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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Republic, by Plato
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Republic
+
+Author: Plato
+
+Translator: B. Jowett
+
+Posting Date: August 27, 2008 [EBook #1497]
+Release Date: October, 1998
+Last Updated: June 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REPUBLIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher
+
+
+
+
+
+THE REPUBLIC
+
+By Plato
+
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+Note: The Republic by Plato, Jowett, etext #150
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
+
+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 politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around
+which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here philosophy reaches the
+highest point (cp, especially in Books V, VI, VII) to which ancient
+thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among the
+moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge, although
+neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form from
+the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content with an
+abstraction of science which was not yet realized. He was the greatest
+metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in
+any other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained.
+The sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many
+instruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses
+of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of
+contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction
+between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means
+and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind
+into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures
+and desires into necessary and unnecessary--these and other great
+forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and were
+probably first invented by Plato. The greatest of all logical truths,
+and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose sight,
+the difference between words and things, has been most strenuously
+insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.; Cratyl. 435, 436 ff), although he
+has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own writings (e.g.
+Rep.). But he does not bind up truth in logical formulae,--logic is
+still veiled in metaphysics; and the science which he imagines to
+'contemplate all truth and all existence' is very unlike the doctrine of
+the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have discovered (Soph. Elenchi,
+33. 18).
+
+Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a
+still larger design which was to have included an ideal history of
+Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy. The fragment of
+the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second only in
+importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said as
+a fact to have inspired some of the early navigators of the sixteenth
+century. This mythical tale, of which the subject was a history of the
+wars of the Athenians against the Island of Atlantis, is supposed to be
+founded upon an unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have stood
+in the same relation as the writings of the logographers to the poems of
+Homer. It would have told of a struggle for Liberty (cp. Tim. 25 C), intended
+to represent the conflict of Persia and Hellas. We may judge from the
+noble commencement of the Timaeus, from the fragment of the Critias
+itself, and from the third book of the Laws, in what manner Plato would
+have treated this high argument. We can only guess why the great design
+was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became sensible of some incongruity
+in a fictitious history, or because he had lost his interest in it, or
+because advancing years forbade the completion of it; and we may please
+ourselves with the fancy that had this imaginary narrative ever been
+finished, we should have found Plato himself sympathising with the
+struggle for Hellenic independence (cp. Laws  iii. 698 ff.), singing a
+hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making the reflection
+of Herodotus (v. 78) where he contemplates the growth of the Athenian
+empire--'How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the
+Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!' or,
+more probably, attributing the victory to the ancient good order of
+Athens and to the favor of Apollo and Athene (cp. Introd. to Critias).
+
+Again, Plato may be regarded as the 'captain' ('arhchegoz') 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 extent to which
+Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the
+Politics has been little recognised, and the recognition is the
+more necessary because it is not made by Aristotle himself. The two
+philosophers had more in common than they were conscious of; and
+probably some elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle. In
+English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in the
+works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great original writers like
+Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas. That there is a truth
+higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to herself, is
+a conviction which in our own generation has been enthusiastically
+asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground. Of the Greek authors who at the
+Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest
+influence. 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 the legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan,
+he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly
+impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church he exercised
+a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on
+politics. Even the fragments of his words when 'repeated at second-hand'
+(Symp. 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 philosophy, in politics, in literature. And many of the latest
+conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity of
+knowledge, the 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
+Polemarchus--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 first care of the
+rulers is to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old
+Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality,
+and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry,
+and greater harmony of the individual and the State. We are thus led on
+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, intellectual 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 is hardly to be realized in this world
+and quickly degenerates. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government
+of the soldier and the lover of honour, this again declining into
+democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but regular order
+having not much resemblance to the actual facts. When 'the wheel has
+come full circle' we do not begin again with a new period of human life;
+but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we end. The
+subject is then changed and the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy
+which had been more lightly treated in the earlier books of the Republic
+is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion. 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 (Cp. Sir G.C. Lewis
+in the Classical Museum, vol. ii. p 1.), is probably later than the age of Plato. The
+natural divisions are five in number;--(1) Book I and the first half
+of Book II down to the paragraph beginning, 'I had always admired the
+genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus,' which is introductory; 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 any definite result. 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. 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 of the individuals who correspond to them
+are reviewed in succession; and the nature of pleasure and the principle
+of tyranny are further analysed in the individual man. 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 Introduction to Phaedrus), 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. Whether this
+imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement of the plan;
+or from the imperfect 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 Odyssey, 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 chronological 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, 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 wanting in unity. Tried by this
+test, several of the Platonic Dialogues, according 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 in some degree confirmed by the 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
+assumed 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 Christian language, the kingdom of God is within, and yet
+developes into a Church or external kingdom; 'the house not made with
+hands, eternal in the heavens,' is reduced to the proportions of an
+earthly building. 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 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 motions of the heavenly bodies (cp. Tim. 47). The Timaeus,
+which takes up the political rather than the ethical side of the
+Republic, and is chiefly occupied with hypotheses concerning the outward
+world, yet contains many indications that the same law is supposed to
+reign over the State, 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 plan grows
+under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of
+writing; he has not worked 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 explanations of the
+argument of the Republic, imagines himself to have found the true
+argument 'in the representation of human life in a State perfected 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, and which does not interfere with the general purpose. What kind
+or degree of unity is to be sought after in a building, in the plastic
+arts, in poetry, in prose, is a problem which has to be determined
+relatively to the subject-matter. To Plato himself, the enquiry 'what
+was the intention of the writer,' or 'what was the principal argument
+of the Republic' would have been hardly intelligible, and therefore had
+better be at once dismissed (cp. the Introduction to the Phaedrus).
+
+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,' or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the 'Sun of
+righteousness with healing in his wings' 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--like the sun in the visible world;--about human perfection, which
+is justice--about education beginning in youth and continuing in later
+years--about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers
+and evil rulers of mankind--about 'the world' which is the embodiment of
+them--about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up
+in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life. No such inspired
+creation is at unity with itself, any more than the clouds of heaven
+when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of light and dark, of
+truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work
+of philosophical imagination. It is not all on the same plane; it easily
+passes from ideas to myths and fancies, from facts to figures of speech.
+It is not prose but poetry, at least a great part of it, and ought not
+to be judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of history. The
+writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole; they take
+possession of him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore
+to discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable or
+not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came first into the
+mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas 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 frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice.
+The great science of dialectic or the organisation of ideas has no real
+content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the
+higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and
+all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato
+reaches the 'summit of speculation,' and these, although they fail to
+satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, 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
+conversation 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 (cp. Rep.,
+Symp., 193 A, etc.), 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 which 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 respecting one of his own dramas); and need not
+greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer
+'which is still worth asking,' because the investigation shows that we
+cannot argue historically from the dates in Plato; it would be useless
+therefore 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 (cp. Apol. 34 A), 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 unknown Charmantides--these are
+mute auditors; also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as
+in the Dialogue which bears his name, he appears as the friend and ally
+of Thrasymachus.
+
+Cephalus, the patriarch of the house, 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
+consciousness of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the
+tyranny of youthful lusts. His love of conversation, his affection, 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 riches have the advantage of placing men above the temptation
+to dishonesty or falsehood. The respectful attention shown to him by
+Socrates, whose love of conversation, no less than the mission imposed
+upon him by the Oracle, leads him to ask questions of all men, young and
+old alike, should also be noted. Who better suited to raise the question
+of justice than Cephalus, whose life might seem to be the expression of
+it? The moderation with which old age is pictured by Cephalus 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 the De Senectute. The evening of life is described by Plato
+in the most expressive manner, yet with the fewest possible touches. As
+Cicero remarks (Ep. ad Attic. iv. 16), the aged Cephalus would have been out of
+place in the discussion which follows, and which he could neither have
+understood nor taken part in without a violation of dramatic propriety
+(cp. Lysimachus in the Laches).
+
+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' 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
+principles; and he quotes Simonides (cp. Aristoph. Clouds) as his father
+had quoted Pindar. But after this 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 Glaucon
+and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he
+belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of
+arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not
+know what he is saying. He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and
+that the virtues follow the analogy of the arts. From his brother Lysias
+(contra Eratosth.) we learn that he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants,
+but no allusion is here made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that
+Cephalus and his family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated from
+Thurii to Athens.
+
+The 'Chalcedonian giant,' Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard
+in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to
+Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst characteristics. He
+is vain and blustering, refusing to discourse unless he is paid, fond of
+making an oration, and hoping thereby 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.' He has reached the
+stage of framing general notions, and in this respect is in advance of
+Cephalus and Polemarchus. But he is incapable of defending them in a
+discussion, and vainly tries to cover his confusion with banter and
+insolence. 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
+infancy of philosophy serious errors about morality might easily grow
+up--they 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. The pompous and empty Sophist is utterly
+helpless in the hands of the great master of dialectic, who knows how
+to touch all the springs of vanity and weakness in him. He is greatly
+irritated by the irony of Socrates, but his noisy and imbecile rage
+only lays him more and more open to the thrusts of his assailant. 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 continue the
+discussion with reluctance, but soon with apparent good-will, and he
+even testifies his interest at a later stage by one or two occasional
+remarks. When attacked by Glaucon he is humorously protected by Socrates
+'as one who has never been his enemy and is now his friend.' From Cicero
+and Quintilian and from Aristotle's Rhetoric we learn that the Sophist
+whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note whose writings were
+preserved in later ages. The play on his name which was made by his
+contemporary Herodicus (Aris. Rhet.), 'thou wast ever bold in
+battle,' seems to show that the description of him is not devoid of
+verisimilitude.
+
+When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal respondents,
+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 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; the
+'juvenis qui gaudet canibus,' and who improves the breed of animals; the
+lover of art and music 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 when the
+argument offers him an opportunity, and who is ever ready to second
+the humour of Socrates and to appreciate the ridiculous, whether in
+the connoisseurs of music, or in the lovers of theatricals, or in the
+fantastic behaviour of the citizens of democracy. His weaknesses are
+several times alluded to by Socrates, who, however, will not allow him
+to be attacked by his brother Adeimantus. He is a soldier, and, like
+Adeimantus, has been distinguished at the battle of Megara (anno
+456?)...The character of Adeimantus is deeper and graver, and the
+profounder objections are commonly put into his mouth. Glaucon is more
+demonstrative, and generally opens the game. Adeimantus pursues the
+argument 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 first but
+the second thing, 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, but 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 of
+argument, and who refuses to let Socrates pass lightly over the question
+of women and children. 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 corruption of philosophy and the
+conception of the idea of good are discussed with Adeimantus. 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. Once more Adeimantus returns with the
+allusion to his brother Glaucon whom he compares to the contentious
+State; in the next book he is again superseded, and Glaucon continues to
+the end.
+
+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 distinguished from one
+another. 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 have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted
+in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, 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 acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the
+corrupters of the world. He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive,
+passing beyond the range either of the political or the speculative
+ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage 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 perfect state were comprehended in
+the Socratic teaching, though he certainly dwelt on the nature of
+the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen. Mem.; Phaedo); 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.) 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, of
+which the affectation 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, and may, perhaps, give the
+answer to a question more fluently than another.
+
+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 (cp. Apol.); nor is there any reason to suppose 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 favorite oath is retained, and a slight mention is made
+of the daemonium, or internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as
+a phenomenon peculiar to himself. 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 (Greek):
+'Let us apply the test of common instances.' 'You,' says Adeimantus,
+ironically, in the sixth book, 'are so unaccustomed to speak in images.'
+And this use of examples or images, though truly Socratic in origin, is
+enlarged by the genius of Plato into the form of an allegory or parable,
+which embodies in the concrete what has been already described, or is
+about to be described, in the abstract. Thus the figure of the cave in
+Book VII is a recapitulation of the divisions of knowledge in Book VI.
+The composite animal in Book IX is an allegory of the parts of the
+soul. The noble captain and the ship and the true pilot in Book VI are
+a figure of the relation of the people to the philosophers in the
+State which has been described. Other figures, such as the dog, or
+the marriage of the portionless maiden, or the drones and wasps in the
+eighth and ninth books, also form links of connexion in long passages,
+or are used to recall previous discussions.
+
+Plato is most true to the character of his master when he describes him
+as 'not of this world.' And with this representation of him the ideal
+state and the other paradoxes of the Republic are quite in accordance,
+though they cannot be shown to have been speculations of Socrates. To
+him, as to other great teachers both philosophical and religious, when
+they looked upward, the world seemed to be the embodiment of error and
+evil. The common sense of mankind has revolted against this view, or
+has only partially admitted it. And even in Socrates himself the sterner
+judgement of the multitude at times passes into a sort of ironical pity
+or love. Men in general are incapable of philosophy, and are therefore
+at enmity with the philosopher; but their misunderstanding of him is
+unavoidable: for they have never seen him as he truly is in his own
+image; they are only acquainted with artificial systems possessing no
+native force of truth--words which admit of many applications. Their
+leaders have nothing to measure with, and are therefore ignorant of
+their own stature. But they are to be pitied or laughed at, not to be
+quarrelled with; they mean well with their nostrums, if they could only
+learn that they are cutting off a Hydra's head. This moderation towards
+those who are in error is one of the most characteristic features
+of Socrates in the Republic. In all the different representations of
+Socrates, whether of Xenophon or Plato, and amid the differences of
+the earlier or later Dialogues, he always retains the character of the
+unwearied and disinterested seeker after truth, without which he would
+have ceased to be Socrates.
+
+Leaving the characters we may now analyse the contents of the Republic,
+and then proceed to consider (1) The general aspects of this Hellenic
+ideal of the State, (2) The modern lights in which the thoughts of Plato
+may be read.
+
+BOOK I. The Republic opens with a truly Greek scene--a festival in
+honour of the goddess Bendis which is held in the Piraeus; to this is
+added the promise of an equestrian torch-race in the evening. The whole
+work is supposed to be recited by Socrates on the day after the festival
+to a small party, consisting of Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and
+another; this we learn from the first words of the Timaeus.
+
+When the rhetorical advantage of reciting the Dialogue has been gained,
+the attention is not distracted by any reference to the audience; nor
+is the reader further reminded of the extraordinary length of the
+narrative. Of the numerous company, three only take any serious part in
+the discussion; nor are we informed whether in the evening they went to
+the torch-race, or talked, as in the Symposium, through the night.
+The manner in which the conversation has arisen is described as
+follows:--Socrates and his companion Glaucon are about to leave the
+festival when they are detained by a message from Polemarchus, who
+speedily appears accompanied by Adeimantus, the brother of Glaucon, and
+with playful violence compels them to remain, promising them not only
+the torch-race, but the pleasure of conversation with the young, which
+to Socrates is a far greater attraction. They return to the house of
+Cephalus, Polemarchus' father, now in extreme old age, who is found
+sitting upon a cushioned seat crowned for a sacrifice. 'You should come
+to me oftener, Socrates, for I am too old to go to you; and at my time
+of life, having lost other pleasures, I care the more for conversation.'
+Socrates asks him what he thinks of age, to which the old man replies,
+that the sorrows and discontents of age are to be attributed to the
+tempers of men, and that age is a time of peace in which the tyranny
+of the passions is no longer felt. Yes, replies Socrates, but the world
+will say, Cephalus, that you are happy in old age because you are rich.
+'And there is something in what they say, Socrates, but not so much as
+they imagine--as Themistocles replied to the Seriphian, "Neither you, if
+you had been an Athenian, nor I, if I had been a Seriphian, would ever
+have been famous," I might in like manner reply to you, Neither a good
+poor man can be happy in age, nor yet a bad rich man.' Socrates remarks
+that Cephalus appears not to care about riches, a quality which he
+ascribes to his having inherited, not acquired them, and would like
+to know what he considers to be the chief advantage of them. Cephalus
+answers that when you are old the belief in the world below grows upon
+you, and then to have done justice and never to have been compelled to
+do injustice through poverty, and never to have deceived anyone, are
+felt to be unspeakable blessings. Socrates, who is evidently preparing
+for an argument, next asks, What is the meaning of the word justice? To
+tell the truth and pay your debts? No more than this? Or must we admit
+exceptions? Ought I, for example, to put back into the hands of my
+friend, who has gone mad, the sword which I borrowed of him when he
+was in his right mind? 'There must be exceptions.' 'And yet,' says
+Polemarchus, 'the definition which has been given has the authority
+of Simonides.' Here Cephalus retires to look after the sacrifices,
+and bequeaths, as Socrates facetiously remarks, the possession of the
+argument to his heir, Polemarchus...
+
+The description of old age is finished, and Plato, as his manner is, has
+touched the key-note of the whole work in asking for the definition of
+justice, first suggesting the question which Glaucon afterwards pursues
+respecting external goods, and preparing for the concluding mythus of
+the world below in the slight allusion of Cephalus. The portrait of the
+just man is a natural frontispiece or introduction to the long discourse
+which follows, and may perhaps imply that in all our perplexity about
+the nature of justice, there is no difficulty in discerning 'who is
+a just man.' The first explanation has been supported by a saying of
+Simonides; and now Socrates has a mind to show that the resolution of
+justice into two unconnected precepts, which have no common principle,
+fails to satisfy the demands of dialectic.
+
+...He proceeds: What did Simonides mean by this saying of his? Did he
+mean that I was to give back arms to a madman? 'No, not in that case,
+not if the parties are friends, and evil would result. He meant that you
+were to do what was proper, good to friends and harm to enemies.' Every
+act does something to somebody; and following this analogy, Socrates
+asks, What is this due and proper thing which justice does, and to whom?
+He is answered that justice does good to friends and harm to enemies.
+But in what way good or harm? 'In making alliances with the one, and
+going to war with the other.' Then in time of peace what is the good
+of justice? The answer is that justice is of use in contracts, and
+contracts are money partnerships. Yes; but how in such partnerships
+is the just man of more use than any other man? 'When you want to have
+money safely kept and not used.' Then justice will be useful when money
+is useless. And there is another difficulty: justice, like the art of
+war or any other art, must be of opposites, good at attack as well as
+at defence, at stealing as well as at guarding. But then justice is a
+thief, though a hero notwithstanding, like Autolycus, the Homeric hero,
+who was 'excellent above all men in theft and perjury'--to such a pass
+have you and Homer and Simonides brought us; though I do not forget that
+the thieving must be for the good of friends and the harm of enemies.
+And still there arises another question: Are friends to be interpreted
+as real or seeming; enemies as real or seeming? And are our friends to
+be only the good, and our enemies to be the evil? The answer is, that
+we must do good to our seeming and real good friends, and evil to our
+seeming and real evil enemies--good to the good, evil to the evil. But
+ought we to render evil for evil at all, when to do so will only make
+men more evil? Can justice produce injustice any more than the art of
+horsemanship can make bad horsemen, or heat produce cold? The final
+conclusion is, that no sage or poet ever said that the just return
+evil for evil; this was a maxim of some rich and mighty man, Periander,
+Perdiccas, or Ismenias the Theban (about B.C. 398-381)...
+
+Thus the first stage of aphoristic or unconscious morality is shown to
+be inadequate to the wants of the age; the authority of the poets is set
+aside, and through the winding mazes of dialectic we make an approach
+to the Christian precept of forgiveness of injuries. Similar words
+are applied by the Persian mystic poet to the Divine being when the
+questioning spirit is stirred within him:--'If because I do evil, Thou
+punishest me by evil, what is the difference between Thee and me?' In
+this both Plato and Kheyam rise above the level of many Christian (?)
+theologians. The first definition of justice easily passes into the
+second; for the simple words 'to speak the truth and pay your debts' is
+substituted the more abstract 'to do good to your friends and harm to
+your enemies.' Either of these explanations gives a sufficient rule
+of life for plain men, but they both fall short of the precision of
+philosophy. We may note in passing the antiquity of casuistry, which not
+only arises out of the conflict of established principles in particular
+cases, but also out of the effort to attain them, and is prior as well
+as posterior to our fundamental notions of morality. The 'interrogation'
+of moral ideas; the appeal to the authority of Homer; the conclusion
+that the maxim, 'Do good to your friends and harm to your enemies,'
+being erroneous, could not have been the word of any great man, are all
+of them very characteristic of the Platonic Socrates.
+
+...Here Thrasymachus, who has made several attempts to interrupt, but
+has hitherto been kept in order by the company, takes advantage of a
+pause and rushes into the arena, beginning, like a savage animal, with a
+roar. 'Socrates,' he says, 'what folly is this?--Why do you agree to be
+vanquished by one another in a pretended argument?' He then prohibits
+all the ordinary definitions of justice; to which Socrates replies that
+he cannot tell how many twelve is, if he is forbidden to say 2 x 6, or
+3 x 4, or 6 x 2, or 4 x 3. At first Thrasymachus is reluctant to argue;
+but at length, with a promise of payment on the part of the company and
+of praise from Socrates, he is induced to open the game. 'Listen,' he
+says, 'my answer is that might is right, justice the interest of the
+stronger: now praise me.' Let me understand you first. Do you mean that
+because Polydamas the wrestler, who is stronger than we are, finds the
+eating of beef for his interest, the eating of beef is also for our
+interest, who are not so strong? Thrasymachus is indignant at the
+illustration, and in pompous words, apparently intended to restore
+dignity to the argument, he explains his meaning to be that the rulers
+make laws for their own interests. But suppose, says Socrates, that the
+ruler or stronger makes a mistake--then the interest of the stronger is
+not his interest. Thrasymachus is saved from this speedy downfall by his
+disciple Cleitophon, who introduces the word 'thinks;'--not the actual
+interest of the ruler, but what he thinks or what seems to be his
+interest, is justice. The contradiction is escaped by the unmeaning
+evasion: for though his real and apparent interests may differ, what the
+ruler thinks to be his interest will always remain what he thinks to be
+his interest.
+
+Of course this was not the original assertion, nor is the new
+interpretation accepted by Thrasymachus himself. But Socrates is not
+disposed to quarrel about words, if, as he significantly insinuates,
+his adversary has changed his mind. In what follows Thrasymachus does
+in fact withdraw his admission that the ruler may make a mistake, for he
+affirms that the ruler as a ruler is infallible. Socrates is quite ready
+to accept the new position, which he equally turns against Thrasymachus
+by the help of the analogy of the arts. Every art or science has an
+interest, but this interest is to be distinguished from the accidental
+interest of the artist, and is only concerned with the good of the
+things or persons which come under the art. And justice has an interest
+which is the interest not of the ruler or judge, but of those who come
+under his sway.
+
+Thrasymachus is on the brink of the inevitable conclusion, when he makes
+a bold diversion. 'Tell me, Socrates,' he says, 'have you a nurse?' What
+a question! Why do you ask? 'Because, if you have, she neglects you and
+lets you go about drivelling, and has not even taught you to know the
+shepherd from the sheep. For you fancy that shepherds and rulers never
+think of their own interest, but only of their sheep or subjects,
+whereas the truth is that they fatten them for their use, sheep and
+subjects alike. And experience proves that in every relation of life
+the just man is the loser and the unjust the gainer, especially where
+injustice is on the grand scale, which is quite another thing from the
+petty rogueries of swindlers and burglars and robbers of temples. The
+language of men proves this--our 'gracious' and 'blessed' tyrant and the
+like--all which tends to show (1) that justice is the interest of the
+stronger; and (2) that injustice is more profitable and also stronger
+than justice.'
+
+Thrasymachus, who is better at a speech than at a close argument, having
+deluged the company with words, has a mind to escape. But the others
+will not let him go, and Socrates adds a humble but earnest request that
+he will not desert them at such a crisis of their fate. 'And what can I
+do more for you?' he says; 'would you have me put the words bodily
+into your souls?' God forbid! replies Socrates; but we want you to be
+consistent in the use of terms, and not to employ 'physician' in an
+exact sense, and then again 'shepherd' or 'ruler' in an inexact,--if the
+words are strictly taken, the ruler and the shepherd look only to the
+good of their people or flocks and not to their own: whereas you insist
+that rulers are solely actuated by love of office. 'No doubt about it,'
+replies Thrasymachus. Then why are they paid? Is not the reason, that
+their interest is not comprehended in their art, and is therefore the
+concern of another art, the art of pay, which is common to the arts in
+general, and therefore not identical with any one of them? Nor would any
+man be a ruler unless he were induced by the hope of reward or the fear
+of punishment;--the reward is money or honour, the punishment is the
+necessity of being ruled by a man worse than himself. And if a State (or
+Church) were composed entirely of good men, they would be affected by
+the last motive only; and there would be as much 'nolo episcopari' as
+there is at present of the opposite...
+
+The satire on existing governments is heightened by the simple and
+apparently incidental manner in which the last remark is introduced.
+There is a similar irony in the argument that the governors of mankind
+do not like being in office, and that therefore they demand pay.
+
+...Enough of this: the other assertion of Thrasymachus is far more
+important--that the unjust life is more gainful than the just. Now, as
+you and I, Glaucon, are not convinced by him, we must reply to him; but
+if we try to compare their respective gains we shall want a judge
+to decide for us; we had better therefore proceed by making mutual
+admissions of the truth to one another.
+
+Thrasymachus had asserted that perfect injustice was more gainful than
+perfect justice, and after a little hesitation he is induced by Socrates
+to admit the still greater paradox that injustice is virtue and justice
+vice. Socrates praises his frankness, and assumes the attitude of one
+whose only wish is to understand the meaning of his opponents. At the
+same time he is weaving a net in which Thrasymachus is finally enclosed.
