and choose the good. He should know all the combinations which occur in life — of beauty with poverty or with wealth, — of know ledge with external goods-, — and at last choose with reference to the nature of the soul, regarding that only as the better life which makes men better, and leaving the rest. And a man must take with him an iron sense of truth and right into the world below, that there too he may remain undazzled by wealth or the allurements of evil, and be determined to avoid the extremes and choose the mean. For this, as the messenger reported the interpreter to have said, is the true happi- 138 THE REPUBLIC. ness of man ; and any one, as he proclaimed, may, if he choose with understanding, have a good lot, even though he come last. 'Let not the first be careless in his choice, nor the last despair.' He spoke; and when he had spoken, he who had drawn the first lot chose a tyranny : he did not see that he was fated to devour his own children — and when he discovered his mistake, he wept and beat his breast, blaming not himself, as the interpreter had bidden him, but chance and the Gods and anybody rather than himself. He was one of those who had come from heaven, and in his previous life had been a citizen of a well-ordered State, but he had only habit and no philosophy. And this was the reason why he, like many others, made a bad choice, because he had no experience of life, whereas those who came from earth and had seen trouble were not in such a hurry to choose. And for this reason and because the lot was a chance, there was often an exchange of lives from good to evil. Whereas if a man followed the pursuits of philosophy while he was upon earth, and had been moderately fortunate in his lot, he might not only be happy here, but his pilgrimage from this world to the other, and from the other to this, would be smooth and heavenly. Nothing was more curious than the spectacle of the choice, at once sad and laughable and wonderful ; most of the souls only seeking to avoid their own condition in a pre vious life. He saw the soul of Orpheus changing into a swan because he would not be born of a woman ; there was Thamyras becoming a nightingale ; musical birds, like the swan, choosing to be men ; the twentieth soul, which was that of Ajax, preferring the life of a lion to that of a man, in remembrance of the injustice which was done to him in the judgment of the arms ; and Agamemnon, from a like enmity to human nature, passing into an eagle. About the middle was the soul of Atalanta choosing the honours of an athlete, and next to her Epeus going into the nature of a workwoman ; among the last was Thersites, who was changing himself into a monkey. Thither, the last of all, came Odysseus, and chose the lot of a private man, which lay neglected and could hardly be found, and when he found it he went away rejoicing, and said that he was weary of ambition, and that if he had been first instead of last, he would have made the same choice. And he saw men passing into animals, and wild and tame animals passing into one another. When all the souls had chosen they went to Lachesis, who sent with INTR OD UCTION. 1 39 each of them their genius or attendant to fulfil their lot. He first of all brought them under the hand of Clotho, and drew them within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand; from her they were carried to Atropos, who made the threads irreversible ; whence, without turning round, they passed beneath the throne of Necessity ; and when they had all passed, they moved on in scorching heat to the desert of Fcrgetfulness and rested at evening by the river Unmindful, whose water could not be retained in any vessel ; of this they had all to drink a certain quantity — some of them drank more than was required, and he who drank forgot all things. Er himself was prevented from drinking. When they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there were thunderstorms and earthquakes, and suddenly they were all driven divers ways, shooting like stars to their birth. Concerning his return to the body, he only knew that awaking suddenly in the morning he saw him self lying on the pyre. Thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved, and will be our salvation if we believe that the soul is immortal, and hold fast to the heavenly way of Justice and Knowledge. So shall we pass undefiled over the river of Lethe, and be dear to ourselves and to the Gods, and have a crown of reward and happiness both in this world and also in the millennial pilgrimage of the other. The Tenth Book of the Republic of Plato falls into two divisions ; first, resuming an old thread which has been interrupted, Socrates assails the poets, who, now that the nature of the soul has been analysed, are seen to be very far gone from the truth ; and secondly, having shown the reality of the happiness of the just, he demands that appearance shall be restored to him, and then proceeds to prove the immortality of the soul. The argument, as in the Phaedo and Gorgias, is supplemented by the vision of a future life. Why Plato, who was himself a poet, and whose dialogues are poems and dramas, should have been hostile to the poets as a class, and espe cially to the dramatic poets; why he should not have seen that truth may be embodied in verse as well as in prose, and that there are some indefinable lights and shadows of human life which can only be expressed in poetry— some elements of imagination which always entwine with reason; why he should have supposed epic verse to be 1 40 THE REPUBLIC. inseparably associated with the impurities of the old Hellenic mytho logy ; why he should try Homer and Hesiod by the unfair and prosaic test of utility, — are questions which have always been debated amongst students of Plato. Though unable to give a complete answer to them, we may show — first, that his views arose naturally out of the circum stances of his age ; and secondly, we may elicit the truth as well as the error which is contained in them. He is the enemy of the poets because poetry was declining in his own lifetime, and a theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws (iii.- 701 A), had taken the place of an intellectual aristocracy. Euripides exhibited the last phase of the tragic drama, and in him Plato saw the friend and apologist of tyrants, and the Sophist of tragedy. The old comedy was almost extinct ; the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other branch of Greek literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric. There was no ' second or third' to ^Eschylus and Sophocles in the generation which followed them. Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs, 89 foil.), speaks of ' thousands of tragedy making prattlers,' whose attempts at poetry he compares to the chirping of swallows; 'their garrulity went far beyond Euripides;' — ' they appeared once upon the stage, and there was an end of them.' To a man of genius who had a real appreciation of the godlike JEschylus and the noble and gentle Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their ' theology' (Rep. ii. 380), these ' minor poets ' must have been con temptible and intolerable. There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a sense of the decline and decay in literature as well as in politics which marked his own age. Nor can he have been expected to look with favour on the licence of Aristophanes, now at the end of his career, who had begun by satirizing Socrates in the Clouds, and in a similar spirit forty years afterwards had satirized the founders of ideal commonwealths in his Eccleziazusae, or Female Parliament (cp. x. 606 C). There were other reasons for the antagonism of Plato to poetry. The profession of an actor was regarded by him as a degradation of human nature, for 'one man in his life' cannot 'play many parts;' the charac ters which the actor performs seem to destroy his own character, and to leave nothing which can be truly called himself. Neither can any man live his life and act it. The actor at the theatre is a figure of the actor in the world. Taking this view Plato is more decided in his expulsion of the dramatic than of the epic poets, though he must have known that INTR OD UCTION. \ 4 1 the Greek tragedians afforded noble lessons and examples of virtue and patriotism, to which nothing in Homer can be compared. But great dramatic or even great rhetorical power is hardly consistent with firmness or strength of mind, and dramatic talent is often incidentally associated with a dissolute character. In the Tenth Book Plato introduces a new series of objections. First, he says that the poet or painter is an imitator, and in the third degree removed from the truth. His creations are not tested by rule and mea sure ; they are only appearances. In modern times we should say that art is not merely imitation, but rather the expression of the ideal in forms of sense. Even adopting the humble image of Plato, from which his argument derives a colour, we should maintain that the artist may en noble the bed which he paints by the folds of the drapery, or by the feeling of home which he introduces ; and there have been modern painters who have imparted such an ideal interest to a blacksmith's or a carpenter's shop. The eye or mind which feels as well as sees can give dignity and pathos to a ruined mill, or a straw-built shed [Rem brandt], to the hull of a vessel ' going to its last home ' [Turner]. Still more would this apply to the greatest works of art, which seem to be the visible embodiment of the divine. Had Plato been asked whether the Zeus or Athene of Pheidias was the imitation of an imitation only, would he not have been compelled to admit that something more was to be found in them than in the form of any mortal ; and that the rule of proportion to which they conformed was ' higher far than any geometry or arithmetic could express?' (Polit. 