+The admission is elicited from him that the just man seeks to gain an
+advantage over the unjust only, but not over the just, while the unjust
+would gain an advantage over either. Socrates, in order to test this
+statement, employs once more the favourite analogy of the arts. The
+musician, doctor, skilled artist of any sort, does not seek to gain more
+than the skilled, but only more than the unskilled (that is to say, he
+works up to a rule, standard, law, and does not exceed it), whereas the
+unskilled makes random efforts at excess. Thus the skilled falls on the
+side of the good, and the unskilled on the side of the evil, and the
+just is the skilled, and the unjust is the unskilled.
+
+There was great difficulty in bringing Thrasymachus to the point; the
+day was hot and he was streaming with perspiration, and for the first
+time in his life he was seen to blush. But his other thesis that
+injustice was stronger than justice has not yet been refuted, and
+Socrates now proceeds to the consideration of this, which, with the
+assistance of Thrasymachus, he hopes to clear up; the latter is at first
+churlish, but in the judicious hands of Socrates is soon restored to
+good-humour: Is there not honour among thieves? Is not the strength of
+injustice only a remnant of justice? Is not absolute injustice absolute
+weakness also? A house that is divided against itself cannot stand; two
+men who quarrel detract from one another's strength, and he who is at
+war with himself is the enemy of himself and the gods. Not wickedness
+therefore, but semi-wickedness flourishes in states,--a remnant of
+good is needed in order to make union in action possible,--there is no
+kingdom of evil in this world.
+
+Another question has not been answered: Is the just or the unjust the
+happier? To this we reply, that every art has an end and an excellence
+or virtue by which the end is accomplished. And is not the end of
+the soul happiness, and justice the excellence of the soul by which
+happiness is attained? Justice and happiness being thus shown to be
+inseparable, the question whether the just or the unjust is the happier
+has disappeared.
+
+Thrasymachus replies: 'Let this be your entertainment, Socrates, at the
+festival of Bendis.' Yes; and a very good entertainment with which your
+kindness has supplied me, now that you have left off scolding. And yet
+not a good entertainment--but that was my own fault, for I tasted of too
+many things. First of all the nature of justice was the subject of our
+enquiry, and then whether justice is virtue and wisdom, or evil and
+folly; and then the comparative advantages of just and unjust: and the
+sum of all is that I know not what justice is; how then shall I know
+whether the just is happy or not?...
+
+Thus the sophistical fabric has been demolished, chiefly by appealing
+to the analogy of the arts. 'Justice is like the arts (1) in having no
+external interest, and (2) in not aiming at excess, and (3) justice is
+to happiness what the implement of the workman is to his work.' At this
+the modern reader is apt to stumble, because he forgets that Plato is
+writing in an age when the arts and the virtues, like the moral
+and intellectual faculties, were still undistinguished. Among early
+enquirers into the nature of human action the arts helped to fill up
+the void of speculation; and at first the comparison of the arts and the
+virtues was not perceived by them to be fallacious. They only saw the
+points of agreement in them and not the points of difference. Virtue,
+like art, must take means to an end; good manners are both an art and
+a virtue; character is naturally described under the image of a statue;
+and there are many other figures of speech which are readily transferred
+from art to morals. The next generation cleared up these perplexities;
+or at least supplied after ages with a further analysis of them. The
+contemporaries of Plato were in a state of transition, and had not yet
+fully realized the common-sense distinction of Aristotle, that 'virtue
+is concerned with action, art with production' (Nic. Eth.), or that
+'virtue implies intention and constancy of purpose,' whereas 'art
+requires knowledge only'. And yet in the absurdities which follow from
+some uses of the analogy, there seems to be an intimation conveyed that
+virtue is more than art. This is implied in the reductio ad absurdum
+that 'justice is a thief,' and in the dissatisfaction which Socrates
+expresses at the final result.
+
+The expression 'an art of pay' which is described as 'common to all the
+arts' is not in accordance with the ordinary use of language. Nor is it
+employed elsewhere either by Plato or by any other Greek writer. It is
+suggested by the argument, and seems to extend the conception of art to
+doing as well as making. Another flaw or inaccuracy of language may be
+noted in the words 'men who are injured are made more unjust.' For
+those who are injured are not necessarily made worse, but only harmed or
+ill-treated.
+
+The second of the three arguments, 'that the just does not aim at
+excess,' has a real meaning, though wrapped up in an enigmatical form.
+That the good is of the nature of the finite is a peculiarly Hellenic
+sentiment, which may be compared with the language of those modern
+writers who speak of virtue as fitness, and of freedom as obedience to
+law. The mathematical or logical notion of limit easily passes into an
+ethical one, and even finds a mythological expression in the conception
+of envy (Greek). 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.)
+
+The harmony of the soul and body, and of the parts of the soul with
+one another, a harmony 'fairer 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 Thrasymachus,
+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. 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 reconcilement of justice and happiness
+and the identity of the individual and the State are also intimated.
+Socrates reassumes the character of a 'know-nothing;' at the same time
+he appears to be not wholly satisfied with the manner in which the
+argument has been conducted. Nothing is concluded; but the tendency of
+the dialectical process, here as always, is to enlarge our conception of
+ideas, and to widen their application to human life.
+
+BOOK II. Thrasymachus is pacified, but the intrepid Glaucon insists on
+continuing the argument. He is not satisfied with the indirect manner
+in which, at the end of the last book, Socrates had disposed 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 themselves 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 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.)
+
+'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! 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 joined in the already
+unequal fray. He considered that the most important point of all had
+been omitted:--'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, such as wealthy
+marriages and high offices. There are the pictures in Homer and Hesiod
+of fat sheep and heavy fleeces, rich corn-fields and trees toppling with
+fruit, which the gods provide in this life for the just. And the Orphic
+poets add a similar picture of another. The heroes of Musaeus and
+Eumolpus lie on couches at a festival, with garlands on their heads,
+enjoying as the meed of virtue a paradise of immortal drunkenness.
+Some go further, and speak of a fair posterity in the third and fourth
+generation. But the wicked they bury in a slough and make them carry
+water in a sieve: and in this life they attribute to them the infamy
+which Glaucon was assuming to be the lot of the just who are supposed to
+be unjust.
+
+'Take another kind of argument which is found both in poetry and
+prose:--"Virtue," as Hesiod says, "is honourable but difficult, vice is
+easy and profitable." 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 an easy fashion with sacrifices and
+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 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 I will turn,--I will put on the show
+of virtue and trail behind me the fox of Archilochus. I hear some one
+saying that "wickedness is not easily concealed," to which I reply that
+"nothing great is easy." Union and force and rhetoric will do much; and
+if men say that 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 only unpunished, still they have
+no further reward, while the wicked may be unpunished and have the
+pleasure of sinning too. But what of the world below? Nay, says the
+argument, there are atoning powers who will set that matter right, as
+the poets, who are the sons of the gods, tell us; and this is confirmed
+by the authority of the State.
+
+'How can we resist such arguments in favour of injustice? Add good
+manners, and, as the wise tell us, 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 others; 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.
+
+'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 and profits of justice. Had we been taught in
+early youth the power of justice and injustice inherent in the soul, and
+unseen by any human or divine eye, we should not have needed others to
+be our guardians, but every one would have been the guardian of himself.
+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.
+Starting 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. The obligation
+of maintaining authority under all circumstances and sometimes by rather
+questionable means is felt strongly and has become a sort of instinct
+among civilized men. The divine right of kings, or more generally of
+governments, is one of the forms under which this natural feeling is
+expressed. Nor again is there any evil which has not some accompaniment
+of good or pleasure; nor any good which is free from some alloy of evil;
+nor any noble or generous thought which may not be attended by a shadow
+or the ghost of a shadow of self-interest or of self-love. We know that
+all human actions are imperfect; but we do not therefore attribute
+them to the worse rather than to the better motive or principle. Such
+a philosophy is both foolish and false, like that opinion of the clever
+rogue who assumes all other men to be like himself. And 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 they describe 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 explained 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 (1) 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. 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
+expressing 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
+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, 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, whether
+the morality of actions is determined by their consequences; 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 (Protag.), '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 the two
+opposite theses 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 philosophical 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
+indirect. 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
+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 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' 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 ye
+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 genuine character
+of Greek thought in beginning with the State and in going on to the
+individual. First ethics, then politics--this 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
+individual and the State, of ethics and politics, which pervades early
+Greek speculation, and even in modern times retains a certain degree of
+influence. 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,
+whenever we either elevate politics into ethics, or lower 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.
+
+...Socrates praises the sons of Ariston, 'inspired offspring of
+the renowned hero,' as the elegiac poet terms them; but he does not
+understand how they can argue so eloquently on behalf of injustice while
+their character shows that they are uninfluenced by their own arguments.
+He knows not 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, that is, he must look for justice in the State
+first, and will then proceed to the individual. Accordingly he 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 required 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 trade; 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
+purchasers; 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 spend their
+days in houses which they have built for themselves; they make their
+own clothes and produce their own corn and wine. Their principal food is
+meal and flour, and they drink in moderation. They live on the best
+of terms with each other, and take care not to have too many children.
+'But,' said Glaucon, interposing, 'are they not to have a relish?'
+Certainly; they will have salt and olives and cheese, vegetables and
+fruits, and chestnuts to roast at the fire. ''Tis a city of pigs,
+Socrates.' Why, I replied, what do you want more? 'Only the comforts of
+life,--sofas and tables, also sauces and sweets.' I see; you want not
+only a State, but a luxurious State; and possibly in the more complex
+frame we may sooner find justice and injustice. Then the fine arts must
+go to work--every conceivable instrument and ornament of luxury will be
+wanted. There will be dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians, cooks,
+barbers, tire-women, nurses, artists; swineherds and neatherds too for
+the animals, and physicians to cure the disorders of which luxury is the
+source. To feed all these superfluous mouths we shall need a part of
+our neighbour's 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 again 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 warlike natures who have this
+aptitude--dogs keen of scent, swift of foot to pursue, and strong of
+limb to fight. And as spirit is the foundation of courage, such natures,
+whether of men or animals, will be full of spirit. But these spirited
+natures are apt to bite and devour one another; the union of
+gentleness to friends and fierceness against enemies appears to be an
+impossibility, and the guardian of a State requires both qualities. Who
+then can be a guardian? The image of the dog suggests an answer. For
+dogs are gentle to friends and fierce to strangers. Your dog is a
+philosopher who judges by the rule of knowing or not knowing; and
+philosophy, whether in man or beast, is the parent of gentleness. The
+human watchdogs must be philosophers or lovers of learning which will
+make them gentle. And how are they to be learned without education?
+
+But what shall their education be? 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 either untrue, or have
+at most one or two grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood. Now early
+life is very impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will
+have to unlearn when they grow up; we must therefore 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 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 quarrel by hearing or
+seeing representations of strife among the gods? Shall they listen to
+the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother, and of Zeus sending him
+flying for helping her when she was beaten? Such tales may possibly have
+a mystical interpretation, but the young are incapable of understanding
+allegory. If any one asks what tales are to be allowed, we will answer
+that we are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay down the
+principles according to which books are to be written; to write them is
+the duty of others.
+
+And our first principle is, that God must be represented as he is; not
+as the author of all things, but of good only. We will not suffer the
+poets to say that he is the steward of good and evil, or that he has two
+casks full of destinies;--or that Athene and Zeus incited Pandarus to
+break the treaty; or that God caused the sufferings of Niobe, or of
+Pelops, or the Trojan war; or that he makes men sin when he wishes to
+destroy them. Either these were not the actions of the gods, or God was
+just, and men were the better for being punished. But that the deed was
+evil, and God the author, is a wicked, suicidal fiction which we will
+allow no one, old or young, to utter. 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 variableness
+or change of form. 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; 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 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 must 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 antiquity 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
+proceeds 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. He indulges, like Rousseau, in a picture of
+primitive life--an idea which has indeed often had a powerful influence
+on the imagination of mankind, but he does not seriously mean to say
+that one is better than the other (Politicus); 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. We should not
+interpret a Platonic dialogue any more than a poem or a parable in too
+literal or matter-of-fact a style. On the other hand, when we compare
+the lively fancy of Plato with the dried-up abstractions of modern
+treatises on philosophy, we are compelled to say with Protagoras, that
+the 'mythus is more interesting' (Protag.)
+
+Several interesting remarks which in modern times would have a place in
+a treatise on Political Economy are scattered up and down the writings
+of Plato: especially Laws, Population; Free Trade; Adulteration; Wills
+and Bequests; Begging; Eryxias, (though not Plato's), Value and Demand;
+Republic, Division of Labour. The last subject, and also the origin of
+Retail Trade, is treated with admirable lucidity in the second book of
+the Republic. But Plato never combined his economic ideas into a system,
+and never seems to have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive
+powers of the State and of the world. He would make retail traders
+only of the inferior sort of citizens (Rep., Laws), though he remarks,
+quaintly enough (Laws), that 'if only the best men and the best women
+everywhere were compelled to keep taverns for a time or to carry on
+retail trade, etc., then we should knew how pleasant and agreeable all
+these things are.'
+
+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
+offering 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 meaning. 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. This is also the substance of Plato's view, though he
+must be acknowledged to have drawn the line somewhat differently from
+modern ethical writers, respecting truth and falsehood. To us, economies
+or accommodations would not be allowable unless they were required by
+the human faculties 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 question
+whether his religion was an historical fact. He was just beginning 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 consideration of their morality
+comes first, afterwards the truth of the documents in which they are
+recorded, or of the events natural or 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 accuracy 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 disregarding 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 therefore tolerant of many things which science and criticism would
+condemn.
+
+We note in passing that the allegorical interpretation of mythology,
+said to have been first introduced as early as the sixth century before
+Christ by Theagenes of Rhegium, was well established in the age of
+Plato, and here, as in the Phaedrus, though for a different reason, was
+rejected by him. That anachronisms whether of religion or law, when
+men have reached another stage of civilization, should be got rid of by
+fictions is in accordance with universal experience. Great is the art of
+interpretation; and by a natural process, which when once discovered was
+always going on, what could not be altered was explained away. And so
+without any palpable inconsistency there existed side by side two forms
+of religion, the tradition inherited or invented by the poets and
+the customary worship of the temple; on the other hand, there was the
+religion of the philosopher, who was dwelling in the heaven of ideas,
+but did not therefore refuse to offer a cock to Aesculapius, or to
+be seen saying his prayers at the rising of the sun. At length the
+antagonism between the popular and philosophical religion, never so
+great among the Greeks as in our own age, disappeared, and was only felt
+like the difference between the religion of the educated and uneducated
+among ourselves. The Zeus of Homer and Hesiod easily passed into
+the 'royal mind' of Plato (Philebus); the giant Heracles became the
+knight-errant and benefactor of mankind. These and still more wonderful
+transformations were readily effected by the ingenuity of Stoics and
+neo-Platonists in the two or three centuries before and after Christ.
+The Greek and Roman religions were gradually permeated by the spirit of
+philosophy; having lost their ancient meaning, they were resolved into
+poetry and morality; and probably were never purer than at the time of
+their decay, when their influence over the world was waning.
+
+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
+deception of the highest part of the soul, from which he who is deceived
+has no 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
+Protagoras 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 (John), '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), 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 about the propriety of deceiving a madman; and he is also
+contrasting the nature of God and man. For God is Truth, but mankind can
+only be true by appearing sometimes to be partial, or false. Reserving
+for another place the greater questions of religion or education, we
+may note further, (1) 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 contemptuous and at the same time
+euphemistic manner in which here as below he alludes to the 'Chronique
+Scandaleuse' 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 concerning the world
+below. They must be gently requested not to abuse hell; they may be
+reminded that their stories are both untrue and discouraging. Nor must
+they be angry if we expunge obnoxious passages, such as the depressing
+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 lost strength and
+youth, the soul with a gibber going beneath the earth like smoke, or
+the souls of the suitors which flutter about like bats. The terrors and
+horrors of Cocytus and Styx, ghosts and sapless shades, and the rest
+of their Tartarean nomenclature, must vanish. Such tales may have their
+use; but they are not the proper food for soldiers. As little can we
+admit the sorrows and sympathies of the Homeric heroes:--Achilles, the
+son of Thetis, in tears, throwing ashes on his head, or pacing up and
+down the sea-shore in distraction; or Priam, the cousin of the gods,
+crying aloud, rolling in the mire. A good man is not 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 inferior persons only, whether women
+or men. Still worse is the attribution of such weakness to the gods; as
+when the goddesses say, 'Alas! my 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
+will not be admitted by us. 'Certainly not.'
+
+Truth should have a high place among the virtues, for falsehood, as
+we were saying, is useless to the gods, and only useful to men as a
+medicine. But this employment of falsehood must remain a privilege of
+state; the common man 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.
+
+In the next place our youth must be temperate, and temperance consists
+in self-control and obedience to authority. That is a lesson which Homer
+teaches in some places: 'The Achaeans marched on breathing prowess, in
+silent awe of their leaders;'--but a very different one in other places:
+'O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog, but the heart of a
+stag.' Language of the latter kind will not impress self-control on the
+minds of youth. The same may be said about his praises of eating and
+drinking and his dread of starvation; also about the verses in which he
+tells of the rapturous loves of Zeus and Here, or of how Hephaestus once
+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 his
+cruelty in dragging the body of Hector round the walls, and slaying
+the captives at the pyre: such a combination of meanness and cruelty in
+Cheiron's pupil is inconceivable. The amatory exploits of Peirithous and
+Theseus are equally unworthy. Either these so-called sons of gods were
+not the sons of gods, or they were not such as the poets imagine them,
+any more than the gods themselves are the authors of evil. The youth who
+believes that such things are done by those who have the 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? Such misrepresentations
+cannot be allowed by us. But in this we are anticipating the definition
+of justice, and had therefore better defer the enquiry.
+
+The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next follows
+style. Now all poetry is a narrative of events past, present, or to
+come; and narrative is of three kinds, the simple, the 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,' the passage will run thus: The priest came and prayed
+Apollo 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--The whole then 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 also something more--Is it not
+doubtful whether our guardians are to be imitators at all? Or rather,
+has not the question been already answered, for we have decided that one
+man cannot in his life play many parts, any more than he can act both
+tragedy and comedy, or be 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. If they imitate they should imitate, not 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, quarrelling, weeping, scolding, or boasting against the
+gods,--least of all when making love or in labour. They must not
+represent slaves, or bullies, or cowards, 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 to employ the descriptive 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
+and cries of animals alike; 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 is not adapted for complexity. And
+when one of these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit
+himself and his poetry we will show him every observance of respect,
+but at the same time tell him that there is no room for his kind in our
+State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, and will not depart from our
+original models (Laws).
+
+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 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. These should be like the
+harmonies, simple and suitable to the occasion. There are four notes
+of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre, 3/2, 2/2,
+2/1, which have all their characteristics, and the feet have different
+characteristics as well as the rhythms. But about this you and I must
+ask Damon, the great 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 equalize the syllables with one another,
+assigning to each the proper quantity. 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 all. This principle of simplicity has to
+be learnt by every one in the days of his youth, and may be gathered
+anywhere, from the creative and constructive arts, as well as from the
+forms of plants and animals.
+
+Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or
+unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to
+the law of simplicity. He who violates it cannot be allowed to work in
+our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For our guardians
+must grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison
+and corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they
+will drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of
+all these influences the greatest is the education given by music,
+which finds a way into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense
+of beauty and of deformity. 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 cannot recognize reflections of them until we know the letters
+themselves;--in like manner we must first attain the elements or
+essential forms of the virtues, and then trace their combinations 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.
+
+Next we pass on to 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
+gymnastic is a sleepy sort of thing, and if left off suddenly is apt to
+endanger health. But our warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, and
+must also be inured to all changes of food and climate. Hence they will
+require a simpler kind of gymnastic, akin to their simple music; and for
+their diet a rule may be found in Homer, who feeds his heroes on roast
+meat only, and gives them no fish although they are 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 confections and Corinthian courtezans, which are
+to gymnastic what Lydian and Ionian melodies are to music, must be
+forbidden. Where gluttony and intemperance prevail the town quickly
+fills with doctors and pleaders; and law and medicine give themselves
+airs as soon as the freemen of a State take an interest in them. But
+what can show a more disgraceful state of education than to have to go
+abroad for justice because you have none of your own at home? And yet
+there IS a worse 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 like disgrace in
+employing a physician, not for the cure of wounds or epidemic disorders,
+but because a man has by laziness and luxury contracted diseases
+which were unknown in the days of Asclepius. 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 medicine
+tortured first himself and then a good many other people, and lived
+a great deal longer than he had any right. But Asclepius would not
+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 'kill
+or cure' method, which artisans and labourers employ. 'They must be
+at their business,' they say, 'and have no time for coddling: if they
+recover, well; 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 sooner) 'he should practise virtue'? But how can excessive
+care of health be inconsistent with an ordinary occupation, and yet
+consistent with that practice of virtue which Phocylides inculcates?
+When a student imagines that philosophy gives him a headache, he never
+does anything; he is always unwell. This was the reason why Asclepius
+and his sons practised no such art. They were acting 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, they applied the proper remedies, and then let
+him eat and drink what he liked. But they declined to treat intemperate
+and worthless subjects, even though they might have made large fortunes
+out of them. 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 the two
+professions. 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 judge controls mind by mind; and therefore his mind should not be
+corrupted by crime. 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 of a certain age; his youth should have been
+innocent, and he should have acquired insight into evil not by the
+practice of it, but by the observation of it in others. This is
+the ideal of a judge; the criminal turned detective is wonderfully
+suspicious, but when in company with good men who have experience, he is
+at fault, for he foolishly imagines that every one is as bad as himself.
+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 both equally concerned with
+the soul, which 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 when it has too much gymnastic is hardened
+and brutalized, the gentle or philosophic temper which has too much
+music becomes enervated. While a man is allowing music to pour 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 exhausted; too much quickly passes into
+nervous irritability. So, again, the athlete by feeding and training has
+his courage doubled, but he soon grows stupid; he is like a wild beast,
+ready to do everything by blows and nothing by counsel or policy. There
+are two principles in man, reason and passion, and to these, not to the
+soul and body, the two arts of music and gymnastic correspond. He who
+mingles them in harmonious concord is the true musician,--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.
+Now they will be the best who love their subjects most, and think that
+they have a common interest with them in the welfare of the state. These
+we must select; but they must be watched at every epoch of life to see
+whether 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 the force of grief and pain
+may compel him. And therefore our guardians must be men who have been
+tried by many tests, like gold in the refiner's fire, and have been
+passed first through danger, 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. These shall receive the
+highest honours both in life and death. (It would perhaps be better to
+confine the term 'guardians' to this select class: the younger men may
+be called 'auxiliaries.')
+
+And now for one magnificent lie, in the belief of which, Oh that we
+could train our rulers!--at any rate let us make the attempt with the
+rest of the world. What I am going to tell is only another version of
+the legend of Cadmus; but our unbelieving generation will be slow to
+accept such a story. The tale must be imparted, first to the rulers,
+then to the soldiers, lastly to the people. We will inform them that
+their youth was a dream, and that during the time when they seemed to
+be undergoing their education they were really being fashioned in the
+earth, who sent them up when they were ready; and that they must protect
+and cherish her whose children they are, and 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 different natures, and some of them God framed to rule, whom he
+fashioned of gold; others he made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others
+again to be husbandmen and craftsmen, and these were formed by him of
+brass and iron. But as they are all sprung from a common stock, a golden
+parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son, and then
+there must be a change of rank; the son of the rich must descend, and
+the child of the artisan rise, in the social scale; for an oracle says
+'that the State will come to an end if governed by a man of brass or
+iron.' Will our citizens ever 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 rulers,
+and look about and pitch their camp in a high place, which will be safe
+against enemies from without, and likewise 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.
+
+1. 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, sometimes altering
+the text from design; more than once quoting or alluding to Homer
+inaccurately, after the manner of the early logographers turning the
+Iliad into prose, and delighting to draw far-fetched inferences from
+his words, or to make ludicrous applications of them. He does not, like
+Heracleitus, get into a rage with Homer and Archilochus (Heracl.), but
+uses their words and expressions as vehicles of a higher truth; not on
+a system like Theagenes of Rhegium or Metrodorus, or in later times the
+Stoics, but as fancy may dictate. And the conclusions drawn from them
+are sound, although the premises are fictitious. These fanciful appeals
+to Homer add a charm to Plato's style, and at the same time they have
+the effect of a satire on the follies of Homeric interpretation. To us
+(and probably to himself), although they take the form of arguments,
+they are really figures of speech. They may be compared with modern
+citations from Scripture, which have often a great rhetorical power even
+when the original meaning of the words is entirely lost sight of. The
+real, like the Platonic Socrates, as we gather from the Memorabilia of
+Xenophon, was fond of making similar adaptations. Great in all ages and
+countries, in religion as well as in law and literature, has been the
+art of interpretation.
+
+2. 'The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style.'