257 A.) Again, Plato objects to the imitative arts that they express the emotional rather than the rational part of human nature. He does not admit Aristotle's theory, that tragedy or other serious imitations are a purgation of the passions by pity and fear ; to him they appear only to afford the opportunity of indulging them. Yet we must acknowledge that we may sometimes cure disordered emotions by expressing them ; and that they often gain strength when pent up within our own breast. All indulgence of the feelings is not to be condemned. For there may be a gratification of the higher as well as of the lower, — thoughts which are too deep or too sad to be expressed by ourselves, may find an utter ance in the words of poets. Every one would acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and elevated by strains of music or by the sublimity of architecture. Plato has himself admitted, 142 THE REPUBLIC. in the earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind ; but in the Tenth Book he regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only ' what good have they done ? ' and is not satisfied with the reply, that ' they have given innocent pleasure to mankind.' He tells us that he rejoices in the banishment of the poets, since he has found by the analysis of the soul that they are concerned with the inferior faculties. He means to say that the higher faculties have to do with universals, the lower with particulars of sense. The poets are on a level with their own age, but not on a level with Socrates and Plato ; and he was well aware that Homer and Hesiod could not be made a rule of life by any process of legitimate interpretation ; his ironical use of them is in fact a denial of their authority ; he saw, too, that the poets were not critics— as he says in the Apology, ' any one was a better interpreter of their writings than they were themselves.' (22 C.) He too had ceased to be a poet when he became a disciple of Socrates ; though, as he tells us of Solon, ' he might have been one of the greatest of them, if he had not been deterred by other pursuits.' (Tim. 21 C.) Thus from many points of view there is an antagonism between Plato and the poets, which was foreshadowed to him in the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. The poets, as he says in the Protagoras (316 E), were the Sophists of their day ; and his dislike of the one is reflected on the others. He regards them generally as the enemies of reasoning and abstraction, though in the case of Euripides more with reference to his immoral sentiments about tyrants and the like. For Plato is the prophet who came to convince the world — first of the fallibility of sense and opinion, and secondly of the reality of abstract ideas. Whatever strangeness there may be in modern times in opposing philosophy to poetry, which to us seem to have so many elements in common, the strangeness will disappear if we conceive of poetry as allied to sense, and of philosophy as equivalent to thought and abstraction. Unfortunately the very word idea, which to Plato is expressive of the most real of all things, is associated in our minds with an element of subjectiveness and unreality. We may note also how he differs from Aristotle who declares poetry to be truer than history, for the opposite reason, because it is concerned with universals, not like history, with particulars (Poet. ix. 3). The things that are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things that INTRODUCTION. 143 are unseen— they are equally opposed in Plato to universals and ideas. To him all particulars appear to be floating about in a world of sense ; they have a taint of error or even of evil. There is no difficulty in seeing that this is an illusion ; for there is no more error or variation in an individual man, horse, bed, &c., than in the class man, horse, bed, &c. ; nor is the truth which is displayed in individual instances less certain than that which is conveyed through the medium of ideas. But Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real importance of universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them an essential truth which is imaginary and/ unreal ; for universals may be often false and particulars true. Had he attained to any clear conception of the individual, which is the synthesis of the universal and the particular ; or had he been able to distinguish between opinion and sensation, which the ambiguity of the words So£a, (paivta-dut, eiKos and the like, tended to confuse, he would not have denied truth to the particulars of sense. But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and feigning in all departments of life and knowledge, like the sophists and rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus ; they are the false priests, false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of the world. There is another count put into the indictment against them by Plato, that they are the friends of the tyrant, and bask in the sunshine of his patronage. Despotism in all ages has had an apparatus of false ideas and false teachers at its service — in the history of Modern Europe as well as of Greece and Rome. For no government of men depends solely upon force ; — without some corrup tion of literature and morals — some appeal to the imagination of the masses— some pretence to the favour of heaven — some element of good giving power to evil (cp. i. 352) tyranny, even for a short time, cannot be maintained. The Greek tyrants were not insensible to the importance of awakening in their cause a Pseudo- Hellenic feeling ; they were proud of successes at the Olympic games ; they were not devoid of the love of literature and art. Plato is thinking in the first instance of Greek poets who had graced the courts of Dionysius or Archelaus : and the old spirit of freedom is roused within him at their prostitution of the Tragic Muse in the praises of tyranny. But his prophetic eye extends beyond them to the "false teachers of other ages who are the creatures of the government under which they live. He compares the corruption of his contemporaries with the idea of a perfect society, and gathers up into one mass of error and evil the errors of mankind ; to him they are 144 THE REPUBLIC. personified in the rhetoricians, sophists, poets who deceive and govern the world. A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative arts is that they excite the emotions. Here the modern reader will be dis posed to introduce a distinction which appears to have escaped him. For the emotions are neither bad nor good in themselves, and are not most likely to be controlled by the attempt to eradicate them, but by the moderate indulgence of them. And the vocation of art is to present thought in the form of feeling, to enlist the feelings on the side of reason, to inspire even for a moment courage or resignation ; perhaps to suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way which mere language is inca pable of attaining. True, the same power which in the purer age of art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the voluptuous image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows that art, like other outward things, may be turned to good and also to evil, and is not more closely connected with the higher than with the lower part of the soul. All imitative art is subject to certain limitations, and therefore necessarily partakes of the nature of a compromise. Something of ideal truth is sacrificed for the sake of the representation, and something in the exactness of the representation is sacrificed to the ideal. Still, works of art have a permanent element ; they idealize and detain the passing thought, and are the intermediates between sense and ideas. In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms of fiction may certainly be regarded as a good. But we can also imagine the existence of an age in which a severer conception of truth has either banished or transformed them. At any rate we must admit that they hold a different place at different periods of the world's history. In the infancy of mankind poetry, with the exception of proverbs, is the whole of literature, and the only instrument of intellectual culture ; in modern times she is the shadow or echo of her former self, and appears to have a precarious existence. Milton in his day doubted whether an epic poem was any longer possible. At the same time we must remember, that what Plato would have called the charms of poetry have been partly transferred to prose ; he himself admits prjTopeia in the Politicus, and pro poses to find in the strain of law (Laws vii. Sir) a substitute for the old poets. Among ourselves the creative power seems often to be growing weaker, and scientific fact to be more engrossing and overpowering to the mind than formerly. The illusion of the feelings commonly called love, has hitherto been the inspiring influence of modern poetry and romance, INTRODUCTION. 145 and has exercised a humanizing if not a strengthening influence on the world. But may not the stimulus which love has given to fancy be some day exhausted? The modern English novel which is the most popular of all forms of reading is not more than a century or two old : will the tale of love a hundred years hence, after so many thousand variations of the same theme, be still received with unabated interest ? Art cannot claim to be on a level with philosophy or religion, and may often corrupt them. It is possible to conceive a mental state in which all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect expression, either of the religious ideal or of the philosophical ideal. The fairest forms may be revolting in certain moods of mind, as is proved by the fact that the Mahommedans, and many sects of Christians, have renounced the use of pictures and images. The beginning of a great religion, whether Christian or Gentile, has not been ' wood or stone/ but a spirit moving in the hearts of men. The disciples have met in a large upper room or in ' holes and caves of the earth ' ; in the second or third generation, they have had mosques, temples, churches, monasteries. And the revival or reform of religions, like the first revelation of them, has come from within and has generally disregarded external ceremonies and accompaniments. But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest truth and the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver between the two opposite views — when, as in the third Book, he insists that youth should be brought up amid wholesome imagery; and again in Book x, when he banishes the poets from his Republic. Admitting that the arts which some of us almost deify have fallen short of their higher aim, we must admit on the other hand that to banish imagination wholly would be suicidal as well as impossible. For nature too is a form of art ; and a breath of the fresh air or a single glance at the varying landscape would in an instant