+Notwithstanding the fascination which the word 'classical' exercises
+over us, we can hardly maintain that this rule is observed in all the
+Greek poetry which has come down to us. We cannot deny that the thought
+often exceeds the power of lucid expression in Aeschylus and Pindar;
+or that rhetoric gets the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet
+Euripides. Only perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the
+two; in him alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a
+Greek statue, in which there is nothing to add or to take away; at
+least this is true of single plays or of large portions of them. The
+connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not
+unfrequently a tangled thread which in an age before logic the poet was
+unable to draw out. Many thoughts and feelings mingled in his mind, and
+he had no power of disengaging or arranging them. For there is a subtle
+influence of logic which requires to be transferred from prose to
+poetry, just as the music and perfection of language are infused by
+poetry into prose. In all ages the poet has been a bad judge of his
+own meaning (Apol.); for he does not see that the word which is full
+of associations to his own mind is difficult and unmeaning to that of
+another; or that the sequence which is clear to himself is puzzling to
+others. There are many passages in some of our greatest modern poets
+which are far too obscure; in which there is no proportion between style
+and subject, in which any half-expressed figure, any harsh construction,
+any distorted collocation of words, any remote sequence of ideas is
+admitted; and there is no voice 'coming sweetly from nature,' or music
+adding the expression of feeling to thought. As if there could be poetry
+without beauty, or beauty without ease and clearness. The obscurities
+of early Greek poets arose necessarily out of the state of language and
+logic which existed in their age. They are not examples to be followed
+by us; for the use of language ought in every generation to become
+clearer and clearer. Like Shakespere, they were great in spite, not
+in consequence, of their imperfections of expression. But there is no
+reason for returning to the necessary obscurity which prevailed in
+the infancy of literature. The English poets of the last century were
+certainly not obscure; and we have no excuse for losing what they had
+gained, or for going back to the earlier or transitional age which
+preceded them. The thought of our own times has not out-stripped
+language; a want of Plato's 'art of measuring' is the rule cause of the
+disproportion between them.
+
+3. In the third book of the Republic a nearer approach is made to a
+theory of art than anywhere else in Plato. His views may be summed up
+as follows:--True art is not fanciful and imitative, but simple and
+ideal,--the expression of the highest moral energy, whether in action or
+repose. To live among works of plastic art which are of this noble
+and simple character, or to listen to such strains, is the best of
+influences,--the true Greek atmosphere, in which youth should be brought
+up. That is the way to create in them a natural good taste, which will
+have a feeling of truth and beauty in all things. For though the
+poets are to be expelled, still art is recognized as another aspect of
+reason--like love in the Symposium, extending over the same sphere, but
+confined to the preliminary education, and acting through the power of
+habit; and this conception of art is not limited to strains of music or
+the forms of plastic art, but pervades all nature and has a wide kindred
+in the world. The Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an
+artistic as well as a political side.
+
+There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only in two
+or three passages does he even allude to them (Rep.; Soph.). He is
+not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias, the Parthenon, the
+Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He would probably have regarded
+any abstract truth of number or figure as higher than the greatest of
+them. Yet it is hard to suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to
+inspire in youth, did not pass into his own mind from the works of art
+which he saw around him. We are living upon the fragments of them, and
+find in a few broken stones the standard of truth and beauty. But in
+Plato this feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the
+object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form
+(Phaedrus); he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts.
+Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he expressed, it
+is at any rate remarkable that the greatest perfection of the fine arts
+should coincide with an almost entire silence about them. In one very
+striking passage he tells us that a work of art, like the State, is a
+whole; and this conception of a whole and the love of the newly-born
+mathematical sciences may be regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any
+rate as the regulating principles of Greek art (Xen. Mem.; and Sophist).
+
+4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better
+not be in robust health; and should have known what illness is in his
+own person. But the judge ought to have had no similar experience of
+evil; he is to be a good man who, having passed his youth in innocence,
+became acquainted late in life with the vices of others. And therefore,
+according to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man
+according to Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy.
+The bad, on the other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no knowledge
+of virtue. It may be doubted, however, whether this train of reflection
+is well founded. In a remarkable passage of the Laws it is acknowledged
+that the evil may form a correct estimate of the good. The union of
+gentleness and courage in Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox,
+yet was afterwards ascertained to be a truth. And Plato might also have
+found that the intuition of evil may be consistent with the abhorrence
+of it. There is a directness of aim in virtue which gives an insight
+into vice. And the knowledge of character is in some degree a natural
+sense independent of any special experience of good or evil.
+
+5. One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-Greek and
+also very different from anything which existed at all in his age of
+the world, is the transposition of ranks. In the Spartan state there had
+been enfranchisement of Helots and degradation of citizens under
+special circumstances. And in the ancient Greek aristocracies, merit
+was certainly recognized as one of the elements on which government was
+based. The founders of states were supposed to be their benefactors, who
+were raised by their great actions above the ordinary level of humanity;
+at a later period, the services of warriors and legislators were held to
+entitle them and their descendants to the privileges of citizenship and
+to the first rank in the state. And although the existence of an ideal
+aristocracy is slenderly proven from the remains of early Greek history,
+and we have a difficulty in ascribing such a character, however the idea
+may be defined, to any actual Hellenic state--or indeed to any state
+which has ever existed in the world--still the rule of the best was
+certainly the aspiration of philosophers, who probably accommodated a
+good deal their views of primitive history to their own notions of good
+government. Plato further insists on applying to the guardians of his
+state a series of tests by which all those who fell short of a fixed
+standard were either removed from the governing body, or not admitted
+to it; and this 'academic' discipline did to a certain extent prevail in
+Greek states, especially in Sparta. He also indicates that the system of
+caste, which existed in a great part of the ancient, and is by no means
+extinct in the modern European world, should be set aside from time
+to time in favour of merit. He is aware how deeply the greater part of
+mankind resent any interference with the order of society, and therefore
+he proposes his novel idea in the form of what he himself calls a
+'monstrous fiction.' (Compare the ceremony of preparation for the two
+'great waves' in Book v.) Two principles are indicated by him: first,
+that there is a distinction of ranks dependent on circumstances prior to
+the individual: second, that this distinction is and ought to be broken
+through by personal qualities. He adapts mythology like the Homeric
+poems to the wants of the state, making 'the Phoenician tale' the
+vehicle of his ideas. Every Greek state had a myth respecting its own
+origin; the Platonic republic may also have a tale of earthborn men. The
+gravity and verisimilitude with which the tale is told, and the analogy
+of Greek tradition, are a sufficient verification of the 'monstrous
+falsehood.' Ancient poetry had spoken of a gold and silver and brass and
+iron age succeeding one another, but Plato supposes these differences
+in the natures of men to exist together in a single state. Mythology
+supplies a figure under which the lesson may be taught (as Protagoras
+says, 'the myth is more interesting'), and also enables Plato to touch
+lightly on new principles without going into details. In this passage he
+shadows forth a general truth, but he does not tell us by what steps the
+transposition of ranks is to be effected. Indeed throughout the Republic
+he allows the lower ranks to fade into the distance. We do not know
+whether they are to carry arms, and whether in the fifth book they are
+or are not included in the communistic regulations respecting property
+and marriage. Nor is there any use in arguing strictly either from a
+few chance words, or from the silence of Plato, or in drawing inferences
+which were beyond his vision. Aristotle, in his criticism on the
+position of the lower classes, does not perceive that the poetical
+creation is 'like the air, invulnerable,' and cannot be penetrated by
+the shafts of his logic (Pol.).
+
+6. Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the highest degree
+fanciful and ideal, and which suggest to him many reflections, are to
+be found in the third book of the Republic: first, the great power of
+music, so much beyond any influence which is experienced by us in modern
+times, when the art or science has been far more developed, and has
+found the secret of harmony, as well as of melody; secondly, the
+indefinite and almost absolute control which the soul is supposed to
+exercise over the body.
+
+In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we may
+also observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to us, at the
+present day. With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt by a few only,
+there seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pythagorean reverence for
+numbers and numerical proportion to which Aristotle is a stranger.
+Intervals of sound and number are to him sacred things which have a law
+of their own, not dependent on the variations of sense. They rise above
+sense, and become a connecting link with the world of ideas. But it is
+evident that Plato is describing what to him appears to be also a fact.
+The power of a simple and characteristic melody on the impressible
+mind of the Greek is more than we can easily appreciate. The effect of
+national airs may bear some comparison with it. And, besides all this,
+there is a confusion between the harmony of musical notes and the
+harmony of soul and body, which is so potently inspired by them.
+
+The second paradox leads up to some curious and interesting
+questions--How far can the mind control the body? Is the relation
+between them one of mutual antagonism or of mutual harmony? Are they
+two or one, and is either of them the cause of the other? May we not at
+times drop the opposition between them, and the mode of describing them,
+which is so familiar to us, and yet hardly conveys any precise meaning,
+and try to view this composite creature, man, in a more simple manner?
+Must we not at any rate admit that there is in human nature a higher
+and a lower principle, divided by no distinct line, which at times
+break asunder and take up arms against one another? Or again, they are
+reconciled and move together, either unconsciously in the ordinary work
+of life, or consciously in the pursuit of some noble aim, to be attained
+not without an effort, and for which every thought and nerve are
+strained. And then the body becomes the good friend or ally, or servant
+or instrument of the mind. And the mind has often a wonderful and almost
+superhuman power of banishing disease and weakness and calling out a
+hidden strength. Reason and the desires, the intellect and the senses
+are brought into harmony and obedience so as to form a single human
+being. They are ever parting, ever meeting; and the identity or
+diversity of their tendencies or operations is for the most part
+unnoticed by us. When the mind touches the body through the appetites,
+we acknowledge the responsibility of the one to the other. There is a
+tendency in us which says 'Drink.' There is another which says, 'Do
+not drink; it is not good for you.' And we all of us know which is the
+rightful superior. We are also responsible for our health, although into
+this sphere there enter some elements of necessity which may be beyond
+our control. Still even in the management of health, care and thought,
+continued over many years, may make us almost free agents, if we do
+not exact too much of ourselves, and if we acknowledge that all human
+freedom is limited by the laws of nature and of mind.
+
+We are disappointed to find that Plato, in the general condemnation
+which he passes on the practice of medicine prevailing in his own day,
+depreciates the effects of diet. He would like to have diseases of a
+definite character and capable of receiving a definite treatment. He is
+afraid of invalidism interfering with the business of life. He does
+not recognize that time is the great healer both of mental and bodily
+disorders; and that remedies which are gradual and proceed little by
+little are safer than those which produce a sudden catastrophe. Neither
+does he see that there is no way in which the mind can more surely
+influence the body than by the control of eating and drinking; or any
+other action or occasion of human life on which the higher freedom of
+the will can be more simple or truly asserted.
+
+7. Lesser matters of style may be remarked.
+
+(1) The affected ignorance of music, which is Plato's way of expressing
+that he is passing lightly over the subject.
+
+(2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book, he
+proceeds with the construction of the State.
+
+(3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality, and then again
+as a work of imagination only; these are the arts by which he sustains
+the reader's interest.
+
+(4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire expulsion of the
+poets in Book X.
+
+(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the
+valetudinarian, the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides, the
+manner in which the image of the gold and silver citizens is taken
+up into the subject, and the argument from the practice of Asclepius,
+should not escape notice.
+
+BOOK IV. Adeimantus said: 'Suppose a person to argue, Socrates, that you
+make your citizens miserable, and this by their own free-will; they are
+the lords of the city, and yet instead of having, like other men, lands
+and houses and money of their own, they live as mercenaries and are
+always mounting guard.' You may add, I replied, that they receive no
+pay but only their food, and have no money to spend on a journey or a
+mistress. 'Well, and what answer do you give?' My answer is, that
+our guardians may or may not be the happiest of men,--I should not be
+surprised to find in the long-run that they were,--but this is not the
+aim of our constitution, which was designed for the good of the whole
+and not of any one part. If I went to a sculptor and blamed him for
+having painted the eye, which is the noblest feature of the face, not
+purple but black, he would reply: 'The eye must be an eye, and you
+should look at the statue as a whole.' 'Now I can well imagine a fool's
+paradise, in which everybody is eating and drinking, clothed in purple
+and fine linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their wheel at hand,
+that they may work a little when they please; and cobblers and all the
+other classes of a State lose their distinctive character. And a State
+may get on without cobblers; but when the guardians degenerate into boon
+companions, then the ruin is complete. Remember that we are not talking
+of peasants keeping holiday, but of a State in which every man is
+expected to do his own work. The happiness resides not in this or that
+class, but in the State as a whole. I have another remark to make:--A
+middle condition is best for artisans; they should have money enough to
+buy tools, and not enough to be independent of business. And will not
+the same condition be best for our citizens? If they are poor, they will
+be mean; if rich, luxurious and lazy; and in neither case contented.
+'But then how will our poor city be able to go to war against an enemy
+who has money?' There may be a difficulty in fighting against one enemy;
+against two there will be none. In the first place, the contest will be
+carried on by trained warriors against well-to-do citizens: and is not a
+regular athlete an easy match for two stout opponents at least? Suppose
+also, that before engaging we send ambassadors to one of the two cities,
+saying, 'Silver and gold we have not; do you help us and take our share
+of the spoil;'--who would fight against the lean, wiry dogs, when they
+might join with them in preying upon the fatted sheep? 'But if many
+states join their resources, shall we not be in danger?' I am amused
+to hear you use the word 'state' of any but our own State. They are
+'states,' but not 'a state'--many in one. For in every state there are
+two hostile nations, rich and poor, which you may set one against the
+other. But our State, while she remains true to her principles, will be
+in very deed the mightiest of Hellenic states.
+
+To the size of the state there is no limit but the necessity of unity;
+it must be neither too large nor too small to be one. This is a matter
+of secondary importance, like the principle of transposition which was
+intimated in the parable of the earthborn men. The meaning there implied
+was that every man should do that for which he was fitted, and be at
+one with himself, and then the whole city would be united. But all these
+things are secondary, if education, which is the great matter, be duly
+regarded. When the wheel has once been set in motion, the speed is
+always increasing; and each generation improves upon the preceding, both
+in physical and moral qualities. The care of the governors should be
+directed to preserve music and gymnastic from innovation; alter the
+songs of a country, Damon says, and you will soon end by altering its
+laws. The change appears innocent at first, and begins in play; but
+the evil soon becomes serious, working secretly upon the characters of
+individuals, then upon social and commercial relations, and lastly upon
+the institutions of a state; and there is ruin and confusion everywhere.
+But if education remains in the established form, there will be no
+danger. A restorative process will be always going on; the spirit of law
+and order will raise up what has fallen down. Nor will any regulations
+be needed for the lesser matters of life--rules of deportment or
+fashions of dress. Like invites like for good or for evil. Education
+will correct deficiencies and supply the power of self-government. Far
+be it from us to enter into the particulars of legislation; let the
+guardians take care of education, and education will take care of all
+other things.
+
+But without education they may patch and mend as they please; they will
+make no progress, any more than a patient who thinks to cure himself by
+some favourite remedy and will not give up his luxurious mode of living.
+If you tell such persons that they must first alter their habits, then
+they grow angry; they are charming people. 'Charming,--nay, the very
+reverse.' Evidently these gentlemen are not in your good graces, nor the
+state which is like them. And such states there are which first ordain
+under penalty of death that no one shall alter the constitution, and
+then suffer themselves to be flattered into and out of anything; and
+he who indulges them and fawns upon them, is their leader and saviour.
+'Yes, the men are as bad as the states.' But do you not admire their
+cleverness? 'Nay, some of them are stupid enough to believe what the
+people tell them.' And when all the world is telling a man that he is
+six feet high, and he has no measure, how can he believe anything
+else? But don't get into a passion: to see our statesmen trying their
+nostrums, and fancying that they can cut off at a blow the Hydra-like
+rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. Minute enactments are
+superfluous in good states, and are useless in bad ones.
+
+And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us; but to
+Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the greatest of all
+things--that is to say, religion. Only our ancestral deity sitting upon
+the centre and navel of the earth will be trusted by us if we have any
+sense, in an affair of such magnitude. No foreign god shall be supreme
+in our realms...
+
+Here, as Socrates would say, let us 'reflect on' (Greek) what has
+preceded: thus far we have spoken not of the happiness of the citizens,
+but only of the well-being of the State. They may be the happiest of
+men, but our principal aim in founding the State was not to make them
+happy. They were to be guardians, not holiday-makers. In this pleasant
+manner is presented to us the famous question both of ancient and modern
+philosophy, touching the relation of duty to happiness, of right to
+utility.
+
+First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas. The
+utilitarian principle is valuable as a corrective of error, and shows
+to us a side of ethics which is apt to be neglected. It may be admitted
+further that right and utility are co-extensive, and that he who makes
+the happiness of mankind his object has one of the highest and noblest
+motives of human action. But utility is not the historical basis of
+morality; nor the aspect in which moral and religious ideas commonly
+occur to the mind. The greatest happiness of all is, as we believe, the
+far-off result of the divine government of the universe. The greatest
+happiness of the individual is certainly to be found in a life of virtue
+and goodness. But we seem to be more assured of a law of right than we
+can be of a divine purpose, that 'all mankind should be saved;' and
+we infer the one from the other. And the greatest happiness of the
+individual may be the reverse of the greatest happiness in the ordinary
+sense of the term, and may be realised in a life of pain, or in a
+voluntary death. Further, the word 'happiness' has several ambiguities;
+it may mean either pleasure or an ideal life, happiness subjective or
+objective, in this world or in another, of ourselves only or of
+our neighbours and of all men everywhere. By the modern founder of
+Utilitarianism the self-regarding and disinterested motives of action
+are included under the same term, although they are commonly opposed
+by us as benevolence and self-love. The word happiness has not the
+definiteness or the sacredness of 'truth' and 'right'; it does
+not equally appeal to our higher nature, and has not sunk into the
+conscience of mankind. It is associated too much with the comforts and
+conveniences of life; too little with 'the goods of the soul which we
+desire for their own sake.' In a great trial, or danger, or temptation,
+or in any great and heroic action, it is scarcely thought of. For these
+reasons 'the greatest happiness' principle is not the true foundation of
+ethics. But though not the first principle, it is the second, which is
+like unto it, and is often of easier application. For the larger part of
+human actions are neither right nor wrong, except in so far as they tend
+to the happiness of mankind (Introd. to Gorgias and Philebus).
+
+The same question reappears in politics, where the useful or expedient
+seems to claim a larger sphere and to have a greater authority. For
+concerning political measures, we chiefly ask: How will they affect
+the happiness of mankind? Yet here too we may observe that what we term
+expediency is merely the law of right limited by the conditions of human
+society. Right and truth are the highest aims of government as well as
+of individuals; and we ought not to lose sight of them because we cannot
+directly enforce them. They appeal to the better mind of nations; and
+sometimes they are too much for merely temporal interests to resist.
+They are the watchwords which all men use in matters of public policy,
+as well as in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be said
+to depend upon them. In the most commercial and utilitarian states
+of society the power of ideas remains. And all the higher class of
+statesmen have in them something of that idealism which Pericles is said
+to have gathered from the teaching of Anaxagoras. They recognise that
+the true leader of men must be above the motives of ambition, and
+that national character is of greater value than material comfort and
+prosperity. And this is the order of thought in Plato; first, he expects
+his citizens to do their duty, and then under favourable circumstances,
+that is to say, in a well-ordered State, their happiness is assured.
+That he was far from excluding the modern principle of utility in
+politics is sufficiently evident from other passages; in which 'the most
+beneficial is affirmed to be the most honourable', and also 'the most
+sacred'.
+
+We may note
+
+(1) The manner in which the objection of Adeimantus here, is designed to
+draw out and deepen the argument of Socrates.
+
+(2) The conception of a whole as lying at the foundation both of
+politics and of art, in the latter supplying the only principle of
+criticism, which, under the various names of harmony, symmetry, measure,
+proportion, unity, the Greek seems to have applied to works of art.
+
+(3) The requirement that the State should be limited in size, after the
+traditional model of a Greek state; as in the Politics of Aristotle, the
+fact that the cities of Hellas were small is converted into a principle.
+
+(4) The humorous pictures of the lean dogs and the fatted sheep, of
+the light active boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen at least, of the
+'charming' patients who are always making themselves worse; or again,
+the playful assumption that there is no State but our own; or the grave
+irony with which the statesman is excused who believes that he is six
+feet high because he is told so, and having nothing to measure with
+is to be pardoned for his ignorance--he is too amusing for us to be
+seriously angry with him.
+
+(5) The light and superficial manner in which religion is passed over
+when provision has been made for two great principles,--first, that
+religion shall be based on the highest conception of the gods, secondly,
+that the true national or Hellenic type shall be maintained...
+
+Socrates proceeds: But where amid all this is justice? Son of Ariston,
+tell me where. Light a candle and search the city, and get your brother
+and the rest of our friends to help in seeking for her. 'That won't do,'
+replied Glaucon, 'you yourself promised to make the search and talked
+about the impiety of deserting justice.' Well, I said, I will lead the
+way, but do you follow. My notion is, that our State being perfect will
+contain all the four virtues--wisdom, courage, temperance, justice. If
+we eliminate the three first, the unknown remainder will be justice.
+
+First then, of wisdom: the State which we have called into being will be
+wise because politic. And policy is one among many kinds of skill,--not
+the skill of the carpenter, or of the worker in metal, or of the
+husbandman, but the skill of him who advises about the interests of the
+whole State. Of such a kind is the skill of the guardians, who are a
+small class in number, far smaller than the blacksmiths; but in them
+is concentrated the wisdom of the State. And if this small ruling class
+have wisdom, then the whole State will be wise.
+
+Our second virtue is courage, which we have no difficulty in finding
+in another class--that of soldiers. Courage may be defined as a sort
+of salvation--the never-failing salvation of the opinions which law and
+education have prescribed concerning dangers. You know the way in which
+dyers first prepare the white ground and then lay on the dye of purple
+or of any other colour. Colours dyed in this way become fixed, and no
+soap or lye will ever wash them out. Now the ground is education, and
+the laws are the colours; and if the ground is properly laid, neither
+the soap of pleasure nor the lye of pain or fear will ever wash them
+out. This power which preserves right opinion about danger I would ask
+you to call 'courage,' adding the epithet 'political' or 'civilized'
+in order to distinguish it from mere animal courage and from a higher
+courage which may hereafter be discussed.
+
+Two virtues remain; temperance and justice. More than the preceding
+virtues temperance suggests the idea of harmony. Some light is thrown
+upon the nature of this virtue by the popular description of a man as
+'master of himself'--which has an absurd sound, because the master is
+also the servant. The expression really means that the better principle
+in a man masters the worse. There are in cities whole classes--women,
+slaves and the like--who correspond to the worse, and a few only to the
+better; and in our State the former class are held under control by the
+latter. Now to which of these classes does temperance belong? 'To both
+of them.' And our State if any will be the abode of temperance; and
+we were right in describing this virtue as a harmony which is diffused
+through the whole, making the dwellers in the city to be of one mind,
+and attuning the upper and middle and lower classes like the strings of
+an instrument, whether you suppose them to differ in wisdom, strength or
+wealth.
+
+And now we are near the spot; let us draw in and surround the cover and
+watch with all our eyes, lest justice should slip away and escape. Tell
+me, if you see the thicket move first. 'Nay, I would have you lead.'
+Well then, offer up a prayer and follow. The way is dark and difficult;
+but we must push on. I begin to see a track. 'Good news.' Why, Glaucon,
+our dulness of scent is quite ludicrous! While we are straining our eyes
+into the distance, justice is tumbling out at our feet. We are as bad
+as people looking for a thing which they have in their hands. Have you
+forgotten our old principle of the division of labour, or of every man
+doing his own business, concerning which we spoke at the foundation
+of the State--what but this was justice? Is there any other virtue
+remaining which can compete with wisdom and temperance and courage in
+the scale of political virtue? For 'every one having his own' is the
+great object of government; and the great object of trade is that
+every man should do his own business. Not that there is much harm in a
+carpenter trying to be a cobbler, or a cobbler transforming himself into
+a carpenter; but great evil may arise from the cobbler leaving his last
+and turning into a guardian or legislator, or when a single individual
+is trainer, warrior, legislator, all in one. And this evil is injustice,
+or every man doing another's business. I do not say that as yet we are
+in a condition to arrive at a final conclusion. For the definition
+which we believe to hold good in states has still to be tested by the
+individual. Having read the large letters we will now come back to the
+small. From the two together a brilliant light may be struck out...
+
+Socrates proceeds to discover the nature of justice by a method of
+residues. Each of the first three virtues corresponds to one of the
+three parts of the soul and one of the three classes in the State,
+although the third, temperance, has more of the nature of a harmony than
+the first two. If there be a fourth virtue, that can only be sought for
+in the relation of the three parts in the soul or classes in the State
+to one another. It is obvious and simple, and for that very reason has
+not been found out. The modern logician will be inclined to object that
+ideas cannot be separated like chemical substances, but that they run
+into one another and may be only different aspects or names of the
+same thing, and such in this instance appears to be the case. For the
+definition here given of justice is verbally the same as one of the
+definitions of temperance given by Socrates in the Charmides, which
+however is only provisional, and is afterwards rejected. And so far
+from justice remaining over when the other virtues are eliminated,
+the justice and temperance of the Republic can with difficulty be
+distinguished. Temperance appears to be the virtue of a part only, and
+one of three, whereas justice is a universal virtue of the whole soul.
+Yet on the other hand temperance is also described as a sort of harmony,
+and in this respect is akin to justice. Justice seems to differ from
+temperance in degree rather than in kind; whereas temperance is the
+harmony of discordant elements, justice is the perfect order by which
+all natures and classes do their own business, the right man in the
+right place, the division and co-operation of all the citizens. Justice,
+again, is a more abstract notion than the other virtues, and therefore,
+from Plato's point of view, the foundation of them, to which they
+are referred and which in idea precedes them. The proposal to omit
+temperance is a mere trick of style intended to avoid monotony.