revive and reillumine the extinguished spark of poetry in the human breast. In the lower stages of civilization imagination more than reason distinguishes man from the animals ; and to banish art would be to banish thought, to banish language, to banish the expression of all truth. No religion is wholly devoid of external forms ; even the Maho metan who renounces the use of pictures and images has a temple in which he worships the Most High, as solemn and beautiful as any Greek or Christian building. Feeling too and thought are not really opposed ; for he who thinks must feel before he can execute : — And the highest VOL. III. L 146 THE REPUBLIC. thoughts, when they become familiarized to us, are always tending to pass into the form of feeling. Plato does not seriously intend to expel poetry from human life. But he feels strongly the unreality of poets; and he is protesting against the degeneracy of them in his own day as we might protest against the want of serious purpose in modern poetry, against the un seemliness or extravagance of some of our novelists, against the time serving of preachers or public writers, against the regardlessness of truth, which to the eye of the philosopher seems to characterize the greater part of the world. For we too have reason to complain that our poets and novelists ' paint inferior truth ' and are concerned ' with the inferior part of the soul ' ; that the readers of them become what they read and are injuriously affected by them. And we look in vain for that healthy atmosphere of which Plato speaks : ' the beauty which meets the sense like a breeze and insensibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of reason/ For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine perfection, the harmony of justice and truth among men : a strain which should renew the youth of the world, as in primitive ages the poet was men's only teacher and best friend : which would find materials in the living present as well as in the romance of the past, and might subdue to the fairest forms of speech and verse the intractable materials of modern civilization : which might elicit the simple principles, or, as Plato would have called them, the essential forms of truth and goodness out of the variety of opinion and the complexity of modern society : which would preserve all the good of each generation and leave the bad unsung : which should be based not on vain longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the nature of man. Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose, two in one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God and man ; and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great thoughts and heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or Petrarch ; and many types of manly and womanly beauty might appear among us, rising above the ordinary level of humanity, and many lives which were like poems (Laws, vii. 817 B) be not only written but lived among us. A few such strains have been heard among men in the tragedies of ^Eschylus and Sophocles, whom Plato quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep and serious approval ; in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in passages of other English INTRODUCTION. 147 poets,— first and above all in the Hebrew prophets and psalmists. Shakespeare has taught us how great men should speak and act ; he has drawn characters of a wonderful purity and depth ; he has ennobled the human mind, but, like Homer (Rep. x. 599 foil.), he ' has left no way of life.' The next greatest poet of modern times, Goethe, is concerned with ' a lower degree of truth ' ; he paints the world as a stage on which ' all the men and women are merely players ' ; he cultivates life as an art, but he furnishes no ideals of life and action. The poet may rebel against any attempt to set limits to his fancy ; and he may argue truly that moralizing in verse is not poetry. Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on his adversaries. But the philosopher will still be justified in asking ' How may the heavenly gift of poesy be devoted to the good of mankind ? ' Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of truth and error appears in other parts of the argument. He is aware of the absurdity of mankind framing their whole lives according to Homer; just as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of interpreting mythology upon rational principles; both these were the modern tendencies of his own age, which he deservedly ridicules. On the other hand, his argument that Homer, if he had been able to teach mankind anything worth knowing, would not have been allowed by them to go about begging as a rhapsodist, is both false and contrary to the spirit of Plato. (Cp. Rep. vi. 489 A foil.) It may be compared with that other paradox of the Gorgias, that ' no statesman was ever unjustly put to death by the city of which he was the head ' ; and that ' no Sophist was ever defrauded by his pupils.' (Gorg. 519 foil.) The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute dualism of soul and body. Admitting the existence of the soul, we know of no force which is able to put an end to her. She is not destroyed by her own proper evil, which is sin ; and still less can she be by any other. Yet Plato has acknowledged that the soul may be so overgrown by the incrustations of earth as to lose her original form, and in the Timaeus he recognizes more strongly than in the Republic the influence which the body has over the mind, denying even the voluntariness of human actions, on the ground that they proceed from physical states. (Tim. 86.) In the Republic, as elsewhere, he wavers between the original soul which has to be restored, and the character which is developed by training and education. L 2 148 THE REPUBLIC. The vision of another world is ascribed to Er, the son of Armenius, who is said by Clement of Alexandria to have been Zoroaster. The tale has certainly an oriental character, and may be compared with the pilgrimages of the soul in the Zend Avesta (cp. Haug, Zend Avesta, p. 197). But no trace of acquaintance with Zoroaster is found elsewhere in Plato's writings, and there is no reason for giving him the name of Er, the Pamphylian. The philosophy of Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from Zoroaster, and still less the myths of Plato. The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that of the Phaedrus and Phaedo. Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and mythology ; the great sphere of heaven is represented under the symbol of a cylinder or box, containing the orbits of the planets and the fixed stars ; this depends upon a spindle which turns on the knees of Neces sity ; the revolutions of the eight orbits are guided by the fates, and their harmonious motion produces the music of the spheres. Through the innermost or eighth of these, which is the moon, is passed the pole or axis ; but it is doubtful whether this is the continuation of the column of light, from which the travellers contemplate the heavens. The words of Plato imply that they are connected, but not the same ; the column of light is clearly not of adamant. The cylinder containing the orbits of the stars is almost as much a symbol as the figure of Necessity turning the spindle ; — for the outermost rim is the sphere of the fixed stars, and nothing is said about the intervals of space which divide the paths of the stars in the heavens. The description is both a picture and an orrery. The column of light is probably not the milky way, which is neither straight, nor like a rainbow, but the imaginary axis of the earth. This is compared to the rainbow in respect not of form but of colour, and not to the undergirders of a trireme, but to the straight rope running from prow to stern in which the undergirders meet. The orrery of the Republic differs in its mode of representation from the circles of the same and of the other in the Timaeus. In both the fixed stars are distinguished from the planets, and they move in orbits without them, although in an opposite direction : in the Republic (as in the Timaeus) they are all moving round the axis of the world, but we are not certain that in the former they are moving round the earth. No distinct mention is made in the Republic of the circles of the same and other ; although both in the Timaeus and in the Republic the motion of the fixed stars is supposed to coincide with the motion INTRODUCTION. 149 of the whole. The relative thickness of the rims is perhaps designed to express the relative distances of the planets. Plato probably in tended to represent the earth, from which Er and his companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place; but whether or not her self revolving, unless this is implied in the revolution of the axis, is uncertain. (Cp. Timaeus.) The spectator might be supposed to look at the heavenly bodies, either from above or below. The earth is a sort of earth and heaven in one, like the heaven of the Phaedrus, on the back of which the spectator goes out to take a peep at the stars and is borne round in the revolution. There is no distinction between the equator and the ecliptic. But Plato is no doubt led to imagine that the planets have an opposite motion to that of the fixed stars, in order to account for their appearances in the heavens. In the description of the meadow, and the retribution of the good and evil after death, there are traces of Homer. The description of the axis as a spindle, and of the heavenly bodies as forming a whole, partly arises out of the attempt to connect the motions of the heavenly bodies with the mythological image of the web, or weaving of the Fates. The giving of the lots, the weaving of them and the making of them irreversible, which are ascribed to the three Fates — Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos, are obviously derived from their names. The element of chance in human life is indicated by the order of the lots. But chance, however adverse, might be overcome by the wisdom of man, if he knew how to choose aright ; there was a worse enemy to man than chance, and this was himself. He who was moderately fortunate in the number of the lot — even the very last comer — might have a good life if he chose with wisdom. And as Plato does not like to make an assertion which is unproven, he more than confirms this statement a few sentences afterwards by the