+
+There is a famous question discussed in one of the earlier Dialogues of
+Plato (Protagoras; Arist. Nic. Ethics), 'Whether the virtues are one
+or many?' This receives an answer which is to the effect that there
+are four cardinal virtues (now for the first time brought together in
+ethical philosophy), and one supreme over the rest, which is not like
+Aristotle's conception of universal justice, virtue relative to others,
+but the whole of virtue relative to the parts. To this universal
+conception of justice or order in the first education and in the moral
+nature of man, the still more universal conception of the good in the
+second education and in the sphere of speculative knowledge seems to
+succeed. Both might be equally described by the terms 'law,' 'order,'
+'harmony;' but while the idea of good embraces 'all time and all
+existence,' the conception of justice is not extended beyond man.
+
+...Socrates is now going to identify the individual and the State. But
+first he must prove that there are three parts of the individual soul.
+His argument is as follows:--Quantity makes no difference in quality.
+The word 'just,' whether applied to the individual or to the State, has
+the same meaning. And the term 'justice' implied that the same three
+principles in the State and in the individual were doing their own
+business. But are they really three or one? The question is difficult,
+and one which can hardly be solved by the methods which we are now
+using; but the truer and longer way would take up too much of our time.
+'The shorter will satisfy me.' Well then, you would admit that the
+qualities of states mean the qualities of the individuals who compose
+them? The Scythians and Thracians are passionate, our own race
+intellectual, and the Egyptians and Phoenicians covetous, because
+the individual members of each have such and such a character; the
+difficulty is to determine whether the several principles are one or
+three; whether, that is to say, we reason with one part of our nature,
+desire with another, are angry with another, or whether the whole soul
+comes into play in each sort of action. This enquiry, however, requires
+a very exact definition of terms. The same thing in the same relation
+cannot be affected in two opposite ways. But there is no impossibility
+in a man standing still, yet moving his arms, or in a top which is fixed
+on one spot going round upon its axis. There is no necessity to mention
+all the possible exceptions; let us provisionally assume that opposites
+cannot do or be or suffer opposites in the same relation. And to the
+class of opposites belong assent and dissent, desire and avoidance.
+And one form of desire is thirst and hunger: and here arises a new
+point--thirst is thirst of drink, hunger is hunger of food; not of warm
+drink or of a particular kind of food, with the single exception of
+course that the very fact of our desiring anything implies that it is
+good. When relative terms have no attributes, their correlatives have
+no attributes; when they have attributes, their correlatives also have
+them. For example, the term 'greater' is simply relative to 'less,' and
+knowledge refers to a subject of knowledge. But on the other hand, a
+particular knowledge is of a particular subject. Again, every science
+has a distinct character, which is defined by an object; medicine, for
+example, is the science of health, although not to be confounded with
+health. Having cleared our ideas thus far, let us return to the original
+instance of thirst, which has a definite object--drink. Now the thirsty
+soul may feel two distinct impulses; the animal one saying 'Drink;'
+the rational one, which says 'Do not drink.' The two impulses are
+contradictory; and therefore we may assume that they spring from
+distinct principles in the soul. But is passion a third principle, or
+akin to desire? There is a story of a certain Leontius which throws some
+light on this question. He was coming up from the Piraeus outside the
+north wall, and he passed a spot where there were dead bodies lying
+by the executioner. He felt a longing desire to see them and also an
+abhorrence of them; at first he turned away and shut his eyes, then,
+suddenly tearing them open, he said,--'Take your fill, ye wretches, of
+the fair sight.' Now is there not here a third principle which is often
+found to come to the assistance of reason against desire, but never
+of desire against reason? This is passion or spirit, of the separate
+existence of which we may further convince ourselves by putting the
+following case:--When a man suffers justly, if he be of a generous
+nature he is not indignant at the hardships which he undergoes: but when
+he suffers unjustly, his indignation is his great support; hunger and
+thirst cannot tame him; the spirit within him must do or die, until the
+voice of the shepherd, that is, of reason, bidding his dog bark no
+more, is heard within. This shows that passion is the ally of reason. Is
+passion then the same with reason? No, for the former exists in children
+and brutes; and Homer affords a proof of the distinction between them
+when he says, 'He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul.'
+
+And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able to infer
+that the virtues of the State and of the individual are the same. For
+wisdom and courage and justice in the State are severally the wisdom and
+courage and justice in the individuals who form the State. Each of the
+three classes will do the work of its own class in the State, and each
+part in the individual soul; reason, the superior, and passion, the
+inferior, will be harmonized by the influence of music and gymnastic.
+The counsellor and the warrior, the head and the arm, will act together
+in the town of Mansoul, and keep the desires in proper subjection. The
+courage of the warrior is that quality which preserves a right opinion
+about dangers in spite of pleasures and pains. The wisdom of the
+counsellor is that small part of the soul which has authority and
+reason. The virtue of temperance is the friendship of the ruling and the
+subject principles, both in the State and in the individual. Of justice
+we have already spoken; and the notion already given of it may
+be confirmed by common instances. Will the just state or the just
+individual steal, lie, commit adultery, or be guilty of impiety to
+gods and men? 'No.' And is not the reason of this that the several
+principles, whether in the state or in the individual, do their own
+business? And justice is the quality which makes just men and just
+states. Moreover, our old division of labour, which required that there
+should be one man for one use, was a dream or anticipation of what was
+to follow; and that dream has now been realized in justice, which
+begins by binding together the three chords of the soul, and then acts
+harmoniously in every relation of life. And injustice, which is the
+insubordination and disobedience of the inferior elements in the soul,
+is the opposite of justice, and is inharmonious and unnatural, being to
+the soul what disease is to the body; for in the soul as well as in the
+body, good or bad actions produce good or bad habits. And virtue is the
+health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease
+and weakness and deformity of the soul.
+
+Again the old question returns upon us: Is justice or injustice the
+more profitable? The question has become ridiculous. For injustice, like
+mortal disease, makes life not worth having. Come up with me to the hill
+which overhangs the city and look down upon the single form of virtue,
+and the infinite forms of vice, among which are four special ones,
+characteristic both of states and of individuals. And the state which
+corresponds to the single form of virtue is that which we have been
+describing, wherein reason rules under one of two names--monarchy and
+aristocracy. Thus there are five forms in all, both of states and of
+souls...
+
+In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate faculties, Plato
+takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of faculties. And
+the criterion which he proposes is difference in the working of the
+faculties. The same faculty cannot produce contradictory effects. But
+the path of early reasoners is beset by thorny entanglements, and he
+will not proceed a step without first clearing the ground. This leads
+him into a tiresome digression, which is intended to explain the nature
+of contradiction. First, the contradiction must be at the same time and
+in the same relation. Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced
+into either of the terms in which the contradictory proposition is
+expressed: for example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink. He
+implies, what he does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or by
+the impulse of anger, a man is restrained from drinking, this proves
+that thirst, or desire under which thirst is included, is distinct
+from anger and reason. But suppose that we allow the term 'thirst' or
+'desire' to be modified, and say an 'angry thirst,' or a 'revengeful
+desire,' then the two spheres of desire and anger overlap and become
+confused. This case therefore has to be excluded. And still there
+remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term 'good,' which is
+always implied in the object of desire. These are the discussions of
+an age before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should remember
+that they are necessary to the clearing up of ideas in the first
+development of the human faculties.
+
+The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of the soul
+into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as far
+as we know, was first made by him, and has been retained by Aristotle
+and succeeding ethical writers. The chief difficulty in this early
+analysis of the mind is to define exactly the place of the irascible
+faculty (Greek), which may be variously described under the terms
+righteous indignation, spirit, passion. It is the foundation of courage,
+which includes in Plato moral courage, the courage of enduring pain, and
+of surmounting intellectual difficulties, as well as of meeting dangers
+in war. Though irrational, it inclines to side with the rational: it
+cannot be aroused by punishment when justly inflicted: it sometimes
+takes the form of an enthusiasm which sustains a man in the performance
+of great actions. It is the 'lion heart' with which the reason makes
+a treaty. On the other hand it is negative rather than positive; it
+is indignant at wrong or falsehood, but does not, like Love in the
+Symposium and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth or Good. It is the
+peremptory military spirit which prevails in the government of honour.
+It differs from anger (Greek), this latter term having no accessory
+notion of righteous indignation. Although Aristotle has retained the
+word, yet we may observe that 'passion' (Greek) has with him lost its
+affinity to the rational and has become indistinguishable from 'anger'
+(Greek). And to this vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws seems to
+revert, though not always. By modern philosophy too, as well as in our
+ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion are employed almost
+exclusively in a bad sense; there is no connotation of a just or
+reasonable cause by which they are aroused. The feeling of 'righteous
+indignation' is too partial and accidental to admit of our regarding
+it as a separate virtue or habit. We are tempted also to doubt whether
+Plato is right in supposing that an offender, however justly condemned,
+could be expected to acknowledge the justice of his sentence; this is
+the spirit of a philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal.
+
+We may observe how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle's famous thesis,
+that 'good actions produce good habits.' The words 'as healthy practices
+(Greek) produce health, so do just practices produce justice,' have
+a sound very like the Nicomachean Ethics. But we note also that an
+incidental remark in Plato has become a far-reaching principle in
+Aristotle, and an inseparable part of a great Ethical system.
+
+There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by 'the longer
+way': he seems to intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not
+be satisfied with arguing from the principle of contradiction. In the
+sixth and seventh books (compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given
+us a sketch of such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final
+revelation of the idea of good, he is put off with the declaration
+that he has not yet studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have
+filled up the sketch, or argued about such questions from a higher point
+of view, we can only conjecture. Perhaps he hoped to find some a priori
+method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he might have asked
+which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and possibly have stumbled
+on the Hegelian identity of the 'ego' and the 'universal.' Or he may
+have imagined that ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous
+to the construction of figures and numbers in the mathematical sciences.
+The most certain and necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to
+this he was always seeking to refer all knowledge or opinion, just as in
+modern times we seek to rest them on the opposite pole of induction and
+experience. The aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended to
+pass beyond the limits of human thought and language: they seem to have
+reached a height at which they are 'moving about in worlds unrealized,'
+and their conceptions, although profoundly affecting their own minds,
+become invisible or unintelligible to others. We are not therefore
+surprized to find that Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained his
+doctrine of ideas; or that his school in a later generation, like his
+contemporaries Glaucon and Adeimantus, were unable to follow him in
+this region of speculation. In the Sophist, where he is refuting the
+scepticism which maintained either that there was no such thing as
+predication, or that all might be predicated of all, he arrives at the
+conclusion that some ideas combine with some, but not all with all. But
+he makes only one or two steps forward on this path; he nowhere attains
+to any connected system of ideas, or even to a knowledge of the most
+elementary relations of the sciences to one another.
+
+BOOK V. I was going to enumerate the four forms of vice or decline in
+states, when Polemarchus--he was sitting a little farther from me
+than Adeimantus--taking him by the coat and leaning towards him, said
+something in an undertone, of which I only caught the words, 'Shall we
+let him off?' 'Certainly not,' said Adeimantus, raising his voice. Whom,
+I said, are you not going to let off? 'You,' he said. Why? 'Because
+we think that you are not dealing fairly with us in omitting women and
+children, of whom you have slily disposed under the general formula
+that friends have all things in common.' And was I not right? 'Yes,'
+he replied, 'but there are many sorts of communism or community, and
+we want to know which of them is right. The company, as you have just
+heard, are resolved to have a further explanation.' Thrasymachus said,
+'Do you think that we have come hither to dig for gold, or to hear you
+discourse?' Yes, I said; but the discourse should be of a reasonable
+length. Glaucon added, 'Yes, Socrates, and there is reason in spending
+the whole of life in such discussions; but pray, without more ado, tell
+us how this community is to be carried out, and how the interval between
+birth and education is to be filled up.' Well, I said, the subject has
+several difficulties--What is possible? is the first question. What is
+desirable? is the second. 'Fear not,' he replied, 'for you are speaking
+among friends.' That, I replied, is a sorry consolation; I shall
+destroy my friends as well as myself. Not that I mind a little innocent
+laughter; but he who kills the truth is a murderer. 'Then,' said
+Glaucon, laughing, 'in case you should murder us we will acquit you
+beforehand, and you shall be held free from the guilt of deceiving us.'
+
+Socrates proceeds:--The guardians of our state are to be watch-dogs, as
+we have already said. Now dogs are not divided into hes and shes--we do
+not take the masculine gender out to hunt and leave the females at home
+to look after their puppies. They have the same employments--the only
+difference between them is that the one sex is stronger and the other
+weaker. But if women are to have the same employments as men, they must
+have the same education--they must be taught music and gymnastics, and
+the art of war. I know that a great joke will be made of their riding
+on horseback and carrying weapons; the sight of the naked old wrinkled
+women showing their agility in the palaestra will certainly not be a
+vision of beauty, and may be expected to become a famous jest. But we
+must not mind the wits; there was a time when they might have laughed at
+our present gymnastics. All is habit: people have at last found out that
+the exposure is better than the concealment of the person, and now they
+laugh no more. Evil only should be the subject of ridicule.
+
+The first question is, whether women are able either wholly or partially
+to share in the employments of men. And here we may be charged with
+inconsistency in making the proposal at all. For we started originally
+with the division of labour; and the diversity of employments was based
+on the difference of natures. But is there no difference between men
+and women? Nay, are they not wholly different? THERE was the difficulty,
+Glaucon, which made me unwilling to speak of family relations. However,
+when a man is out of his depth, whether in a pool or in an ocean, he can
+only swim for his life; and we must try to find a way of escape, if we
+can.
+
+The argument is, that different natures have different uses, and the
+natures of men and women are said to differ. But this is only a verbal
+opposition. We do not consider that the difference may be purely nominal
+and accidental; for example, a bald man and a hairy man are opposed in a
+single point of view, but you cannot infer that because a bald man is
+a cobbler a hairy man ought not to be a cobbler. Now why is such an
+inference erroneous? Simply because the opposition between them is
+partial only, like the difference between a male physician and a female
+physician, not running through the whole nature, like the difference
+between a physician and a carpenter. And if the difference of the sexes
+is only that the one beget and the other bear children, this does not
+prove that they ought to have distinct educations. Admitting that women
+differ from men in capacity, do not men equally differ from one another?
+Has not nature scattered all the qualities which our citizens require
+indifferently up and down among the two sexes? and even in their
+peculiar pursuits, are not women often, though in some cases superior to
+men, ridiculously enough surpassed by them? Women are the same in kind
+as men, and have the same aptitude or want of aptitude for medicine
+or gymnastic or war, but in a less degree. One woman will be a good
+guardian, another not; and the good must be chosen to be the colleagues
+of our guardians. If however their natures are the same, the inference
+is that their education must also be the same; there is no longer
+anything unnatural or impossible in a woman learning music and
+gymnastic. And the education which we give them will be the very best,
+far superior to that of cobblers, and will train up the very best women,
+and nothing can be more advantageous to the State than this. Therefore
+let them strip, clothed in their chastity, and share in the toils of war
+and in the defence of their country; he who laughs at them is a fool for
+his pains.
+
+The first wave is past, and the argument is compelled to admit that men
+and women have common duties and pursuits. A second and greater wave is
+rolling in--community of wives and children; is this either expedient
+or possible? The expediency I do not doubt; I am not so sure of the
+possibility. 'Nay, I think that a considerable doubt will be entertained
+on both points.' I meant to have escaped the trouble of proving the
+first, but as you have detected the little stratagem I must even submit.
+Only allow me to feed my fancy like the solitary in his walks, with a
+dream of what might be, and then I will return to the question of what
+can be.
+
+In the first place our rulers will enforce the laws and make new ones
+where they are wanted, and their allies or ministers will obey. You, as
+legislator, have already selected the men; and now you shall select
+the women. After the selection has been made, they will dwell in common
+houses and have their meals in common, and will be brought together by
+a necessity more certain than that of mathematics. But they cannot be
+allowed to live in licentiousness; that is an unholy thing, which
+the rulers are determined to prevent. For the avoidance of this, holy
+marriage festivals will be instituted, and their holiness will be in
+proportion to their usefulness. And here, Glaucon, I should like to ask
+(as I know that you are a breeder of birds and animals), Do you not take
+the greatest care in the mating? 'Certainly.' And there is no reason to
+suppose that less care is required in the marriage of human beings. But
+then our rulers must be skilful physicians of the State, for they will
+often need a strong dose of falsehood in order to bring about desirable
+unions between their subjects. The good must be paired with the good,
+and the bad with the bad, and the offspring of the one must be reared,
+and of the other destroyed; in this way the flock will be preserved in
+prime condition. Hymeneal festivals will be celebrated at times fixed
+with an eye to population, and the brides and bridegrooms will meet at
+them; and by an ingenious system of lots the rulers will contrive that
+the brave and the fair come together, and that those of inferior breed
+are paired with inferiors--the latter will ascribe to chance what is
+really the invention of the rulers. And when children are born, the
+offspring of the brave and fair will be carried to an enclosure in a
+certain part of the city, and there attended by suitable nurses; the
+rest will be hurried away to places unknown. The mothers will be brought
+to the fold and will suckle the children; care however must be taken
+that none of them recognise their own offspring; and if necessary other
+nurses may also be hired. The trouble of watching and getting up
+at night will be transferred to attendants. 'Then the wives of our
+guardians will have a fine easy time when they are having children.' And
+quite right too, I said, that they should.
+
+The parents ought to be in the prime of life, which for a man may be
+reckoned at thirty years--from twenty-five, when he has 'passed the
+point at which the speed of life is greatest,' to fifty-five; and at
+twenty years for a woman--from twenty to forty. Any one above or below
+those ages who partakes in the hymeneals shall be guilty of impiety;
+also every one who forms a marriage connexion at other times without the
+consent of the rulers. This latter regulation applies to those who are
+within the specified ages, after which they may range at will, provided
+they avoid the prohibited degrees of parents and children, or
+of brothers and sisters, which last, however, are not absolutely
+prohibited, if a dispensation be procured. 'But how shall we know the
+degrees of affinity, when all things are common?' The answer is, that
+brothers and sisters are all such as are born seven or nine months after
+the espousals, and their parents those who are then espoused, and every
+one will have many children and every child many parents.
+
+Socrates proceeds: I have now to prove that this scheme is advantageous
+and also consistent with our entire polity. The greatest good of a State
+is unity; the greatest evil, discord and distraction. And there will be
+unity where there are no private pleasures or pains or interests--where
+if one member suffers all the members suffer, if one citizen is touched
+all are quickly sensitive; and the least hurt to the little finger of
+the State runs through the whole body and vibrates to the soul. For the
+true State, like an individual, is injured as a whole when any part is
+affected. Every State has subjects and rulers, who in a democracy are
+called rulers, and in other States masters: but in our State they are
+called saviours and allies; and the subjects who in other States are
+termed slaves, are by us termed nurturers and paymasters, and those who
+are termed comrades and colleagues in other places, are by us called
+fathers and brothers. And whereas in other States members of the same
+government regard one of their colleagues as a friend and another as an
+enemy, in our State no man is a stranger to another; for every citizen
+is connected with every other by ties of blood, and these names and
+this way of speaking will have a corresponding reality--brother, father,
+sister, mother, repeated from infancy in the ears of children, will not
+be mere words. Then again the citizens will have all things in common,
+in having common property they will have common pleasures and pains.
+
+Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one mind; or
+lawsuits about property when men have nothing but their bodies which
+they call their own; or suits about violence when every one is bound
+to defend himself? The permission to strike when insulted will be an
+'antidote' to the knife and will prevent disturbances in the State. But
+no younger man will strike an elder; reverence will prevent him from
+laying hands on his kindred, and he will fear that the rest of the
+family may retaliate. Moreover, our citizens will be rid of the
+lesser evils of life; there will be no flattery of the rich, no sordid
+household cares, no borrowing and not paying. Compared with the
+citizens of other States, ours will be Olympic victors, and crowned
+with blessings greater still--they and their children having a better
+maintenance during life, and after death an honourable burial. Nor has
+the happiness of the individual been sacrificed to the happiness of the
+State; our Olympic victor has not been turned into a cobbler, but he
+has a happiness beyond that of any cobbler. At the same time, if any
+conceited youth begins to dream of appropriating the State to himself,
+he must be reminded that 'half is better than the whole.' 'I should
+certainly advise him to stay where he is when he has the promise of such
+a brave life.'
+
+But is such a community possible?--as among the animals, so also among
+men; and if possible, in what way possible? About war there is no
+difficulty; the principle of communism is adapted to military service.
+Parents will take their children to look on at a battle, just as
+potters' boys are trained to the business by looking on at the wheel.
+And to the parents themselves, as to other animals, the sight of their
+young ones will prove a great incentive to bravery. Young warriors must
+learn, but they must not run into danger, although a certain degree of
+risk is worth incurring when the benefit is great. The young creatures
+should be placed under the care of experienced veterans, and they should
+have wings--that is to say, swift and tractable steeds on which they may
+fly away and escape. One of the first things to be done is to teach a
+youth to ride.
+
+Cowards and deserters shall be degraded to the class of husbandmen;
+gentlemen who allow themselves to be taken prisoners, may be presented
+to the enemy. But what shall be done to the hero? First of all he shall
+be crowned by all the youths in the army; secondly, he shall receive the
+right hand of fellowship; and thirdly, do you think that there is any
+harm in his being kissed? We have already determined that he shall have
+more wives than others, in order that he may have as many children
+as possible. And at a feast he shall have more to eat; we have the
+authority of Homer for honouring brave men with 'long chines,' which is
+an appropriate compliment, because meat is a very strengthening thing.
+Fill the bowl then, and give the best seats and meats to the brave--may
+they do them good! And he who dies in battle will be at once declared to
+be of the golden race, and will, as we believe, become one of Hesiod's
+guardian angels. He shall be worshipped after death in the manner
+prescribed by the oracle; and not only he, but all other benefactors
+of the State who die in any other way, shall be admitted to the same
+honours.
+
+The next question is, How shall we treat our enemies? Shall Hellenes be
+enslaved? No; for there is too great a risk of the whole race passing
+under the yoke of the barbarians. Or shall the dead be despoiled?
+Certainly not; for that sort of thing is an excuse for skulking, and has
+been the ruin of many an army. There is meanness and feminine malice in
+making an enemy of the dead body, when the soul which was the owner has
+fled--like a dog who cannot reach his assailants, and quarrels with
+the stones which are thrown at him instead. Again, the arms of Hellenes
+should not be offered up in the temples of the Gods; they are a
+pollution, for they are taken from brethren. And on similar grounds
+there should be a limit to the devastation of Hellenic territory--the
+houses should not be burnt, nor more than the annual produce carried
+off. For war is of two kinds, civil and foreign; the first of which is
+properly termed 'discord,' and only the second 'war;' and war between
+Hellenes is in reality civil war--a quarrel in a family, which is ever
+to be regarded as unpatriotic and unnatural, and ought to be prosecuted
+with a view to reconciliation in a true phil-Hellenic spirit, as of
+those who would chasten but not utterly enslave. The war is not against
+a whole nation who are a friendly multitude of men, women, and children,
+but only against a few guilty persons; when they are punished peace will
+be restored. That is the way in which Hellenes should war against one
+another--and against barbarians, as they war against one another now.
+
+'But, my dear Socrates, you are forgetting the main question: Is such a
+State possible? I grant all and more than you say about the blessedness
+of being one family--fathers, brothers, mothers, daughters, going out
+to war together; but I want to ascertain the possibility of this ideal
+State.' You are too unmerciful. The first wave and the second wave I
+have hardly escaped, and now you will certainly drown me with the third.
+When you see the towering crest of the wave, I expect you to take pity.
+'Not a whit.'
+
+Well, then, we were led to form our ideal polity in the search after
+justice, and the just man answered to the just State. Is this ideal at
+all the worse for being impracticable? Would the picture of a perfectly
+beautiful man be any the worse because no such man ever lived? Can any
+reality come up to the idea? Nature will not allow words to be fully
+realized; but if I am to try and realize the ideal of the State in a
+measure, I think that an approach may be made to the perfection of which
+I dream by one or two, I do not say slight, but possible changes in the
+present constitution of States. I would reduce them to a single one--the
+great wave, as I call it. Until, then, kings are philosophers, or
+philosophers are kings, cities will never cease from ill: no, nor the
+human race; nor will our ideal polity ever come into being. I know that
+this is a hard saying, which few will be able to receive. 'Socrates,
+all the world will take off his coat and rush upon you with sticks and
+stones, and therefore I would advise you to prepare an answer.' You got
+me into the scrape, I said. 'And I was right,' he replied; 'however, I
+will stand by you as a sort of do-nothing, well-meaning ally.' Having
+the help of such a champion, I will do my best to maintain my position.
+And first, I must explain of whom I speak and what sort of natures these
+are who are to be philosophers and rulers. As you are a man of pleasure,
+you will not have forgotten how indiscriminate lovers are in their
+attachments; they love all, and turn blemishes into beauties. The
+snub-nosed youth is said to have a winning grace; the beak of another
+has a royal look; the featureless are faultless; the dark are manly, the
+fair angels; the sickly have a new term of endearment invented expressly
+for them, which is 'honey-pale.' Lovers of wine and lovers of ambition
+also desire the objects of their affection in every form. Now here comes
+the point:--The philosopher too is a lover of knowledge in every form;
+he has an insatiable curiosity. 'But will curiosity make a philosopher?
+Are the lovers of sights and sounds, who let out their ears to every
+chorus at the Dionysiac festivals, to be called philosophers?' They
+are not true philosophers, but only an imitation. 'Then how are we to
+describe the true?'