example of Odysseus, who chose last. But the virtue which is founded on habit is not sufficient to enable a man to choose ; he must add to virtue knowledge, if he is to act rightly when placed in new circumstances. The routine of good actions and good habits is an inferior sort of goodness; and, as Cole ridge says, ' Common sense is intolerable which is not based on me taphysics,' so Plato would have said, ' Custom is worthless which is not based upon philosophy.' The freedom of the will to refuse the evil and to choose the good is distinctly asserted. ' Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours 150 THE REPUBLIC. her he will have more or less of her.' The life of man is ' rounded ' by necessity; there are circumstances prior to birth which affect him. (Cp. Pol. 273 B.) But within the walls of necessity there is an open space in which he is his own master, and can study for himself the effects which the variously compounded gifts of nature or fortune have upon the soul, and act accordingly. All men cannot have first choices in everything. But the lot of all men is good enough, if they choose wisely and will live diligently. The verisimilitude which is given to the pilgrimage of a thousand years, by the intimation that Ardiaeus had lived a thousand years before ; the coincidence of Er coming to life on the twelfth day after he was supposed to have been dead with the seven days which the pilgrims passed in the meadow, and the four days during which they journeyed to the column of light ; the precision with which the soul is mentioned who chose the twentieth lot; the passing remarks that there was no definite character among the souls, and that the souls which had chosen ill blamed any one rather than themselves; or that some of the souls drank more than was necessary of the waters of forgetfulness, while Er himself was hindered from drinking ; the desire of Odysseus to rest at last, unlike the conception of him in Dante and Tennyson ; the feigned ignorance of how Er returned to the body, when the other souls went shooting like stars to their birth, — add greatly to the truth fulness of the narrative. They are such touches of nature as the art of Defoe might have introduced when he wished to win credibility for marvels and apparitions. There still remain to be considered some points which have been intentionally reserved to the end : (I) the Janus-like character of the Republic, which presents two faces — one an Hellenic state, the other a kingdom of philosophers. Connected with the latter of the two aspects are (II) the paradoxes of the Republic, as they have been termed by Morgenstern : (a) the community of property ; (ft) of families ; (y) the rule of philosophers ; (8) the analogy of the individual and the State, which, like some other analogies in the Republic, is carried too far. We may then proceed to consider (III) the subject of education as con ceived by Plato, bringing together in a general view the education of youth and the education of after life; lastly, (IV), some light may be INTRODUCTION. 151 thrown on the Republic of Plato by his imitators ; and hence we may take occasion to consider the nature and value of political ideals. I. Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an Hellenic State (Book v. 470 E). Many of his regulations are characteristically Spartan ; such as the prohibition of gold and silver, the common meals, the training of youth in a military gymnastic, the gymnastic exercises of the women. The life of Sparta was the life of a camp (Laws ii. 666 E), enforced even more rigidly in time of peace than in war; the citizens, like Plato's citizens, were forbidden to trade — they were to be soldiers and not shopkeepers. Nowhere else in Greece was the indi vidual so completely subjected to the State ; the time when he was to marry, the education of his children, the food which he was to eat, were prescribed by law. Some of the best enactments in the Republic, such as the reverence to be paid to parents and elders, and some of the worst, such as the exposure of deformed children, are borrowed from the practice of Sparta. The encouragement of friendships be tween men and youths, or of men with one another, as affording incentives to bravery, is also Spartan, and in Sparta a nearer approach was made than in any other Greek State to equality of the sexes, and to community of property ; while there was probably less of licentiousness in the sense of immorality, the tie of marriage was regarded more lightly than in the rest of Greece. The 'suprema lex' was the preservation of the family, and the interest of the State. The coarse strength of a military government was not favourable to purity and refinement; and the excessive strictness of some regulations seems to have pro duced a reaction. Of all Hellenes the Spartans were most accessible to bribery ; several of the greatest of them might be described in the words of Plato as having a ' fierce secret longing after gold and silver.' Though not in the strict sense communists, the principle of communism was maintained among them in their division of lands, in their com mon meals, in their slaves, and in the free use of one another's goods. Marriage was a public