+
+You would acknowledge the existence of abstract ideas, such as justice,
+beauty, good, evil, which are severally one, yet in their various
+combinations appear to be many. Those who recognize these realities are
+philosophers; whereas the other class hear sounds and see colours,
+and understand their use in the arts, but cannot attain to the true or
+waking vision of absolute justice or beauty or truth; they have not the
+light of knowledge, but of opinion, and what they see is a dream only.
+Perhaps he of whom we say the last will be angry with us; can we pacify
+him without revealing the disorder of his mind? Suppose we say that,
+if he has knowledge we rejoice to hear it, but knowledge must be of
+something which is, as ignorance is of something which is not; and there
+is a third thing, which both is and is not, and is matter of opinion
+only. Opinion and knowledge, then, having distinct objects, must also
+be distinct faculties. And by faculties I mean powers unseen and
+distinguishable only by the difference in their objects, as opinion
+and knowledge differ, since the one is liable to err, but the other
+is unerring and is the mightiest of all our faculties. If being is
+the object of knowledge, and not-being of ignorance, and these are the
+extremes, opinion must lie between them, and may be called darker than
+the one and brighter than the other. This intermediate or contingent
+matter is and is not at the same time, and partakes both of existence
+and of non-existence. Now I would ask my good friend, who denies
+abstract beauty and justice, and affirms a many beautiful and a
+many just, whether everything he sees is not in some point of view
+different--the beautiful ugly, the pious impious, the just unjust? Is
+not the double also the half, and are not heavy and light relative terms
+which pass into one another? Everything is and is not, as in the old
+riddle--'A man and not a man shot and did not shoot a bird and not a
+bird with a stone and not a stone.' The mind cannot be fixed on either
+alternative; and these ambiguous, intermediate, erring, half-lighted
+objects, which have a disorderly movement in the region between being
+and not-being, are the proper matter of opinion, as the immutable
+objects are the proper matter of knowledge. And he who grovels in the
+world of sense, and has only this uncertain perception of things, is not
+a philosopher, but a lover of opinion only...
+
+The fifth book is the new beginning of the Republic, in which the
+community of property and of family are first maintained, and the
+transition is made to the kingdom of philosophers. For both of these
+Plato, after his manner, has been preparing in some chance words of Book
+IV, which fall unperceived on the reader's mind, as they are supposed
+at first to have fallen on the ear of Glaucon and Adeimantus. The
+'paradoxes,' as Morgenstern terms them, of this book of the Republic
+will be reserved for another place; a few remarks on the style, and some
+explanations of difficulties, may be briefly added.
+
+First, there is the image of the waves, which serves for a sort of
+scheme or plan of the book. The first wave, the second wave, the third
+and greatest wave come rolling in, and we hear the roar of them. All
+that can be said of the extravagance of Plato's proposals is anticipated
+by himself. Nothing is more admirable than the hesitation with which he
+proposes the solemn text, 'Until kings are philosophers,' etc.; or the
+reaction from the sublime to the ridiculous, when Glaucon describes the
+manner in which the new truth will be received by mankind.
+
+Some defects and difficulties may be noted in the execution of the
+communistic plan. Nothing is told us of the application of communism
+to the lower classes; nor is the table of prohibited degrees capable of
+being made out. It is quite possible that a child born at one hymeneal
+festival may marry one of its own brothers or sisters, or even one of
+its parents, at another. Plato is afraid of incestuous unions, but at
+the same time he does not wish to bring before us the fact that the city
+would be divided into families of those born seven and nine months after
+each hymeneal festival. If it were worth while to argue seriously about
+such fancies, we might remark that while all the old affinities are
+abolished, the newly prohibited affinity rests not on any natural or
+rational principle, but only upon the accident of children having been
+born in the same month and year. Nor does he explain how the lots could
+be so manipulated by the legislature as to bring together the fairest
+and best. The singular expression which is employed to describe the age
+of five-and-twenty may perhaps be taken from some poet.
+
+In the delineation of the philosopher, the illustrations of the nature
+of philosophy derived from love are more suited to the apprehension
+of Glaucon, the Athenian man of pleasure, than to modern tastes or
+feelings. They are partly facetious, but also contain a germ of truth.
+That science is a whole, remains a true principle of inductive as well
+as of metaphysical philosophy; and the love of universal knowledge is
+still the characteristic of the philosopher in modern as well as in
+ancient times.
+
+At the end of the fifth book Plato introduces the figment of contingent
+matter, which has exercised so great an influence both on the Ethics and
+Theology of the modern world, and which occurs here for the first time
+in the history of philosophy. He did not remark that the degrees of
+knowledge in the subject have nothing corresponding to them in the
+object. With him a word must answer to an idea; and he could not
+conceive of an opinion which was an opinion about nothing. The influence
+of analogy led him to invent 'parallels and conjugates' and to overlook
+facts. To us some of his difficulties are puzzling only from their
+simplicity: we do not perceive that the answer to them 'is tumbling out
+at our feet.' To the mind of early thinkers, the conception of not-being
+was dark and mysterious; they did not see that this terrible apparition
+which threatened destruction to all knowledge was only a logical
+determination. The common term under which, through the accidental use
+of language, two entirely different ideas were included was another
+source of confusion. Thus through the ambiguity of (Greek) Plato,
+attempting to introduce order into the first chaos of human thought,
+seems to have confused perception and opinion, and to have failed to
+distinguish the contingent from the relative. In the Theaetetus the
+first of these difficulties begins to clear up; in the Sophist the
+second; and for this, as well as for other reasons, both these dialogues
+are probably to be regarded as later than the Republic.
+
+BOOK VI. Having determined that the many have no knowledge of true
+being, and have no clear patterns in their minds of justice, beauty,
+truth, and that philosophers have such patterns, we have now to ask
+whether they or the many shall be rulers in our State. But who can doubt
+that philosophers should be chosen, if they have the other qualities
+which are required in a ruler? For they are lovers of the knowledge of
+the eternal and of all truth; they are haters of falsehood; their meaner
+desires are absorbed in the interests of knowledge; they are spectators
+of all time and all existence; and in the magnificence of their
+contemplation the life of man is as nothing to them, nor is death
+fearful. Also they are of a social, gracious disposition, equally free
+from cowardice and arrogance. They learn and remember easily; they have
+harmonious, well-regulated minds; truth flows to them sweetly by nature.
+Can the god of Jealousy himself find any fault with such an assemblage
+of good qualities?
+
+Here Adeimantus interposes:--'No man can answer you, Socrates; but every
+man feels that this is owing to his own deficiency in argument. He is
+driven from one position to another, until he has nothing more to say,
+just as an unskilful player at draughts is reduced to his last move by
+a more skilled opponent. And yet all the time he may be right. He may
+know, in this very instance, that those who make philosophy the business
+of their lives, generally turn out rogues if they are bad men, and fools
+if they are good. What do you say?' I should say that he is quite right.
+'Then how is such an admission reconcileable with the doctrine that
+philosophers should be kings?'
+
+I shall answer you in a parable which will also let you see how poor a
+hand I am at the invention of allegories. The relation of good men to
+their governments is so peculiar, that in order to defend them I must
+take an illustration from the world of fiction. Conceive the captain
+of a ship, taller by a head and shoulders than any of the crew, yet a
+little deaf, a little blind, and rather ignorant of the seaman's art.
+The sailors want to steer, although they know nothing of the art; and
+they have a theory that it cannot be learned. If the helm is refused
+them, they drug the captain's posset, bind him hand and foot, and take
+possession of the ship. He who joins in the mutiny is termed a good
+pilot and what not; they have no conception that the true pilot must
+observe the winds and the stars, and must be their master, whether
+they like it or not;--such an one would be called by them fool, prater,
+star-gazer. This is my parable; which I will beg you to interpret for
+me to those gentlemen who ask why the philosopher has such an evil name,
+and to explain to them that not he, but those who will not use him, are
+to blame for his uselessness. The philosopher should not beg of mankind
+to be put in authority over them. The wise man should not seek the rich,
+as the proverb bids, but every man, whether rich or poor, must knock at
+the door of the physician when he has need of him. Now the pilot is
+the philosopher--he whom in the parable they call star-gazer, and the
+mutinous sailors are the mob of politicians by whom he is rendered
+useless. Not that these are the worst enemies of philosophy, who is far
+more dishonoured by her own professing sons when they are corrupted by
+the world. Need I recall the original image of the philosopher? Did we
+not say of him just now, that he loved truth and hated falsehood, and
+that he could not rest in the multiplicity of phenomena, but was led by
+a sympathy in his own nature to the contemplation of the absolute? All
+the virtues as well as truth, who is the leader of them, took up their
+abode in his soul. But as you were observing, if we turn aside to view
+the reality, we see that the persons who were thus described, with the
+exception of a small and useless class, are utter rogues.
+
+The point which has to be considered, is the origin of this corruption
+in nature. Every one will admit that the philosopher, in our description
+of him, is a rare being. But what numberless causes tend to destroy
+these rare beings! There is no good thing which may not be a cause of
+evil--health, wealth, strength, rank, and the virtues themselves,
+when placed under unfavourable circumstances. For as in the animal or
+vegetable world the strongest seeds most need the accompaniment of good
+air and soil, so the best of human characters turn out the worst when
+they fall upon an unsuitable soil; whereas weak natures hardly ever
+do any considerable good or harm; they are not the stuff out of which
+either great criminals or great heroes are made. The philosopher follows
+the same analogy: he is either the best or the worst of all men. Some
+persons say that the Sophists are the corrupters of youth; but is not
+public opinion the real Sophist who is everywhere present--in those very
+persons, in the assembly, in the courts, in the camp, in the applauses
+and hisses of the theatre re-echoed by the surrounding hills? Will not
+a young man's heart leap amid these discordant sounds? and will any
+education save him from being carried away by the torrent? Nor is this
+all. For if he will not yield to opinion, there follows the gentle
+compulsion of exile or death. What principle of rival Sophists or
+anybody else can overcome in such an unequal contest? Characters there
+may be more than human, who are exceptions--God may save a man, but not
+his own strength. Further, I would have you consider that the hireling
+Sophist only gives back to the world their own opinions; he is the
+keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter or anger him, and
+observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts. Good is what pleases
+him, evil what he dislikes; truth and beauty are determined only by
+the taste of the brute. Such is the Sophist's wisdom, and such is the
+condition of those who make public opinion the test of truth, whether in
+art or in morals. The curse is laid upon them of being and doing what
+it approves, and when they attempt first principles the failure is
+ludicrous. Think of all this and ask yourself whether the world is more
+likely to be a believer in the unity of the idea, or in the multiplicity
+of phenomena. And the world if not a believer in the idea cannot be a
+philosopher, and must therefore be a persecutor of philosophers. There
+is another evil:--the world does not like to lose the gifted nature, and
+so they flatter the young (Alcibiades) into a magnificent opinion of his
+own capacity; the tall, proper youth begins to expand, and is dreaming
+of kingdoms and empires. If at this instant a friend whispers to
+him, 'Now the gods lighten thee; thou art a great fool' and must be
+educated--do you think that he will listen? Or suppose a better sort of
+man who is attracted towards philosophy, will they not make Herculean
+efforts to spoil and corrupt him? Are we not right in saying that the
+love of knowledge, no less than riches, may divert him? Men of this
+class (Critias) often become politicians--they are the authors of
+great mischief in states, and sometimes also of great good. And thus
+philosophy is deserted by her natural protectors, and others enter in
+and dishonour her. Vulgar little minds see the land open and rush from
+the prisons of the arts into her temple. A clever mechanic having a
+soul coarse as his body, thinks that he will gain caste by becoming her
+suitor. For philosophy, even in her fallen estate, has a dignity of her
+own--and he, like a bald little blacksmith's apprentice as he is, having
+made some money and got out of durance, washes and dresses himself as a
+bridegroom and marries his master's daughter. What will be the issue of
+such marriages? Will they not be vile and bastard, devoid of truth
+and nature? 'They will.' Small, then, is the remnant of genuine
+philosophers; there may be a few who are citizens of small states, in
+which politics are not worth thinking of, or who have been detained by
+Theages' bridle of ill health; for my own case of the oracular sign is
+almost unique, and too rare to be worth mentioning. And these few when
+they have tasted the pleasures of philosophy, and have taken a look at
+that den of thieves and place of wild beasts, which is human life,
+will stand aside from the storm under the shelter of a wall, and try to
+preserve their own innocence and to depart in peace. 'A great work, too,
+will have been accomplished by them.' Great, yes, but not the greatest;
+for man is a social being, and can only attain his highest development
+in the society which is best suited to him.
+
+Enough, then, of the causes why philosophy has such an evil name.
+Another question is, Which of existing states is suited to her? Not one
+of them; at present she is like some exotic seed which degenerates in
+a strange soil; only in her proper state will she be shown to be of
+heavenly growth. 'And is her proper state ours or some other?' Ours in
+all points but one, which was left undetermined. You may remember our
+saying that some living mind or witness of the legislator was needed in
+states. But we were afraid to enter upon a subject of such difficulty,
+and now the question recurs and has not grown easier:--How may
+philosophy be safely studied? Let us bring her into the light of day,
+and make an end of the inquiry.
+
+In the first place, I say boldly that nothing can be worse than the
+present mode of study. Persons usually pick up a little philosophy in
+early youth, and in the intervals of business, but they never master the
+real difficulty, which is dialectic. Later, perhaps, they occasionally
+go to a lecture on philosophy. Years advance, and the sun of philosophy,
+unlike that of Heracleitus, sets never to rise again. This order of
+education should be reversed; it should begin with gymnastics in youth,
+and as the man strengthens, he should increase the gymnastics of
+his soul. Then, when active life is over, let him finally return to
+philosophy. 'You are in earnest, Socrates, but the world will be equally
+earnest in withstanding you--no more than Thrasymachus.' Do not make a
+quarrel between Thrasymachus and me, who were never enemies and are
+now good friends enough. And I shall do my best to convince him and
+all mankind of the truth of my words, or at any rate to prepare for
+the future when, in another life, we may again take part in similar
+discussions. 'That will be a long time hence.' Not long in comparison
+with eternity. The many will probably remain incredulous, for they
+have never seen the natural unity of ideas, but only artificial
+juxtapositions; not free and generous thoughts, but tricks of
+controversy and quips of law;--a perfect man ruling in a perfect state,
+even a single one they have not known. And we foresaw that there was no
+chance of perfection either in states or individuals until a necessity
+was laid upon philosophers--not the rogues, but those whom we called
+the useless class--of holding office; or until the sons of kings were
+inspired with a true love of philosophy. Whether in the infinity of
+past time there has been, or is in some distant land, or ever will be
+hereafter, an ideal such as we have described, we stoutly maintain
+that there has been, is, and will be such a state whenever the Muse of
+philosophy rules. Will you say that the world is of another mind? O, my
+friend, do not revile the world! They will soon change their opinion
+if they are gently entreated, and are taught the true nature of the
+philosopher. Who can hate a man who loves him? Or be jealous of one who
+has no jealousy? Consider, again, that the many hate not the true but
+the false philosophers--the pretenders who force their way in without
+invitation, and are always speaking of persons and not of principles,
+which is unlike the spirit of philosophy. For the true philosopher
+despises earthly strife; his eye is fixed on the eternal order in
+accordance with which he moulds himself into the Divine image (and not
+himself only, but other men), and is the creator of the virtues private
+as well as public. When mankind see that the happiness of states is only
+to be found in that image, will they be angry with us for attempting
+to delineate it? 'Certainly not. But what will be the process of
+delineation?' The artist will do nothing until he has made a tabula
+rasa; on this he will inscribe the constitution of a state, glancing
+often at the divine truth of nature, and from that deriving the godlike
+among men, mingling the two elements, rubbing out and painting in,
+until there is a perfect harmony or fusion of the divine and human. But
+perhaps the world will doubt the existence of such an artist. What will
+they doubt? That the philosopher is a lover of truth, having a nature
+akin to the best?--and if they admit this will they still quarrel with
+us for making philosophers our kings? 'They will be less disposed to
+quarrel.' Let us assume then that they are pacified. Still, a person may
+hesitate about the probability of the son of a king being a philosopher.
+And we do not deny that they are very liable to be corrupted; but yet
+surely in the course of ages there might be one exception--and one
+is enough. If one son of a king were a philosopher, and had obedient
+citizens, he might bring the ideal polity into being. Hence we conclude
+that our laws are not only the best, but that they are also possible,
+though not free from difficulty.
+
+I gained nothing by evading the troublesome questions which arose
+concerning women and children. I will be wiser now and acknowledge
+that we must go to the bottom of another question: What is to be the
+education of our guardians? It was agreed that they were to be lovers of
+their country, and were to be tested in the refiner's fire of pleasures
+and pains, and those who came forth pure and remained fixed in their
+principles were to have honours and rewards in life and after death.
+But at this point, the argument put on her veil and turned into another
+path. I hesitated to make the assertion which I now hazard,--that our
+guardians must be philosophers. You remember all the contradictory
+elements, which met in the philosopher--how difficult to find them all
+in a single person! Intelligence and spirit are not often combined with
+steadiness; the stolid, fearless, nature is averse to intellectual toil.
+And yet these opposite elements are all necessary, and therefore, as
+we were saying before, the aspirant must be tested in pleasures and
+dangers; and also, as we must now further add, in the highest branches
+of knowledge. You will remember, that when we spoke of the virtues
+mention was made of a longer road, which you were satisfied to leave
+unexplored. 'Enough seemed to have been said.' Enough, my friend; but
+what is enough while anything remains wanting? Of all men the guardian
+must not faint in the search after truth; he must be prepared to take
+the longer road, or he will never reach that higher region which is
+above the four virtues; and of the virtues too he must not only get an
+outline, but a clear and distinct vision. (Strange that we should be so
+precise about trifles, so careless about the highest truths!) 'And what
+are the highest?' You to pretend unconsciousness, when you have so often
+heard me speak of the idea of good, about which we know so little, and
+without which though a man gain the world he has no profit of it! Some
+people imagine that the good is wisdom; but this involves a circle,--the
+good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has to do with the good. According to
+others the good is pleasure; but then comes the absurdity that good is
+bad, for there are bad pleasures as well as good. Again, the good must
+have reality; a man may desire the appearance of virtue, but he will not
+desire the appearance of good. Ought our guardians then to be ignorant
+of this supreme principle, of which every man has a presentiment, and
+without which no man has any real knowledge of anything? 'But, Socrates,
+what is this supreme principle, knowledge or pleasure, or what? You may
+think me troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always
+repeating the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.' Can
+I say what I do not know? 'You may offer an opinion.' And will the
+blindness and crookedness of opinion content you when you might have
+the light and certainty of science? 'I will only ask you to give such
+an explanation of the good as you have given already of temperance and
+justice.' I wish that I could, but in my present mood I cannot reach to
+the height of the knowledge of the good. To the parent or principal I
+cannot introduce you, but to the child begotten in his image, which
+I may compare with the interest on the principal, I will. (Audit the
+account, and do not let me give you a false statement of the debt.)
+You remember our old distinction of the many beautiful and the one
+beautiful, the particular and the universal, the objects of sight and
+the objects of thought? Did you ever consider that the objects of sight
+imply a faculty of sight which is the most complex and costly of our
+senses, requiring not only objects of sense, but also a medium, which is
+light; without which the sight will not distinguish between colours and
+all will be a blank? For light is the noble bond between the perceiving
+faculty and the thing perceived, and the god who gives us light is the
+sun, who is the eye of the day, but is not to be confounded with the eye
+of man. This eye of the day or sun is what I call the child of the good,
+standing in the same relation to the visible world as the good to the
+intellectual. When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the intellectual
+world where truth is, there is sight and light. Now that which is the
+sun of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the cause of knowledge
+and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and standing in the
+same relation to them in which the sun stands to light. O inconceivable
+height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above truth! ('You cannot
+surely mean pleasure,' he said. Peace, I replied.) And this idea of
+good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and the author not of
+knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than either in dignity
+and power. 'That is a reach of thought more than human; but, pray, 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
+intelligible; 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 knowledge in either sphere. The lower portion of the lower or
+visible sphere will consist of shadows and reflections, and its upper
+and smaller portion will contain real objects in the world of nature
+or of art. The sphere of the intelligible will also have two
+divisions,--one of mathematics, 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, the perception of
+shadows--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 convince 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 anticipation 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 philosopher 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 acknowledged 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 'separate the limbs of science without breaking
+them' (Phaedr.). 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.). 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), 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 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 conclusions
+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 arithmetical 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
+instance, may be regarded as implying a reflection upon the Socratic
+mode of reasoning. And here, as elsewhere, 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 experience proves
+philosophers to be either useless or rogues. Contrary to all expectation
+Socrates has no hesitation 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 elsewhere, 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
+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; and that the finer nature is
+more likely to suffer from alien conditions. We too observe that there
+are some kinds of excellence which spring from a peculiar delicacy
+of constitution; as is evidently true of the poetical and imaginative
+temperament, which often seems to depend on impressions, and hence can
+only breathe or live in a certain atmosphere. 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, he has an insight which is terrible into the follies and
+weaknesses of his fellow-men. 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. 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
+themselves 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 overpowered
+by public opinion, and what efforts the rest of mankind will make to
+get possession of them. The world, the church, their own profession, any
+political or party organization, are always carrying them off their legs
+and teaching them to apply high and holy names to their 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
+intervals. The question is asked,--Why are the citizens of states so
+hostile 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 confusion,
+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
+considered: 1st, the nature of the longer and more circuitous way, which
+is contrasted with the shorter and more imperfect method of Book IV;
+2nd, 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:
+
+1. 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 meaning. 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, he argues
+from experience and the common use of language. But at the end of the
+sixth book he conceives another and more perfect method, in which
+all ideas are only steps or grades or moments of thought, forming a
+connected 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
+process. 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 principles and becomes imperceptibly one with them. But Plato
+erroneously 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
+philosophy. Anticipations or divinations, or prophetic glimpses of
+truths whether concerning man or nature, seem to stand in the same
+relation to ancient philosophy which hypotheses bear to modern inductive
+science. These 'guesses at truth' were not made at random; they arose
+from a superficial impression of uniformities and first principles
+in nature which the genius of the Greek, contemplating the expanse of
+heaven and earth, seemed to recognize in the distance. Nor can we deny
+that in ancient times knowledge must have stood still, and the human
+mind been deprived of the very instruments 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). 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.
+
+3. There is no difficulty in seeing that Plato's divisions of knowledge
+are based, first, on the fundamental antithesis of sensible 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 require 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
+Pythagorean 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 his philosophy. He had observed the use of mathematics in education;
+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.). For
+metaphysical and moral philosophy has no connexion with mathematics;
+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
+reference 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 (Timaeus) to make
+four terms instead of three, although the objects perceived 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 (cp.
+for the use of the word faith or belief, (Greek), Timaeus), contrasting
+equally with the vagueness of the perception of shadows (Greek) and the
+higher certainty of understanding (Greek) and reason (Greek).
+
+The difference between understanding and mind or reason (Greek) 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 subordinate ideas. Those ideas are called both images and
+hypotheses--images because they are clothed in sense, hypotheses because
+they are assumptions only, until they are brought into connexion with
+the idea of good.
+
+The general meaning of the passage, 'Noble, then, is the bond which
+links together sight...And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible...'
+so far as the thought contained in it admits of being translated
+into the terms of modern philosophy, may be described or explained as
+follows:--There is a truth, one and self-existent, to which by the help
+of a ladder let down from above, the human intelligence may ascend. This
+unity is like the sun in the heavens, the light by which all things are
+seen, the being by which they are created and sustained. It is the
+IDEA of good. And the steps of the ladder leading up to this highest or
+universal existence are the mathematical sciences, which also contain
+in themselves an element of the universal. These, too, we see in a new
+manner when we connect them with the idea of good. They then cease to
+be hypotheses or pictures, and become essential parts of a higher truth
+which is at once their first principle and their final cause.
+
+We cannot give any more precise meaning to this remarkable passage, but
+we may trace in it several rudiments or vestiges of thought which are
+common to us and to Plato: such as (1) the unity and correlation of the
+sciences, or rather of science, for in Plato's time they were not yet
+parted off or distinguished; (2) the existence of a Divine Power,
+or life or idea or cause or reason, not yet conceived or no longer
+conceived as in the Timaeus and elsewhere under the form of a person;
+(3) the recognition of the hypothetical and conditional character of the
+mathematical sciences, and in a measure of every science when isolated
+from the rest; (4) the conviction of a truth which is invisible, and of
+a law, though hardly a law of nature, which permeates the intellectual
+rather than the visible world.
+
+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 internal oracle, or demonic
+sign, of Socrates, which here, as always in Plato, is only prohibitory;
+the remark that the salvation of any remnant of good in the present evil
+state of the world is due to God only; the reference to a future state
+of existence, which is unknown to Glaucon in the tenth book, and in
+which the discussions of Socrates and his disciples would be resumed;
+the surprise in the answers; the fanciful irony of Socrates, where
+he pretends that he can only describe the strange position of the
+philosopher in a figure of speech; the original observation 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 figure of 'the great beast' followed
+by the expression of good-will towards the common people who would not
+have rejected the philosopher if they had known him; 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; the comparison
+of philosophy to a deserted maiden who marries beneath her--are some of
+the most interesting characteristics of the sixth book.
+
+Yet a few more words may be added, on the old theme, which was so
+oft discussed in the Socratic circle, of which we, like Glaucon and
+Adeimantus, would fain, if possible, have a clearer notion. Like them,
+we are dissatisfied when we are told that the idea of good can only be
+revealed to a student of the mathematical sciences, and we are inclined
+to think that neither we nor they could have been led along that path to
+any satisfactory goal. For we have learned that differences of quantity
+cannot pass into differences of quality, and that the mathematical
+sciences can never rise above themselves into the sphere of our higher
+thoughts, although they may sometimes furnish symbols and expressions
+of them, and may train the mind in habits of abstraction and
+self-concentration. The illusion which was natural to an ancient
+philosopher has ceased to be an illusion to us. But if the process by
+which we are supposed to arrive at the idea of good be really imaginary,
+may not the idea itself be also a mere abstraction? We remark, first,
+that in all ages, and especially in primitive philosophy, words such
+as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted an extraordinary influence
+over the minds of men. The meagreness or negativeness of their content
+has been in an inverse ratio to their power. They have become the forms
+under which all things were comprehended. There was a need or instinct
+in the human soul which they satisfied; they were not ideas, but gods,
+and to this new mythology the men of a later generation began to attach
+the powers and associations of the elder deities.
+
+The idea of good is one of those sacred words or forms of thought, which
+were beginning to take the place of the old mythology. It meant unity,
+in which all time and all existence were gathered up. It was the truth
+of all things, and also the light in which they shone forth, and became
+evident to intelligences human and divine. It was the cause of all
+things, the power by which they were brought into being. It was the
+universal reason divested of a human personality. It was the life
+as well as the light of the world, all knowledge and all power were
+comprehended in it. The way to it was through the mathematical sciences,
+and these too were dependent on it. To ask whether God was the maker of
+it, or made by it, would be like asking whether God could be conceived
+apart from goodness, or goodness apart from God. The God of the Timaeus
+is not really at variance with the idea of good; they are aspects of
+the same, differing only as the personal from the impersonal, or the
+masculine from the neuter, the one being the expression or language of
+mythology, the other of philosophy.
+
+This, or something like this, is the meaning of the idea of good as
+conceived by Plato. Ideas of number, order, harmony, development may
+also be said to enter into it. The paraphrase which has just been given
+of it goes beyond the actual words of Plato. We have perhaps arrived at
+the stage of philosophy which enables us to understand what he is aiming
+at, better than he did himself. We are beginning to realize what he saw
+darkly and at a distance. But if he could have been told that this, or
+some conception of the same kind, but higher than this, was the truth
+at which he was aiming, and the need which he sought to supply, he would
+gladly have recognized that more was contained in his own thoughts
+than he himself knew. As his words are few and his manner reticent
+and tentative, so must the style of his interpreter be. We should not
+approach his meaning more nearly by attempting to define it further. In
+translating him into the language of modern thought, we might insensibly
+lose the spirit of ancient philosophy. It is remarkable that although
+Plato speaks of the idea of good as the first principle of truth and
+being, it is nowhere mentioned in his writings except in this passage.
+Nor did it retain any hold upon the minds of his disciples in a later
+generation; it was probably unintelligible to them. Nor does the mention
+of it in Aristotle appear to have any reference to this or any other
+passage in his extant writings.
+
+BOOK VII. And now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or
+unenlightenment of our nature:--Imagine human beings living in an
+underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there
+from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see
+into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and
+the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like
+the screen over which marionette players show their puppets. Behind the
+wall appear 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 are talking and others silent. 'A strange parable,'
+he said, 'and strange captives.' They are ourselves, I replied; and they
+see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of
+the den; 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. Suppose 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! But
+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, and if they find anybody trying to
+set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to death,
+if they can catch him. Now the cave or den is the world of sight, the
+fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to knowledge, 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 understanding 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.
+But blindness is of two 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 between 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 puzzled soul looking
+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 cut away from him
+those leaden weights of pleasure and desire which bind his soul to
+earth, his intelligence 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? We must choose out
+therefore the natures who are most likely to ascend to the light and
+knowledge of the good; but we must not allow them to remain in the
+region of light; they must be forced down again among the captives in
+the den to partake of their labours and honours. 'Will they not think
+this a hardship?' You should remember 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 have been trained by us to be the rulers and kings of our hive,
+and therefore we must insist on your descending into 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 far better than those who
+quarrel about the shadows, whose knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours
+is a 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 philosophy, 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? The change is effected by philosophy;
+it 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. Nothing remains to us
+but that universal or primary science of which all the arts and sciences
+are partakers, I mean number or calculation. 'Very true.' Including the
+art of war? 'Yes, certainly.' Then there is something ludicrous about
+Palamedes in the tragedy, coming in and saying that he had invented
+number, and had counted the ranks and set them in order. For if
+Agamemnon could not count his feet (and without 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 regarded 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 without number cannot further distinguish them. Or again, suppose
+two objects to be relatively great 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; we
+are thus led on to the distinction between the visible and intelligible.
+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. All number has also
+an elevating effect; 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. And to our higher purpose no science can be better
+adapted; but it must be pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, not of a
+shopkeeper. It is concerned, not with visible objects, but with abstract
+truth; for numbers are pure abstractions--the true arithmetician
+indignantly denies that his unit is capable of division. When you
+divide, he insists that you are only multiplying; his 'one' is not
+material or resolvable into fractions, but an unvarying and absolute
+equality; and this proves 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 general
+ability, or equally improving to a stupid person.
+
+Let our second branch of education be geometry. 'I can easily see,'
+replied Glaucon, 'that the skill of the general will be doubled by his
+knowledge of geometry.' That is a small matter; the use of geometry, to
+which I refer, is the assistance given by it in the contemplation 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 pursuing these studies,
+as any one who is the least of a mathematician is 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 necessary at
+once for husbandry, navigation, military tactics.' I like your way of
+giving useful reasons for everything in order to make friends of the
+world. And there is a difficulty in proving to mankind that education is
+not only useful information but a purification of the eye of the soul,
+which is better than the bodily eye, for by this alone is truth seen.
+Now, will you appeal to mankind in general or to the philosopher? 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 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 conceited and impatient. 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; 'but do
+I understand you now to begin with plane geometry, and to place next
+geometry of solids, and thirdly, astronomy, or the motion of solids?'
+Yes, I said; my hastiness has only hindered us.
+
+'Very good, and now 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 lie on his back on land or on 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 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 intellect.
+
+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 empirics who are always twisting and torturing the strings
+of the lyre, and quarrelling about the tempers of the strings; I am
+referring rather to the Pythagorean harmonists, who are almost equally
+in error. For 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,
+I replied, which is only useful if pursued with a view to the good.
+
+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
+business.' 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. 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 dialectical 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
+contemplate 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.
+
+'So far, I agree with 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 human needs and opinions; and the mathematical sciences are
+but a dream or hypothesis of true being, and never analyse their own
+principles. Dialectic alone rises to the principle which is above
+hypotheses, 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, perception of shadows--which make a proportion--
+being:becoming::intellect:opinion--and science:belief::understanding:
+perception 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 good. To him who is not a
+dialectician life is but a sleepy dream; and many a man is in his grave
+before his is well waked up. And would you have the future rulers of
+your ideal State 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, good-looking, and of noble manners, but
+now they must also have natural ability which education will improve;
+that is to say, they must be quick at learning, capable of mental toil,
+retentive, solid, diligent natures, who combine intellectual with
+moral virtues; not lame and one-sided, diligent in bodily exercise
+and indolent in mind, or conversely; not a maimed soul, which hates
+falsehood and yet unintentionally is always wallowing 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; and they
+will be the saviours of our State; disciples of another sort would
+only make philosophy more ridiculous than she is at present. Forgive
+my enthusiasm; I am becoming excited; but when I see her trampled
+underfoot, 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 selection 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; 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
+should be at first 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, a selection must be made of the more promising
+disciples, with whom a new epoch of education will begin. The sciences
+which they have hitherto learned in fragments will now be brought into
+relation with each other and with true being; for the power of combining
+them is the test of speculative and dialectical ability. And afterwards
+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
+dialectic 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 informed 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 exercised a 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
+require 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; 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 does not run
+on in this way; he will argue and not merely contradict, and adds new
+honour to philosophy by the sobriety of his conduct. 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 command 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 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
+receive such worship as the Pythian oracle approves.
+
+'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 when there shall arise
+philosopher-kings, one or more, who will despise earthly vanities, and
+will be the servants of justice only. 'And how will they begin their
+work?' Their first act will be to send away into the country all those
+who are more than ten years of age, and to proceed with 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 allegory, in
+this, as in other passages, following the order which he prescribes
+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
+process begins with the contemplation of the real stars, and not mere
+reflections 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 divisions 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 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
+then seeks to combine the universals which he has disengaged from sense,
+not perceiving that the correlation of them has no other basis but the
+common use of language. He never understands that abstractions, as Hegel
+says, are 'mere abstractions'--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 apart from facts has enlarged the
+mind, and played a great part in the education of the human race.
+Plato appreciated the value of this faculty, and saw that it might be
+quickened by the study of number and relation. All things in which
+there is opposition or proportion are suggestive of reflection. The
+mere impression of sense evokes no power of thought or of mind, but when
+sensible objects ask to be compared and distinguished, then philosophy
+begins. The science of arithmetic first suggests such distinctions. The
+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, such as we
+employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and
+even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics, e.g. his distinction
+between arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics (Book V),
+or between numerical and proportional equality in the Politics.
+
+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 application
+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
+recognize 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
+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
+fallen into the error of supposing that he can construct the heavens a
+priori by mathematical problems, and determine the principles of harmony
+irrespective of the adaptation of sounds 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 or
+vibrations on which they must ultimately rest, was overlooked by him.
+The modern predecessors of Newton fell into errors 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 consider 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 acknowledging
+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 ancient
+Pythagorean notions. There is no reason to suppose that he is speaking
+of the ideal numbers; 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 phenomena, gave them a kind of
+sacredness in the eyes of an ancient philosopher. 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.' It is
+worthy of remark that the old Pythagorean 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 philosophy in the Platonic idea of good, which
+is the source and measure of all things, and yet only an abstraction
+(Philebus).
+
+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
+indistinguishable 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 impressions 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
+Pythagoreans, whom he proposes to consult as in the previous discussion
+on music he was to consult Damon--they are acknowledged to be masters
+in the art, but are altogether 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
+intervals 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
+den or cave represents the narrow sphere of politics or law (compare the
+description of the philosopher and lawyer in the Theaetetus), 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 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
+voluntarily 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. (Symposium.)
+
+Many illustrations of this part of the Republic may be found in modern
+Politics and in daily life. For among ourselves, too, there have
+been two sorts of Politicians or Statesmen, whose eyesight has become
+disordered in two different ways. First, there have been great men who,
+in the language of Burke, 'have been too much given to general
+maxims,' who, like J.S. Mill or Burke himself, have been theorists or
+philosophers before they were politicians, or who, having been students
+of history, have allowed some great historical parallel, such as the
+English Revolution of 1688, or possibly Athenian democracy or Roman
+Imperialism, to be the medium through which they viewed contemporary
+events. Or perhaps the long projecting shadow of some existing
+institution may have darkened their vision. The Church of the future,
+the Commonwealth of the future, the Society of the future, have
+so absorbed their minds, that they are unable to see in their true
+proportions the Politics of to-day. They have been intoxicated with
+great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest happiness of
+the greatest number, or the brotherhood of humanity, and they no
+longer care to consider how these ideas must be limited in practice or
+harmonized with the conditions of human life. They are full of light,
+but the light to them has become only a sort of luminous mist or
+blindness. Almost every one has known some enthusiastic half-educated
+person, who sees everything at false distances, and in erroneous
+proportions.
+
+With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted another--of those who
+see not far into the distance, but what is near only; who have been
+engaged all their lives in a trade or a profession; who are limited to
+a set or sect of their own. Men of this kind have no universal except
+their own interests or the interests of their class, no principle but
+the opinion of persons like themselves, no knowledge of affairs beyond
+what they pick up in the streets or at their club. Suppose them to be
+sent into a larger world, to undertake some higher calling, from being
+tradesmen to turn generals or politicians, from being schoolmasters to
+become philosophers:--or imagine them on a sudden to receive an inward
+light which reveals to them for the first time in their lives a higher
+idea of God and the existence of a spiritual world, by this sudden
+conversion or change is not their daily life likely to be upset; and on
+the other hand will not many of their old prejudices and narrownesses
+still adhere to them long after they have begun to take a more
+comprehensive view of human things? From familiar examples like these we
+may learn what Plato meant by the eyesight which is liable to two kinds
+of disorders.
+
+Nor have we any difficulty in drawing a parallel between the young
+Athenian in the fifth century before Christ who became unsettled by new
+ideas, and the student of a modern University who has been the subject
+of a similar 'aufklarung.' We too observe that when young men begin to
+criticise customary beliefs, or to analyse the constitution of human
+nature, they are apt to lose hold of solid principle (Greek). They are
+like trees which have been frequently transplanted. The earth about them
+is loose, and they have no roots reaching far into the soil. They 'light
+upon every flower,' following their own wayward wills, or because the
+wind blows them. They catch opinions, as diseases are caught--when
+they are in the air. Borne hither and thither, 'they speedily fall
+into beliefs' the opposite of those in which they were brought up. They
+hardly retain the distinction of right and wrong; they seem to think one
+thing as good as another. They suppose themselves to be searching after
+truth when they are playing the game of 'follow my leader.' They fall
+in love 'at first sight' with paradoxes respecting morality, some fancy
+about art, some novelty or eccentricity in religion, and like lovers
+they are so absorbed for a time in their new notion that they can think
+of nothing else. The resolution of some philosophical or theological
+question seems to them more interesting and important than any
+substantial knowledge of literature or science or even than a good life.
+Like the youth in the Philebus, they are ready to discourse to any one
+about a new philosophy. They are generally the disciples of some eminent
+professor or sophist, whom they rather imitate than understand. They may
+be counted happy if in later years they retain some of the simple truths
+which they acquired in early education, and which they may, perhaps,
+find to be worth all the rest. Such is the picture which Plato draws and
+which we only reproduce, partly in his own words, of the dangers which
+beset youth in times of transition, when old opinions are fading
+away and the new are not yet firmly established. Their condition is
+ingeniously compared by him 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 distinct from the higher philosophical sense
+which recognizes and combines first principles. The contempt which
+he expresses for distinctions of words, the danger of involuntary
+falsehood, the apology which Socrates makes for his earnestness of
+speech, are highly characteristic 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, in which he expects the lie about the earthborn men to
+be believed in the second generation.)
+
+BOOK 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 to be common, and
+kings are to be philosophers and warriors, and the soldiers of the State
+are to live together, having all things in common; and 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. 'That is
+easily done,' he replied: 'You were speaking of the State which you had
+constructed, and of the individual who answered to this, both of whom
+you affirmed to be good; and you said that of inferior States there were
+four forms and four individuals corresponding to them, which although
+deficient 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 of what constitutions you were speaking?' Besides the
+perfect State there are only four of any note in Hellas:--first, the
+famous Lacedaemonian 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 government.
+Now, States are not made of 'oak and rock,' but of 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 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. But whence came
+division? 'Sing, heavenly Muses,' as Homer says;--let them condescend to
+answer us, as if we were children, to whom they put 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 from this
+law of destiny, 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 rulers because 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 perfect squares
+from all, and adding a hundred cubes of three. This entire number is
+geometrical and contains the rule or law of generation. When this law is
+neglected marriages will be unpropitious; the inferior offspring who are
+then born will in time become the rulers; the State will decline, and
+education fall into decay; gymnastic will be preferred to music, and
+the gold and silver and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass--thus
+division will arise. Such is the Muses' answer to our question. 'And a
+true answer, of course:--but what more have they 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 will take to trade and moneymaking,
+and the others, having the true riches and not caring for money, will
+resist them: the contest will end in a compromise; they will agree to
+have private property, and will enslave their fellow-citizens who were
+once their friends and nurturers. But they will retain their warlike
+character, and will be chiefly occupied in fighting and exercising rule.
+Thus arises timocracy, which is intermediate between aristocracy and
+oligarchy.
+
+The new form of government resembles the ideal in obedience to rulers
+and contempt for trade, and having common 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 philosopher; 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 this 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.' In that
+respect, perhaps, but not in others. He is self-asserting and
+ill-educated, yet fond of literature, although not himself a
+speaker,--fierce with slaves, but obedient to rulers, a lover of power
+and honour, which he hopes to gain by deeds of arms,--fond, too, of
+gymnastics and of hunting. As he advances in years he grows avaricious,
+for he has lost philosophy, which is the only saviour and guardian of
+men. His origin is as follows:--His father is a good man dwelling in an
+ill-ordered State, who has retired from politics in order that he may
+lead a quiet life. His mother is angry at her loss of precedence among
+other women; she is disgusted at her husband's selfishness, and she
+expatiates to her son on the unmanliness and indolence of his father.
+The old family servant takes up the tale, and says to the youth:--'When
+you grow up you must be more of a man than your father.' All the world
+are agreed that he who minds his own business is an idiot, while a
+busybody is highly honoured and esteemed. The young man compares this
+spirit with his father's words and ways, and as he is naturally well
+disposed, although he has suffered from evil influences, he rests at a
+middle point and becomes ambitious and a lover of honour.
+
+And now let us set another city over against another man. The next form
+of government is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the rich only; nor
+is it difficult to see how such a State arises. The decline begins with
+the possession of gold and silver; illegal modes of expenditure are
+invented; one draws another on, and the multitude are infected; riches
+outweigh virtue; 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, who do not shrink from violence in order to effect
+their purposes.
+
+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 destitute. 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 of the hive; only whereas the
+actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the two-legged things
+whom we call drones are some of them without stings and some of them
+have dreadful stings; in other words, there are paupers and there are
+rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical cities, where
+nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler, you will find abundance
+of both. And this evil state of society originates in bad education and
+bad government.
+
+Like State, like man,--the change in the latter begins with the
+representative 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 thus receives, makes him cautious; he leaves
+politics, represses his pride, and saves pence. Avarice is enthroned as
+his bosom's lord, and assumes the style of the Great King; the rational
+and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground at either side, 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. The man is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one
+passion which is the master of the rest: 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. If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the power to defraud,
+he will soon prove that he is not without the will, and that his
+passions are only restrained by fear and not by reason. 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 keeps his
+money and loses the victory.
+
+Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and
+the oligarchical man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an
+oligarchy; and they encourage expensive habits in order that they may
+gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men of family often lose
+their property or rights of citizenship; but they remain in the city,
+full of hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for
+revolution. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them;
+he passes by, and leaves his sting--that is, his money--in some other
+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 the evil is either to limit a man in
+his use of his property, or to insist that he shall lend at his own
+risk. But the ruling class do not want remedies; they care only for
+money, and are 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 sturdy
+pauper finds that in the hour of danger he is not despised; he sees
+the rich man 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, or with none at all, the city 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 embroidery 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 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. Observe, too,
+how grandly Democracy sets her foot upon all our fine theories of
+education,--how little she cares for the training of her statesmen! The
+only qualification which she demands 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 I ought to explain 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 necessary 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, is 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 miserly bringing up, gets a taste of the drone's
+honey; he meets with wild companions, who introduce him to every new
+pleasure. 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 oligarchical principle; and the two factions 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 gets possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul,
+which they find void and unguarded by true words and works. 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 individual elders comes from home,
+the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and permit no one to
+enter,--there is a battle, and they gain the victory; and straightway
+making alliance with the desires, they banish modesty, which they call
+folly, and send temperance over the border. When the house has been
+swept and garnished, they dress up the exiled vices, and, crowning them
+with garlands, bring them back under new names. Insolence they call good
+breeding, anarchy freedom, waste magnificence, impudence courage. Such
+is the process by which the youth passes from the necessary pleasures to
+the unnecessary. After a while he divides his time impartially between
+them; and perhaps, when he gets older and the violence of passion
+has abated, he restores some of the exiles and lives in a sort of
+equilibrium, indulging first one pleasure and then another; and if
+reason comes and tells him that some pleasures are good and honourable,
+and others bad and vile, he shakes his head and says that he can make
+no distinction between them. Thus he lives in the fancy of the hour;
+sometimes he takes to drink, and then he turns abstainer; he practises
+in the gymnasium or he does nothing at all; then again he would be a
+philosopher or a politician; 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 as
+democracy springs from oligarchy. Both arise from excess; the one from
+excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom. 'The great natural
+good of life,' 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 demands the strong wine of
+freedom, and unless her rulers give her a plentiful draught, punishes
+and insults them; 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 extends even to the animals. 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 are on a level with their masters and mistresses, and
+there is no difference between men and women. Nay, the very animals in
+a democratic 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. 'That has often been my experience.' At last 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
+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; for there is a law of contraries; 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, whom we compared to drones with and
+without stings. These two classes are to the State what phlegm and bile
+are to the human body; and the State-physician, or legislator, must get
+rid of them, just as the bee-master keeps the drones out of the hive.
+Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but they are more numerous
+and more dangerous than in the oligarchy; there they are inert and
+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 individuals, who can be
+squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions; there is
+moreover a third class, who are the labourers and the artisans, and
+they make up the mass of the people. When the people meet, they
+are omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together unless they are
+attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey,
+of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste
+only to the mob. Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad
+by the stings of the drones, and so 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, which tells how he who
+tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims will turn
+into a wolf. Even so the protector, who tastes human blood, and slays
+some and exiles others with or without law, who hints at 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; and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by lawful 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. Now let the
+rich man make to himself wings, for he will never run away again if he
+does not do so then. And the Great Protector, having crushed all his
+rivals, stands proudly erect in the chariot of State, a full-blown
+tyrant: Let us enquire into the nature of his happiness.
+
+In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon 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. He is thus
+enabled to depress the poor by heavy taxes, and so keep them at work;
+and he can get rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy.
+Then comes unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to
+oppose him. The consequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the
+State; but, unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get
+rid of the high-spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no choice
+between death and a life of shame and dishonour. And the more hated he
+is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he obtain them?
+'They will come flocking like birds--for pay.' Will he not rather obtain
+them on the spot? He will take the slaves from their owners and make
+them his body-guard; these are his trusted friends, who admire and
+look up to him. Are not the tragic poets wise who magnify and exalt the
+tyrant, and say that he is wise by association with the wise? And are
+not their praises of tyranny alone a sufficient reason why we should
+exclude them from our State? They may go to other cities, and gather the
+mob about them with fine words, and change commonwealths into tyrannies
+and democracies, receiving honours and rewards for their services; but
+the higher they and their 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 companions, 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 bids him and his riotous crew begone, then
+will the parent know what a monster he has been nurturing, 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.' 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 servitude...
+
+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 States, 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 ages, 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'; or again, as he
+afterwards says in the Laws, '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 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. But there is obviously no connection between the manner
+in which the timocratic 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
+historical 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 succeeded 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
+government 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 Athens, 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 fluctuation 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
+constitution 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 governments
+of the Sicilian States, which alternated 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
+delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives
+of 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 today 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 in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of
+democracy which he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy
+is 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). 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 harmonizing the passions, and training them in virtue;
+in the timocracy and the timocratic man the constitution, whether of the
+State or of the individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly,
+upon the love of honour; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be
+esteemed a virtue, has superseded all the rest. In the second stage of
+decline the virtues have altogether disappeared, and the love of gain
+has succeeded to them; in the third stage, or democracy, the various
+passions are allowed to have free play, and the virtues and vices are
+impartially cultivated. 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 fanciful
+allusions; the use of metaphorical language is carried to a greater
+extent than anywhere else in Plato. We may remark,
+
+(1), the description of the two nations in one, which become more and
+more divided in the Greek Republics, as in feudal times, and perhaps
+also in our own;
+
+(2), the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean formula
+as equality among unequals;
+
+(3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic
+of liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the
+tyrant;
+
+(4), 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: in modern times we may be said to have almost, if not
+quite, solved the first of these difficulties, but hardly the second.
+
+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
+parricide; the representation of the tyrant's life as an obscene dream;
+the rhetorical surprise of a more miserable than the most miserable of
+men in Book IX; the hint to the poets that if they are the friends of
+tyrants there is no place for them in a constitutional State, and that
+they are too clever not to see the propriety of their own expulsion; the
+continuous image of the drones who are of two kinds, swelling at last
+into the monster drone having wings (Book IX),--are among Plato's
+happiest touches.
+
+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.). 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.), and would have been ridiculous to
+any reader of the Republic who was acquainted with Greek mathematics.
+As little reason is there for supposing that Plato intentionally used
+obscure expressions; the obscurity 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. (Compare Cratylus; Protag.)
+
+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 (Greek) describes a solid figure. (Pol.--'He only says that
+nothing is abiding, but that all things change in a certain cycle; and
+that the origin of the change is a base of numbers which are in the
+ratio of 4:3; and this when combined with a figure of five gives two
+harmonies; he means when the number of this figure becomes solid.')
+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 hypotenuse (9 + 16 = 25).
+
+Plato begins by speaking of a perfect or cyclical number (Tim.), 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 revolutions 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 in
+certain proportions; these he converts into figures, and finds in
+them when they have been raised to the third power certain elements of
+number, 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; nor is any intimation given that the
+first or divine number represents the period of the world, the second
+the period of the state, or of the human race as Zeller supposes; nor
+is the divine number afterwards mentioned (Arist.). The second is the
+number of generations or births, and presides over them in the same
+mysterious manner in which the stars preside over them, or in which,
+according to the Pythagoreans, opportunity, justice, marriage, are
+represented by some number or figure. This is probably the number 216.