institution : and the women were educated by the State, and sang and danced in public with the men. Many traditions were preserved at Sparta of the severity with which the magistrates had maintained the primitive rule of music and poetry ; as in the Republic of Plato, the new-fangled poet was to be expelled. Hymns to the Gods, which were the only kind of music allowed at Sparta, are the only kind which he has admitted into his ideal State. i$2 THE REPUBLIC. The council of elder men also corresponds to the Spartan gerusia; and the freedom with which they are permitted to judge about matters of detail agrees with what we are told of that institution. Once more, the military rule of not spoiling the dead or offering arms at the temples ; the moderation in the pursuit of enemies ; the importance at tached to the physical well-being of the citizens ; the use of warfare for the sake of defence rather than of aggression, are features probably suggested by the spirit and practice of Sparta. To the Spartan type the ideal State reverts in the first decline; and the character of the individual timocrat is borrowed from the Spartan citizen. The love of Lacedaemon not only affected Plato and Xenophon, but was shared by many undistinguished Athenians ; there they seemed to find a principle which was wanting in their own democracy. The fVKHcr/j.ia of Sparta attracted them, that is to say, not the goodness of their laws, but the spirit of order and loyalty which prevailed there. Fascinated by the idea, they would imitate the Lacedaemonians in their dress and manners; they were known to the contemporaries of Plato as 'the persons who had their ears bruised/ like the Roundheads of the Commonwealth. The love of another church or country when seen at a distance only, the longing for an imaginary simplicity in civilized times, the desire of what we are not, are tendencies of the human mind which are often displayed among ourselves. Such feelings would meet with a response in the Republic of Plato. But there are other features of the Platonic Republic, as, for example, the literary and philosophical education, and the grace and beauty of life, which are the reverse of Spartan. Plato wishes to give his citizens a taste of Athenian freedom as well as of Lacedaemonian discipline. His individual genius is purely Athenian, although in theory he is a lover of Sparta ; and he is something more than either — he has also a true Hellenic feeling. He is desirous of humanizing the wars of Hellenes against one another; he acknowledges that the Delphian God is the grand hereditary interpreter of all Hellas. The spirit of harmony and the Dorian mode are to prevail, and the whole State is to have an external beauty which is the reflex of the harmony within. But he has not yet found out the truth which he afterwards enunciated in the Laws (i. 628 D) — that he was a better legislator who made men to be of one mind, than he who trained them for war. The citizens, as in other Hellenic States, democratic as well as aristocratic, are really INTRODUCTION. 153 an upper class ; for, although no mention is made of slaves, the lower classes are allowed to fade away into the distance, and are represented in the individual by the passions. Plato has no idea either of a social State in which all classes are harmonised, or of a federation of the world in which different nations have a place. His city is equipped for war rather than for peace, and this would seem to be justified by the ordinary condition of Hellenic States. The mythe of the earth- born men is an embodiment of the orthodox tradition of Hellas, and the allusion to the four ages of the world is also sanctioned by the authority of Hesiod and the poets. Thus we see that the Republic is partly founded on the ideal of the old Greek potis, partly on the actual circumstances of Hellenic States. Plato, like the old painters, retains the traditional form, and like them he has also a vision of a city in the clouds. There is yet another thread which is interwoven in the texture of the work ; for the Republic is not only a Dorian State, but a Pythagorean league. The way of life which was connected with the name of Pytha goras, like the Catholic monastic orders, showed the power which the mind of an individual might exercise over his contemporaries, and might naturally suggest to Plato the possibility of reviving such 'mediaeval institutions.' The Pythagoreans, like Plato, enforced a rule of life and a moral and intellectual training. The influence ascribed to music, which to us seems exaggerated, is also a Pythagorean feature, and is not to be regarded as representing the real influence of music in the Greek world. More nearly than any other government of Hellas, the Pythagorean league of three hundred was an aristocracy of virtue. For once in the history of mankind ' the philosophy of order or KOO-^OS, expressing and consequently enlisting on its side the combined endeavours of the better part of the people, obtained the management of public affairs and held possession of it for a considerable time' (until about B.C. 500). Probably only in states prepared by Dorian institutions would such a league have been possible. The rulers, like Plato's v\ai