+
+The explanation given in the text supposes the two harmonies to make up
+the number 8000. This explanation derives a certain plausibility from
+the circumstance that 8000 is the ancient number of the Spartan citizens
+(Herod.), and would be what Plato might have called 'a number which
+nearly concerns the population of a city'; the mysterious disappearance
+of the Spartan population may possibly have suggested to him the first
+cause of his decline of States. 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 respectively to the
+three orders in the State or parts of the soul, the four virtues, the
+five forms of government. The harmony of the musical scale, which
+is elsewhere used as a symbol of the harmony of the state, is also
+indicated. For the numbers 3, 4, 5, which represent the sides of the
+Pythagorean triangle, also denote the intervals of the scale.
+
+The terms used in the statement of the problem may be explained as
+follows. A perfect number (Greek), as already stated, is one which is
+equal to the sum of its divisors. Thus 6, which is the first perfect or
+cyclical number, = 1 + 2 + 3. The words (Greek), 'terms' or 'notes,' and
+(Greek), 'intervals,' are applicable to music as well as to number and
+figure. (Greek) is the 'base' on which the whole calculation depends,
+or the 'lowest term' from which it can be worked out. The words (Greek)
+have been variously translated--'squared and cubed' (Donaldson),
+'equalling and equalled in power' (Weber), 'by involution and
+evolution,' i.e. by raising the power and extracting the root (as in
+the translation). Numbers are called 'like and unlike' (Greek) when the
+factors or the sides of the planes and cubes which they represent are
+or are not in the same ratio: e.g. 8 and 27 = 2 cubed and 3 cubed; and
+conversely. 'Waxing' (Greek) numbers, called also 'increasing' (Greek),
+are those which are exceeded by the sum of their divisors: e.g. 12
+and 18 are less than 16 and 21. 'Waning' (Greek) numbers, called also
+'decreasing' (Greek) are those which succeed the sum of their divisors:
+e.g. 8 and 27 exceed 7 and 13. The words translated 'commensurable
+and agreeable to one another' (Greek) seem to be different ways of
+describing the same relation, with more or less precision. They are
+equivalent to 'expressible in terms having the same relation to one
+another,' like the series 8, 12, 18, 27, each of which numbers is in the
+relation of (1 and 1/2) to the preceding. The 'base,' or 'fundamental
+number, which has 1/3 added to it' (1 and 1/3) = 4/3 or a musical
+fourth. (Greek) is a 'proportion' of numbers as of musical notes,
+applied either to the parts or factors of a single number or to the
+relation of one number to another. The first harmony is a 'square'
+number (Greek); the second harmony is an 'oblong' number (Greek), i.e. a
+number representing a figure of which the opposite sides only are
+equal. (Greek) = 'numbers squared from' or 'upon diameters'; (Greek)
+= 'rational,' i.e. omitting fractions, (Greek), 'irrational,' i.e.
+including fractions; e.g. 49 is a square of the rational diameter of a
+figure the side of which = 5: 50, of an irrational diameter of the same.
+For several of the explanations here given and for a good deal besides
+I am indebted to an excellent article on the Platonic Number by Dr.
+Donaldson (Proc. of the Philol. Society).
+
+The conclusions which he draws from these data are summed up by him as
+follows. Having assumed that the number of the perfect or divine cycle
+is the number of the world, and the number of the imperfect cycle the
+number of the state, he proceeds: 'The period of the world is defined
+by the perfect number 6, that of the state by the cube of that number
+or 216, which is the product of the last pair of terms in the Platonic
+Tetractys (a series of seven terms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27); and if
+we take this as the basis of our computation, we shall have two cube
+numbers (Greek), viz. 8 and 27; and the mean proportionals between
+these, viz. 12 and 18, will furnish three intervals and four terms,
+and these terms and intervals stand related to one another in the
+sesqui-altera ratio, i.e. each term is to the preceding as 3/2. Now if
+we remember that the number 216 = 8 x 27 = 3 cubed + 4 cubed + 5 cubed,
+and 3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared, we must admit that this
+number implies the numbers 3, 4, 5, to which musicians attach so much
+importance. And if we combine the ratio 4/3 with the number 5, or
+multiply the ratios of the sides by the hypotenuse, we shall by first
+squaring and then cubing obtain two expressions, which denote the ratio
+of the two last pairs of terms in the Platonic Tetractys, the former
+multiplied by the square, the latter by the cube of the number 10, the
+sum of the first four digits which constitute the Platonic Tetractys.'
+The two (Greek) he elsewhere explains as follows: 'The first (Greek) is
+(Greek), in other words (4/3 x 5) all squared = 100 x 2 squared over 3
+squared. The second (Greek), a cube of the same root, is described
+as 100 multiplied (alpha) by the rational diameter of 5 diminished
+by unity, i.e., as shown above, 48: (beta) by two incommensurable
+diameters, i.e. the two first irrationals, or 2 and 3: and (gamma) by
+the cube of 3, or 27. Thus we have (48 + 5 + 27) 100 = 1000 x 2 cubed.
+This second harmony is to be the cube of the number of which the former
+harmony is the square, and therefore must be divided by the cube of
+3. In other words, the whole expression will be: (1), for the first
+harmony, 400/9: (2), for the second harmony, 8000/27.'
+
+The reasons which have inclined me to agree with Dr. Donaldson and also
+with Schleiermacher in supposing that 216 is the Platonic number of
+births are: (1) that it coincides with the description of the number
+given in the first part of the passage (Greek...): (2) that the
+number 216 with its permutations would have been familiar to a Greek
+mathematician, though unfamiliar to us: (3) that 216 is the cube of
+6, and also the sum of 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed, the numbers 3, 4, 5
+representing the Pythagorean triangle, of which the sides when squared
+equal the square of the hypotenuse (9 + 16 = 25): (4) that it is also
+the period of the Pythagorean Metempsychosis: (5) the three ultimate
+terms or bases (3, 4, 5) of which 216 is composed answer to the third,
+fourth, fifth in the musical scale: (6) that the number 216 is the
+product of the cubes of 2 and 3, which are the two last terms in
+the Platonic Tetractys: (7) that the Pythagorean triangle is said by
+Plutarch (de Is. et Osir.), Proclus (super prima Eucl.), and Quintilian
+(de Musica) to be contained in this passage, so that the tradition
+of the school seems to point in the same direction: (8) that the
+Pythagorean triangle is called also the figure of marriage (Greek).
+
+But though agreeing with Dr. Donaldson thus far, I see no reason for
+supposing, as he does, that the first or perfect number is the world,
+the human or imperfect number the state; nor has he given any proof that
+the second harmony is a cube. Nor do I think that (Greek) can mean
+'two incommensurables,' which he arbitrarily assumes to be 2 and 3,
+but rather, as the preceding clause implies, (Greek), i.e. two square
+numbers based upon irrational diameters of a figure the side of which is
+5 = 50 x 2.
+
+The greatest objection to the translation is the sense given to the
+words (Greek), 'a base of three with a third added to it, multiplied
+by 5.' In this somewhat forced manner Plato introduces once more the
+numbers of the Pythagorean triangle. But the coincidences in the numbers
+which follow are in favour of the explanation. The first harmony of 400,
+as has been already remarked, probably represents the rulers; the second
+and oblong harmony of 7600, the people.
+
+And here we take leave of the difficulty. 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 is represented
+or presided over by a perfect or cyclical number; human generation is
+imperfect, and represented or presided over by an imperfect number or
+series of numbers. The number 5040, which is the number of the citizens
+in the Laws, is expressly based by him on utilitarian grounds, namely,
+the convenience of the number for division; it is also made up of
+the first seven digits multiplied by one another. 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 exactness to be attributed to the problem,
+the number of the tyrant in Book IX (729 = 365 x 2), and the slight
+correction of the error in the number 5040/12 (Laws), 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 he knows the great influence which 'the little matter
+of 1, 2, 3' exercises upon education. He 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 is he, 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 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. 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, who encouraged the saving desires and repressed
+the ornamental and expensive ones; presently the youth 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 that 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, and 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 puts an end to every true or modest thought or wish. Love, like
+drunkenness and madness, is a tyranny; 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? 'Nay, that you must tell me.' Well then,
+I fancy that he will live amid revelries and harlotries, and love will
+be the lord and master of the house. Many desires require much money,
+and so he spends all that he has and borrows more; and when he has
+nothing the young ravens are still in the nest in which they were
+hatched, crying for food. Love urges them on; and they must be gratified
+by force or fraud, or if not, they become painful and troublesome;
+and as the new pleasures succeed the old ones, so will the son take
+possession of the goods of his parents; if they show signs of refusing,
+he will defraud and deceive them; and if they openly resist, what then?
+'I can only say, that I should not much like to be in their place.'
+But, O heavens, Adeimantus, to think that for some new-fangled and
+unnecessary love he will give up his old father and mother, best and
+dearest of friends, or enslave them to the fancies of the hour! Truly a
+tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother! When there is no
+more to be got out of them, he turns burglar or pickpocket, or robs a
+temple. Love overmasters the thoughts of his youth, and he becomes
+in sober reality the monster that he was sometimes in sleep. He waxes
+strong in all violence and lawlessness; and is ready for any deed of
+daring that will supply the wants of his rabble-rout. 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, footpads, cut-purses,
+man-stealers of the community; or if they are able to speak, they turn
+false-witnesses and informers. 'No small catalogue of crimes truly,
+even if the perpetrators are few.' Yes, I said; but small and great are
+relative terms, and no crimes which are committed by them approach those
+of the tyrant, whom this class, growing strong and numerous, create out
+of themselves. If the people yield, well and good, but, if they resist,
+then, as before he beat his father and mother, so now he beats his
+fatherland and motherland, and places his mercenaries over them. Such
+men in their early days live with flatterers, and they themselves
+flatter others, in order to gain their ends; but they soon discard their
+followers when they have no longer any need of them; they are always
+either masters or servants,--the joys of friendship are unknown to them.
+And they are utterly treacherous and unjust, if the nature of justice be
+at all understood by us. They realize our dream; and he who is the most
+of a tyrant by nature, and leads the life of a tyrant for 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. But which is the happier? Great and terrible as the
+tyrant may appear enthroned amid 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
+panic-struck by the vain pomp of tyranny? I will suppose that he is one
+who has lived with him, and has seen him in family life, or perhaps in
+the hour of trouble and danger.
+
+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 applies to the man as well
+as to the State; for his soul is full of meanness and slavery, and the
+better part is enslaved to the worse. He cannot do what he would, and
+his mind is full of confusion; he is the very reverse of a freeman. The
+State will be poor and full of misery and sorrow; and the man's soul
+will also be poor and full of sorrows, and he will be 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;' conjecture is out of place in an enquiry of this nature. He
+is like a wealthy owner of slaves, only he has more of them than
+any private individual. You will say, 'The owners of slaves are not
+generally in any fear of them.' But why? Because the whole city is in a
+league which protects the individual. Suppose however that one of these
+owners and his household is carried off by a god into a wilderness,
+where there are no freemen to help him--will he not be in an agony of
+terror?--will he not be compelled to flatter his slaves and to promise
+them many things sore against his will? And suppose the same god who
+carried him off were to surround him with neighbours who declare that no
+man ought 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 a captive soul, who is tormented by
+a swarm of passions which he cannot indulge; living indoors always like
+a woman, and jealous of those who can go out and see 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; the meanest
+of slaves and the most abject of flatterers; wanting all things, and
+never able to satisfy his desires; 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, a misery
+to himself and to others. And so let us have a final trial and
+proclamation; need we hire a herald, or shall I proclaim the result?
+'Made the proclamation yourself.' 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. 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 includes ambition, party-feeling, love
+of reputation. Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of
+truth, and careless of money and reputation. In accordance with the
+difference of men's natures, one of these three principles is in the
+ascendant, and they have their several pleasures corresponding to them.
+Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will be found praising
+his own pleasures and depreciating those of others. The money-maker will
+contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid advantages of wealth.
+The ambitious man will despise knowledge which brings no honour; whereas
+the philosopher will regard only the fruition of truth, and will call
+other pleasures necessary rather than good. Now, how shall we decide
+between them? Is there any better criterion 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; 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 standard is only 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 rational part of the soul,
+and a life passed in such pleasure is the pleasantest. He who has a
+right to judge judges thus. Next comes the life of ambition, and, in the
+third place, that of money-making.
+
+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; on the other hand, when he is in an
+ecstasy of pleasure, 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 reliefs of
+pain, and have not only their reactions when they depart, but their
+anticipations before they come. They can be best described in a simile.
+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, 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 existence is truer than of that which has less. The
+invariable and immortal has a more real existence than the variable
+and mortal, and has a corresponding measure of knowledge and truth. The
+soul, again, 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. They are like fatted beasts,
+full of gluttony and sensuality, and ready to kill one another by reason
+of their insatiable lust; for they are not filled with true being, and
+their vessel is leaky (Gorgias). Their pleasures are mere shadows of
+pleasure, mixed with pain, coloured and intensified by contrast,
+and therefore intensely desired; and men go fighting about them, as
+Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen at
+Troy, because they know not the truth.
+
+The same may be said of the passionate element:--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
+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 3 x 3, 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 difference 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 (365 x 2 = 730); and is
+therefore concerned with human life. This is the interval between a good
+and bad man in happiness only: what must be the difference between them
+in comeliness of life 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 know the nature of justice and injustice, let us
+make an image of the soul, which will personify his words. First of all,
+fashion a multitudinous beast, having a ring of heads of all manner of
+animals, tame and wild, and able to produce and change them at pleasure.
+Suppose now another form of a lion, and another of a man; the second
+smaller than the first, the third than the second; join them together
+and cover them with a human skin, in which they are completely
+concealed. When this has been done, let us tell the supporter of
+injustice that he is feeding up the beasts and starving the man. The
+maintainer of justice, on the other hand, is trying to strengthen 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.
+
+But now, let us reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally in
+error. Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or
+rather to the God in man; the ignoble, that which subjects the man to
+the beast? And 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 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, while
+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
+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 in themselves; 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? If he had been punished,
+the brute within him would have been silenced, and the gentler element
+liberated; and he would have united temperance, justice, and wisdom in
+his soul--a union better far than any combination of bodily gifts. The
+man of understanding will honour knowledge above all; in the next
+place he will keep under his body, not only for the sake of health and
+strength, but in order to attain the most perfect harmony of body
+and soul. In the acquisition of riches, too, he will aim at order and
+harmony; he will not desire 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 reason he will only accept such honours as
+will make him a better man; any others he will decline. 'In that case,'
+said he, 'he will never be a politician.' Yes, but he will, in his own
+city; though probably not in his native country, unless by some divine
+accident. 'You 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 wishes 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 noticeable points in the 9th Book of the Republic are:--(1) the
+account of pleasure; (2) the number of the interval which divides the
+king from the tyrant; (3) the pattern which is in heaven.
+
+1. 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 pleasures of smell, and also the pleasures of hope and anticipation.
+In the previous book 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 (Greek). 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 reason. 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 further technical distinctions. Both
+in Plato and Aristotle we note the illusion under which the ancients
+fell of regarding the transience of pleasure as a proof of its
+unreality, and of confounding 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
+(Introduction 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
+immeasurable, 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.), 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
+philosophical 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; just
+as persons in our own day are apt to fancy that a statement is verified
+when it has been only thrown into an abstract form. 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 similar 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, 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 9th 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. ('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 imitation.
+I do not mind telling you in confidence that all poetry is an outrage on
+the understanding, unless the hearers have that balm of knowledge which
+heals error. I have loved Homer ever since I was a boy, and even now
+he appears to me to be the great 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, will you explain what is imitation, for really I do not
+understand? 'How likely then that I should understand!' That might very
+well be, for the duller often sees better than the keener eye. '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, who makes not only vessels but plants and
+animals, himself, the earth and heaven, and things in heaven and 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 reflection of the sun, and the
+earth, or anything else--there now you have made them. 'Yes, but only
+in appearance.' 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 need we wonder
+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. 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 is rather the imitator of what the
+other two make; he has to do with a creation which is thrice removed
+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 other artist,
+although he knows nothing of their arts; and this with sufficient skill
+to deceive children or simple people. Suppose now that somebody came to
+us and told us, how he had met a man who knew all that everybody knows,
+and better than anybody:--should we not infer him to be a simpleton who,
+having no discernment of truth and falsehood, had 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 they 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.'
+
+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 removed 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 invention attributed to you, as there is to Thales
+and Anacharsis? Or is there any Homeric way of life, such as the
+Pythagorean was, in which you instructed men, and which is called after
+you? 'No, indeed; and Creophylus (Flesh-child) was even 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,
+but could this ever have happened if Homer had really been the educator
+of Hellas? Would he not have had many devoted followers? If Protagoras
+and Prodicus can persuade their contemporaries that no one can manage
+house or State without them, is it 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 men have compelled them
+to stay where they were, or 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 delineate
+any art in the colours of language, 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 appearance. The painter paints, and
+the artificer makes a bridle and reins, but neither understands the use
+of them--the knowledge 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; 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: Objects are differently 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 save our bewildered minds 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. 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.
+'In the latter case.' Feeling would lead him to indulge his sorrow, but
+reason and law control him and enjoin patience; since he cannot know
+whether his affliction is good or evil, and no human thing is of
+any great consequence, while sorrow is certainly a hindrance to good
+counsel. For when we stumble, we should not, like children, make an
+uproar; we should take the measures which reason prescribes, not raising
+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 no experience of her. Thus the poet is like the
+painter in two ways: 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 some passage in which a hero laments his sufferings at tedious
+length, you know that we sympathize with him and praise the poet; and
+yet in our own sorrows such an exhibition of feeling is regarded as
+effeminate and unmanly (Ion). Now, ought a man to feel pleasure in
+seeing another do what he hates and abominates in himself? Is he not
+giving 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 the inevitable consequence is that 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; 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 all life should be regulated by his
+precepts, we may allow the excellence of their intentions, and agree
+with them in thinking Homer a great poet and tragedian. But we shall
+continue to prohibit 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 grounds for expelling poetry; but lest she should charge
+us with discourtesy, let us also make an apology to her. We will remind
+her that there is an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, of
+which there are many traces in the writings of the poets, such as the
+saying of 'the she-dog, yelping at her mistress,' and 'the philosophers
+who are ready to circumvent Zeus,' and 'the philosophers who are
+paupers.' Nevertheless we bear her no ill-will, and will gladly allow
+her to return upon condition that she makes a defence of herself in
+verse; and her supporters who are not poets may speak in prose. We
+confess her charms; but if she cannot show that she is useful as well
+as delightful, like rational lovers, we must renounce our love,
+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--no less than the good
+or evil of a 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 things greater still?' Not, perhaps, in this brief
+span of life: but should an immortal being care about anything short of
+eternity? 'I do not understand what you mean?' Do you not know that the
+soul is immortal? 'Surely you are not prepared to prove that?' Indeed I
+am. 'Then let me hear this argument, of which you make so light.'
+
+You would admit that everything has an element of good and of evil. In
+all things there is an inherent corruption; and if this cannot destroy
+them, nothing else will. The soul too has her own corrupting principles,
+which are injustice, 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,
+brought any nearer to death. Nothing which was not destroyed from within
+ever perished by external affection of evil. The body, which is one
+thing, cannot be destroyed by food, which is another, unless the badness
+of the food is communicated to the body. Neither can the soul, which
+is one thing, be corrupted by the body, which is another, unless she
+herself is infected. And as no bodily evil can infect the soul, neither
+can any bodily evil, whether disease or violence, or any other destroy
+the soul, unless it can be shown to render her unholy and unjust. But no
+one will ever prove that the souls of men become more unjust when
+they die. If a person has the audacity to say the contrary, 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 rather believe that
+the injustice which murders others may tend to quicken and stimulate
+the life of the unjust.' You are quite right. If sin which is her own
+natural and inherent evil cannot destroy the soul, hardly will anything
+else destroy her. But the soul which cannot be destroyed either by
+internal or external evil must be immortal and everlasting. And 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, and so behold justice and injustice in
+their own nature, she must be viewed by the light of reason pure as at
+birth, or as she is reflected in philosophy when holding converse with
+the divine and immortal and eternal. In her present condition we see her
+only like the sea-god Glaucus, bruised and maimed in the sea which is
+the world, and covered with shells and stones which are incrusted upon
+her from the entertainments of earth.
+
+Thus far, as the argument required, we have said nothing of the rewards
+and honours which the poets attribute to justice; we have contented
+ourselves with showing that justice in herself is best for the soul in
+herself, even if a man should put on a Gyges' ring and have the helmet
+of Hades too. And now you shall repay me what you borrowed; 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 since 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 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 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 breaks down before he
+reaches the goal, and slinks away in dishonour; 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 bear rule in the city, they marry and give in marriage to
+whom they will; and the evils which you attributed to the unfortunate
+just, do really fall in the end on the unjust, although, as you implied,
+their sufferings are better veiled in silence.
+
+But all the blessings of this present life are as nothing when compared
+with those which await good men after death. 'I should like to hear
+about them.' Come, then, and I will tell you the story of Er, the son of
+Armenius, a valiant man. He was supposed to have died in battle, but ten
+days afterwards his body was found untouched by corruption and sent home
+for burial. On the twelfth day he was placed on the funeral pyre and
+there he came to life again, and told what he had seen in the world
+below. He said that his soul went with a great company to a place, in
+which there were two chasms near together in the earth beneath, and two
+corresponding chasms 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, while the unjust, having the seal behind, were bidden to descend
+by the way on the left hand. Him they told to look and listen, as he was
+to be their messenger to men from the world below. And he beheld and saw
+the souls departing after judgment at either chasm; some who came from
+earth, were worn and travel-stained; others, who came from heaven,
+were clean and bright. They seemed glad to meet and rest awhile in the
+meadow; here they discoursed with one another of what they had seen in
+the other world. Those who came from earth wept at the remembrance of
+their sorrows, but the spirits from above spoke of glorious sights and
+heavenly bliss. He said that for every evil deed they were punished
+tenfold--now the journey was of a thousand years' duration, because the
+life of man was reckoned as a hundred years--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?
+(This Ardiaeus was a cruel tyrant, who had murdered his father, and his
+elder brother, a thousand years before.) Another spirit answered,
+'He comes not hither, and will never come. And I myself,' he added,
+'actually saw this terrible sight. At the entrance of the chasm, as we
+were about to reascend, Ardiaeus appeared, and some other sinners--most
+of whom had been tyrants, but not all--and just as they fancied that
+they were returning to life, the chasm gave a roar, and then wild,
+fiery-looking men who knew the meaning of the sound, seized him and
+several 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 like wool, 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.
+
+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 line of
+light, in colour like a rainbow, only brighter and clearer. One day
+more brought them to the place, and they saw that this was the column
+of light which binds together the whole universe. The ends of the column
+were fastened to heaven, and from them hung 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. The whorl was in form
+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. The outermost had the rim broadest, and the inner whorls were
+smaller and smaller, and had their rims narrower. The largest (the fixed
+stars) was spangled--the seventh (the sun) was brightest--the eighth
+(the 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 circles;
+Lachesis in turn putting forth her hand from time to time to guide both
+of them. On their arrival the pilgrims went to Lachesis, and there was
+an interpreter who arranged them, and taking from her knees lots, and
+samples of lives, got up into a pulpit and said: 'Mortal souls, hear
+the words 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 of 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. Here, 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 knowledge 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 happiness 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 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. Like many another, he 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. But if a
+man had followed philosophy while upon earth, and had been moderately
+fortunate in his lot, he might not only be happy here, but his
+pilgrimage both from and to this world 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 previous 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 taking 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 sought the lot of a private man, which lay neglected and
+despised, and when he found it he went away rejoicing, and said that if
+he had been first instead of last, his choice would have been the same.
+Men, too, were seen passing into animals, and wild and tame animals
+changing into one another.
+
+When all the souls had chosen they went to Lachesis, who sent with 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 plain of
+Forgetfulness 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 found himself
+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 Forgetfulness, 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 analyzed, 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 especially
+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 inseparably
+associated with the impurities of the old Hellenic mythology; 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 circumstances
+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, 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 Aeschylus and Sophocles in the
+generation which followed them. Aristophanes, in one of his later
+comedies (Frogs), 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 Aeschylus and the noble and gentle
+Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their 'theology'
+(Rep.), these 'minor poets' must have been contemptible and intolerable.
+There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a sense of
+the decline and decay both in literature and 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 (Laws).
+
+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
+characters 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 is the slave of his art, not the
+master of it. Taking this view Plato is more decided in his expulsion of
+the dramatic than of the epic poets, though he must have known that
+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 weak or 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
+measure; 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
+ennoble 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 (Rembrandt),
+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?' (Statesman.)
+
+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 giving expression to them;
+and that they often gain strength when pent up within our own breast.
+It is not every indulgence of the feelings which is 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 utterance in the words of poets. Every one would
+acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and
+elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by
+the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, 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. He himself
+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.) 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, were the Sophists of their day;
+and his dislike of the one class is reflected on the other. He regards
+them both 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 into the world
+to convince men'--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).
+
+The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things which
+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, etc., than in the class man, horse,
+bed, etc.; 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 (Greek) 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 corruption 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, 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 evil the evils and errors of mankind; to him they are
+personified in the rhetoricians, sophists, poets, rulers 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
+disposed 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
+incapable 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 (Statesman) admits rhetoric to be the
+handmaiden of Politics, and proposes to find in the strain of law (Laws)
+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, 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 Mahometans, 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 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
+Mahometan 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 thoughts,
+when they become familiarized to us, are always tending to pass into the
+form of feeling.
+
+Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society.
+But he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he is protesting
+against the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we might protest
+against the want of serious purpose in modern fiction, against the
+unseemliness or extravagance of some of our poets or 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 imperceptibly 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 goodness and truth among men: a strain which
+should renew the youth of the world, and bring back the ages in which
+the poet was man'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 civilisation,--which might elicit the
+simple principles, or, as Plato would have called them, the essential
+forms, of truth and justice 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),
+be not only written, but lived by us. A few such strains have been
+heard among men in the tragedies of Aeschylus 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 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.), 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 truth 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 (Rep.). It may be
+compared with those other paradoxes 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.)...
+
+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. Vice is her own proper evil; and if
+she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be destroyed 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.). 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...
+
+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 (Haug, Avesta). 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 seven orbits of the planets and the fixed stars;
+this is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns on the knees of
+Necessity; the revolutions of the seven orbits contained in the cylinder
+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 spindle; but it is doubtful whether this is the
+continuation of the column of light, from which the pilgrims contemplate
+the heavens; the words of Plato imply that they are connected, but
+not the same. The column itself is clearly not of adamant. The spindle
+(which is of adamant) is fastened to the ends of the chains which
+extend to the middle of the column of light--this column is said to hold
+together the heaven; but whether it hangs from the spindle, or is at
+right angles to it, is not explained. 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, and therefore is necessarily inconsistent with itself. The
+column of light is 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 or picture of the heavens given in 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 of the whole. The relative thickness of the rims is
+perhaps designed to express the relative distances of the planets.
+Plato probably intended to represent the earth, from which Er and his
+companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place; but whether
+or not herself revolving, unless this is implied in the revolution of
+the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus). The spectator may 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, may be overcome by the wisdom
+of man, if he knows how to choose aright; there is a worse enemy to man
+than chance; this enemy is 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 Coleridge says, 'Common sense
+is intolerable which is not based on metaphysics,' so Plato would have
+said, 'Habit 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
+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
+(Pol.). 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 the first choice 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 probability 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: (1) 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 (2) the paradoxes of the Republic, as they have been termed by
+Morgenstern: (a) the community of property; (b) of families; (c) the
+rule of philosophers; (d) 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 (3) the subject of education as conceived
+by Plato, bringing together in a general view the education of youth
+and the education of after-life; (4) we may note further some essential
+differences between ancient and modern politics which are suggested by
+the Republic; (5) we may compare the Politicus and the Laws; (6) we may
+observe the influence exercised by Plato on his imitators; and (7)
+take occasion to consider the nature and value of political, and (8) of
+religious ideals.
+
+1. Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an Hellenic State
+(Book V). Many of his regulations are characteristically Spartan; such
+as the prohibition of gold and silver, the common meals of the men, the
+military training of the youth, the gymnastic exercises of the women.
+The life of Sparta was the life of a camp (Laws), enforced even more
+rigidly in time of peace than in war; the citizens of Sparta, like
+Plato's, were forbidden to trade--they were to be soldiers and not
+shopkeepers. Nowhere else in Greece was the individual so completely
+subjected to the State; the time when he was to marry, the education of
+his children, the clothes which he was to wear, the food which he was
+to eat, were all 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
+between men and youths, or of men with one another, as affording
+incentives to bravery, is also Spartan; in Sparta too a nearer approach
+was made than in any other Greek State to equality of the sexes, and
+to community of property; and 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 produced 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 common 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 are the only kind of music admitted into the ideal
+State, were the only kind which was permitted at Sparta. The Spartans,
+though an unpoetical race, were nevertheless lovers of poetry; they had
+been stirred by the Elegiac strains of Tyrtaeus, they had crowded around
+Hippias to hear his recitals of Homer; but in this they resembled the
+citizens of the timocratic rather than of the ideal State. The council
+of elder men also corresponds to the Spartan gerousia; 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 attached 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 (Greek)
+of the Spartans attracted them, that is to say, not the goodness
+of their laws, but the spirit of order and loyalty which prevailed.
+Fascinated by the idea, citizens of Athens 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 fond desire of a past which never has
+been, or of a future which never will be,--these are aspirations of the
+human mind which are often felt among ourselves. Such feelings 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--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 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 harmonized, or of a federation of Hellas or
+the world in which different nations or States 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 myth 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 polis, partly on the actual
+circumstances of Hellas in that age. 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
+Pythagoras, like the Catholic monastic orders, showed the power which
+the mind of an individual might exercise over his contemporaries, and
+may have naturally suggested 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; it
+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 (Greek),
+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
+(Greek), were required to submit to a severe training in order to
+prepare the way for the education of the other members of the community.
+Long after the dissolution of the Order, eminent Pythagoreans, such as
+Archytas of Tarentum, retained their political influence over the cities
+of Magna Graecia. There was much here that was suggestive to the kindred
+spirit of Plato, who had doubtless meditated deeply on the 'way of life
+of Pythagoras' (Rep.) and his followers. Slight traces of Pythagoreanism
+are to be found in the mystical number of the State, in the number which
+expresses the interval between the king and the tyrant, in the doctrine
+of transmigration, in the music of the spheres, as well as in the great
+though secondary importance ascribed to mathematics in education.
+
+But as in his philosophy, so also in the form of his State, he goes far
+beyond the old Pythagoreans. He attempts a task really impossible, which
+is to unite the past of Greek history with the future of philosophy,
+analogous to that other impossibility, which has often been the dream
+of Christendom, the attempt to unite the past history of Europe with
+the kingdom of Christ. Nothing actually existing in the world at all
+resembles Plato's ideal State; nor does he himself imagine that such
+a State is possible. This he repeats again and again; e.g. in the
+Republic, or in the Laws where, casting a glance back on the Republic,
+he admits that the perfect state of communism and philosophy was
+impossible in his own age, though still to be retained as a pattern.
+The same doubt is implied in the earnestness with which he argues in the
+Republic that ideals are none the worse because they cannot be realized
+in fact, and in the chorus of laughter, which like a breaking wave will,
+as he anticipates, greet the mention of his proposals; though like
+other writers of fiction, he uses all his art to give reality to his
+inventions. When asked how the ideal polity can come into being, he
+answers ironically, 'When one son of a king becomes a philosopher'; he
+designates the fiction of the earth-born men as 'a noble lie'; and when
+the structure is finally complete, he fairly tells you that his Republic
+is a vision only, which in some sense may have reality, but not in the
+vulgar one of a reign of philosophers upon earth. It has been said that
+Plato flies as well as walks, but this falls short of the truth; for he
+flies and walks at the same time, and is in the air and on firm ground
+in successive instants.
+
+Niebuhr has asked a trifling question, which may be briefly noticed in
+this place--Was Plato a good citizen? If by this is meant, Was he loyal
+to Athenian institutions?--he can hardly be said to be the friend of
+democracy: but neither is he the friend of any other existing form of
+government; all of them he regarded as 'states of faction' (Laws); none
+attained to his ideal of a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects, which
+seems indeed more nearly to describe democracy than any other; and the
+worst of them is tyranny. The truth is, that the question has hardly any
+meaning when applied to a great philosopher whose writings are not meant
+for a particular age and country, but for all time and all mankind. The
+decline of Athenian politics was probably the motive which led Plato to
+frame an ideal State, and the Republic may be regarded as reflecting the
+departing glory of Hellas. As well might we complain of St. Augustine,
+whose great work 'The City of God' originated in a similar motive, for
+not being loyal to the Roman Empire. Even a nearer parallel might be
+afforded by the first Christians, who cannot fairly be charged with
+being bad citizens because, though 'subject to the higher powers,' they
+were looking forward to a city which is in heaven.
+
+2. The idea of the perfect State is full of paradox when judged of
+according to the ordinary notions of mankind. The paradoxes of one age
+have been said to become the commonplaces of the next; but the
+paradoxes of Plato are at least as paradoxical to us as they were to his
+contemporaries. The modern world has either sneered at them as absurd,
+or denounced them as unnatural and immoral; men have been pleased to
+find in Aristotle's criticisms of them the anticipation of their own
+good sense. The wealthy and cultivated classes have disliked and also
+dreaded them; they have pointed with satisfaction to the failure of
+efforts to realize them in practice. Yet since they are the thoughts of
+one of the greatest of human intelligences, and of one who had done
+most to elevate morality and religion, they seem to deserve a better
+treatment at our hands. We may have to address the public, as Plato does
+poetry, and assure them that we mean no harm to existing institutions.
+There are serious errors which have a side of truth and which therefore
+may fairly demand a careful consideration: there are truths mixed with
+error of which we may indeed say, 'The half is better than the whole.'
+Yet 'the half' may be an important contribution to the study of human
+nature.
+
+(a) The first paradox is the community of goods, which is mentioned
+slightly at the end of the third Book, and seemingly, as Aristotle
+observes, is confined to the guardians; at least no mention is made of
+the other classes. But the omission is not of any real significance, and
+probably arises out of the plan of the work, which prevents the writer
+from entering into details.
+
+Aristotle censures the community of property much in the spirit of
+modern political economy, as tending to repress industry, and as doing
+away with the spirit of benevolence. Modern writers almost refuse to
+consider the subject, which is supposed to have been long ago settled
+by the common opinion of mankind. But it must be remembered that the
+sacredness of property is a notion far more fixed in modern than
+in ancient times. The world has grown older, and is therefore more
+conservative. Primitive society offered many examples of land held in
+common, either by a tribe or by a township, and such may probably
+have been the original form of landed tenure. Ancient legislators had
+invented various modes of dividing and preserving the divisions of land
+among the citizens; according to Aristotle there were nations who held
+the land in common and divided the produce, and there were others who
+divided the land and stored the produce in common. The evils of debt and
+the inequality of property were far greater in ancient than in modern
+times, and the accidents to which property was subject from war, or
+revolution, or taxation, or other legislative interference, were also
+greater. All these circumstances gave property a less fixed and sacred
+character. The early Christians are believed to have held their property
+in common, and the principle is sanctioned by the words of Christ
+himself, and has been maintained as a counsel of perfection in almost
+all ages of the Church. Nor have there been wanting instances of modern
+enthusiasts who have made a religion of communism; in every age of
+religious excitement notions like Wycliffe's 'inheritance of grace'
+have tended to prevail. A like spirit, but fiercer and more violent,
+has appeared in politics. 'The preparation of the Gospel of peace' soon
+becomes the red flag of Republicanism.
+
+We can hardly judge what effect Plato's views would have upon his
+own contemporaries; they would perhaps have seemed to them only an
+exaggeration of the Spartan commonwealth. Even modern writers would
+acknowledge that the right of private property is based on expediency,
+and may be interfered with in a variety of ways for the public good. Any
+other mode of vesting property which was found to be more advantageous,
+would in time acquire the same basis of right; 'the most useful,' in
+Plato's words, 'would be the most sacred.' The lawyers and ecclesiastics
+of former ages would have spoken of property as a sacred institution.
+But they only meant by such language to oppose the greatest amount
+of resistance to any invasion of the rights of individuals and of the
+Church.
+
+When we consider the question, without any fear of immediate application
+to practice, in the spirit of Plato's Republic, are we quite sure that
+the received notions of property are the best? Is the distribution of
+wealth which is customary in civilized countries the most favourable
+that can be conceived for the education and development of the mass
+of mankind? Can 'the spectator of all time and all existence' be quite
+convinced that one or two thousand years hence, great changes will not
+have taken place in the rights of property, or even that the very notion
+of property, beyond what is necessary for personal maintenance, may not
+have disappeared? This was a distinction familiar to Aristotle, though
+likely to be laughed at among ourselves. Such a change would not be
+greater than some other changes through which the world has passed
+in the transition from ancient to modern society, for example, the
+emancipation of the serfs in Russia, or the abolition of slavery in
+America and the West Indies; and not so great as the difference which
+separates the Eastern village community from the Western world. To
+accomplish such a revolution in the course of a few centuries, would
+imply a rate of progress not more rapid than has actually taken place
+during the last fifty or sixty years. The kingdom of Japan underwent
+more change in five or six years than Europe in five or six hundred.
+Many opinions and beliefs which have been cherished among ourselves
+quite as strongly as the sacredness of property have passed away; and
+the most untenable propositions respecting the right of bequests or
+entail have been maintained with as much fervour as the most moderate.
+Some one will be heard to ask whether a state of society can be final in
+which the interests of thousands are perilled on the life or character
+of a single person. And many will indulge the hope that our present
+condition may, after all, be only transitional, and may conduct to a
+higher, in which property, besides ministering to the enjoyment of the
+few, may also furnish the means of the highest culture to all, and will
+be a greater benefit to the public generally, and also more under the
+control of public authority. There may come a time when the saying,
+'Have I not a right to do what I will with my own?' will appear to be a
+barbarous relic of individualism;--when the possession of a part may be
+a greater blessing to each and all than the possession of the whole is
+now to any one.
+
+Such reflections appear visionary to the eye of the practical statesman,
+but they are within the range of possibility to the philosopher. He can
+imagine that in some distant age or clime, and through the influence of
+some individual, the notion of common property may or might have sunk
+as deep into the heart of a race, and have become as fixed to them, as
+private property is to ourselves. He knows that this latter institution
+is not more than four or five thousand years old: may not the end revert
+to the beginning? In our own age even Utopias affect the spirit of
+legislation, and an abstract idea may exercise a great influence on
+practical politics.
+
+The objections that would be generally urged against Plato's community
+of property, are the old ones of Aristotle, that motives for exertion
+would be taken away, and that disputes would arise when each was
+dependent upon all. Every man would produce as little and consume as
+much as he liked. The experience of civilized nations has hitherto been
+adverse to Socialism. The effort is too great for human nature; men try
+to live in common, but the personal feeling is always breaking in. On
+the other hand it may be doubted whether our present notions of property
+are not conventional, for they differ in different countries and in
+different states of society. We boast of an individualism which is not
+freedom, but rather an artificial result of the industrial state
+of modern Europe. The individual is nominally free, but he is also
+powerless in a world bound hand and foot in the chains of economic
+necessity. Even if we cannot expect the mass of mankind to become
+disinterested, at any rate we observe in them a power of organization
+which fifty years ago would never have been suspected. The same forces
+which have revolutionized the political system of Europe, may effect a
+similar change in the social and industrial relations of mankind. And if
+we suppose the influence of some good as well as neutral motives working
+in the community, there will be no absurdity in expecting that the
+mass of mankind having power, and becoming enlightened about the higher
+possibilities of human life, when they learn how much more is attainable
+for all than is at present the possession of a favoured few, may pursue
+the common interest with an intelligence and persistency which mankind
+have hitherto never seen.
+
+Now that the world has once been set in motion, and is no longer held
+fast under the tyranny of custom and ignorance; now that criticism has
+pierced the veil of tradition and the past no longer overpowers the
+present,--the progress of civilization may be expected to be far greater
+and swifter than heretofore. Even at our present rate of speed the point
+at which we may arrive in two or three generations is beyond the power
+of imagination to foresee. There are forces in the world which work, not
+in an arithmetical, but in a geometrical ratio of increase.
+Education, to use the expression of Plato, moves like a wheel with
+an ever-multiplying rapidity. Nor can we say how great may be its
+influence, when it becomes universal,--when it has been inherited by
+many generations,--when it is freed from the trammels of superstition
+and rightly adapted to the wants and capacities of different classes
+of men and women. Neither do we know how much more the co-operation of
+minds or of hands may be capable of accomplishing, whether in labour or
+in study. The resources of the natural sciences are not half-developed
+as yet; the soil of the earth, instead of growing more barren, may
+become many times more fertile than hitherto; the uses of machinery far
+greater, and also more minute than at present. New secrets of physiology
+may be revealed, deeply affecting human nature in its innermost
+recesses. The standard of health may be raised and the lives of men
+prolonged by sanitary and medical knowledge. There may be peace, there
+may be leisure, there may be innocent refreshments of many kinds. The
+ever-increasing power of locomotion may join the extremes of earth.
+There may be mysterious workings of the human mind, such as occur only
+at great crises of history. The East and the West may meet together, and
+all nations may contribute their thoughts and their experience to the
+common stock of humanity. Many other elements enter into a speculation
+of this kind. But it is better to make an end of them. For such
+reflections appear to the majority far-fetched, and to men of science,
+commonplace.
+
+(b) Neither to the mind of Plato nor of Aristotle did the doctrine of
+community of property present at all the same difficulty, or appear to
+be the same violation of the common Hellenic sentiment, as the community
+of wives and children. This paradox he prefaces by another proposal,
+that the occupations of men and women shall be the same, and that to
+this end they shall have a common training and education. Male and
+female animals have the same pursuits--why not also the two sexes of
+man?
+
+But have we not here fallen into a contradiction? for we were saying
+that different natures should have different pursuits. How then can men
+and women have the same? And is not the proposal inconsistent with our
+notion of the division of labour?--These objections are no sooner raised
+than answered; for, according to Plato, there is no organic difference
+between men and women, but only the accidental one that men beget and
+women bear children. Following the analogy of the other animals, he
+contends that all natural gifts are scattered about indifferently among
+both sexes, though there may be a superiority of degree on the part of
+the men. The objection on the score of decency to their taking part
+in the same gymnastic exercises, is met by Plato's assertion that the
+existing feeling is a matter of habit.
+
+That Plato should have emancipated himself from the ideas of his own
+country and from the example of the East, shows a wonderful independence
+of mind. He is conscious that women are half the human race, in some
+respects the more important half (Laws); and for the sake both of men
+and women he desires to raise the woman to a higher level of existence.
+He brings, not sentiment, but philosophy to bear upon a question which
+both in ancient and modern times has been chiefly regarded in the light
+of custom or feeling. The Greeks had noble conceptions of womanhood
+in the goddesses Athene and Artemis, and in the heroines Antigone and
+Andromache. But these ideals had no counterpart in actual life. The
+Athenian woman was in no way the equal of her husband; she was not the
+entertainer of his guests or the mistress of his house, but only his
+housekeeper and the mother of his children. She took no part in military
+or political matters; nor is there any instance in the later ages of
+Greece of a woman becoming famous in literature. 'Hers is the greatest
+glory who has the least renown among men,' is the historian's conception
+of feminine excellence. A very different ideal of womanhood is held up
+by Plato to the world; she is to be the companion of the man, and to
+share with him in the toils of war and in the cares of government. She
+is to be similarly trained both in bodily and mental exercises. She
+is to lose as far as possible the incidents of maternity and the
+characteristics of the female sex.
+
+The modern antagonist of the equality of the sexes would argue that the
+differences between men and women are not confined to the single point
+urged by Plato; that sensibility, gentleness, grace, are the qualities
+of women, while energy, strength, higher intelligence, are to be looked
+for in men. And the criticism is just: the differences affect the whole
+nature, and are not, as Plato supposes, confined to a single point. But
+neither can we say how far these differences are due to education and
+the opinions of mankind, or physically inherited from the habits and
+opinions of former generations. Women have been always taught, not
+exactly that they are slaves, but that they are in an inferior position,
+which is also supposed to have compensating advantages; and to this
+position they have conformed. It is also true that the physical form may
+easily change in the course of generations through the mode of life; and
+the weakness or delicacy, which was once a matter of opinion, may become
+a physical fact. The characteristics of sex vary greatly in different
+countries and ranks of society, and at different ages in the same
+individuals. Plato may have been right in denying that there was any
+ultimate difference in the sexes of man other than that which exists in
+animals, because all other differences may be conceived to disappear in
+other states of society, or under different circumstances of life and
+training.
+
+The first wave having been passed, we proceed to the second--community
+of wives and children. 'Is it possible? Is it desirable?' For as Glaucon
+intimates, and as we far more strongly insist, 'Great doubts may
+be entertained about both these points.' Any free discussion of the
+question is impossible, and mankind are perhaps right in not allowing
+the ultimate bases of social life to be examined. Few of us can safely
+enquire into the things which nature hides, any more than we can
+dissect our own bodies. Still, the manner in which Plato arrived at his
+conclusions should be considered. For here, as Mr. Grote has remarked,
+is a wonderful thing, that one of the wisest and best of men should have
+entertained ideas of morality which are wholly at variance with our
+own. And if we would do Plato justice, we must examine carefully the
+character of his proposals. First, we may observe that the relations of
+the sexes supposed by him are the reverse of licentious: he seems rather
+to aim at an impossible strictness. Secondly, he conceives the family
+to be the natural enemy of the state; and he entertains the serious
+hope that an universal brotherhood may take the place of private
+interests--an aspiration which, although not justified by experience,
+has possessed many noble minds. On the other hand, there is no sentiment
+or imagination in the connections which men and women are supposed by
+him to form; human beings return to the level of the animals, neither
+exalting to heaven, nor yet abusing the natural instincts. All that
+world of poetry and fancy which the passion of love has called forth
+in modern literature and romance would have been banished by Plato. The
+arrangements of marriage in the Republic are directed to one object--the
+improvement of the race. In successive generations a great development
+both of bodily and mental qualities might be possible. The analogy of
+animals tends to show that mankind can within certain limits receive a
+change of nature. And as in animals we should commonly choose the best
+for breeding, and destroy the others, so there must be a selection made
+of the human beings whose lives are worthy to be preserved.
+
+We start back horrified from this Platonic ideal, in the belief, first,
+that the higher feelings of humanity are far too strong to be crushed
+out; secondly, that if the plan could be carried into execution we
+should be poorly recompensed by improvements in the breed for the loss
+of the best things in life. The greatest regard for the weakest and
+meanest of human beings--the infant, the criminal, the insane, the
+idiot, truly seems to us one of the noblest results of Christianity. We
+have learned, though as yet imperfectly, that the individual man has an
+endless value in the sight of God, and that we honour Him when we honour
+the darkened and disfigured image of Him (Laws). This is the lesson
+which Christ taught in a parable when He said, 'Their angels do always
+behold the face of My Father which is in heaven.' Such lessons are only
+partially realized in any age; they were foreign to the age of Plato, as
+they have very different degrees of strength in different countries or
+ages of the Christian world. To the Greek the family was a religious and
+customary institution binding the members together by a tie inferior
+in strength to that of friendship, and having a less solemn and sacred
+sound than that of country. The relationship which existed on the lower
+level of custom, Plato imagined that he was raising to the higher level
+of nature and reason; while from the modern and Christian point of view
+we regard him as sanctioning murder and destroying the first principles
+of morality.
+
+The great error in these and similar speculations is that the difference
+between man and the animals is forgotten in them. The human being
+is regarded with the eye of a dog- or bird-fancier, or at best of a
+slave-owner; the higher or human qualities are left out. The breeder
+of animals aims chiefly at size or speed or strength; in a few cases at
+courage or temper; most often the fitness of the animal for food is the
+great desideratum. But mankind are not bred to be eaten, nor yet for
+their superiority in fighting or in running or in drawing carts. Neither
+does the improvement of the human race consist merely in the increase
+of the bones and flesh, but in the growth and enlightenment of the mind.
+Hence there must be 'a marriage of true minds' as well as of bodies, of
+imagination and reason as well as of lusts and instincts. Men and women
+without feeling or imagination are justly called brutes; yet Plato
+takes away these qualities and puts nothing in their place, not even
+the desire of a noble offspring, since parents are not to know their own
+children. The most important transaction of social life, he who is the
+idealist philosopher converts into the most brutal. For the pair are to
+have no relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their
+children are not theirs, but the state's; nor is any tie of affection to
+unite them. Yet here the analogy of the animals might have saved
+Plato from a gigantic error, if he had 'not lost sight of his own
+illustration.' For the 'nobler sort of birds and beasts' nourish and
+protect their offspring and are faithful to one another.
+
+An eminent physiologist thinks it worth while 'to try and place life
+on a physical basis.' But should not life rest on the moral rather than
+upon the physical? The higher comes first, then the lower, first the
+human and rational, afterwards the animal. Yet they are not absolutely
+divided; and in times of sickness or moments of self-indulgence they
+seem to be only different aspects of a common human nature which
+includes them both. Neither is the moral the limit of the physical,
+but the expansion and enlargement of it,--the highest form which the
+physical is capable of receiving. As Plato would say, the body does not
+take care of the body, and still less of the mind, but the mind takes
+care of both. In all human action not that which is common to man and
+the animals is the characteristic element, but that which distinguishes
+him from them. Even if we admit the physical basis, and resolve all
+virtue into health of body 'la facon que notre sang circule,' still on
+merely physical grounds we must come back to ideas. Mind and reason and
+duty and conscience, under these or other names, are always reappearing.
+There cannot be health of body without health of mind; nor health of
+mind without the sense of duty and the love of truth (Charm).
+
+That the greatest of ancient philosophers should in his regulations
+about marriage have fallen into the error of separating body and mind,
+does indeed appear surprising. Yet the wonder is not so much that Plato
+should have entertained ideas of morality which to our own age are
+revolting, but that he should have contradicted himself to an extent
+which is hardly credible, falling in an instant from the heaven of
+idealism into the crudest animalism. Rejoicing in the newly found gift
+of reflection, he appears to have thought out a subject about which he
+had better have followed the enlightened feeling of his own age. The
+general sentiment of Hellas was opposed to his monstrous fancy. The old
+poets, and in later time the tragedians, showed no want of respect for
+the family, on which much of their religion was based. But the example
+of Sparta, and perhaps in some degree the tendency to defy public
+opinion, seems to have misled him. He will make one family out of all
+the families of the state. He will select the finest specimens of men
+and women and breed from these only.
+
+Yet because the illusion is always returning (for the animal part of
+human nature will from time to time assert itself in the disguise of
+philosophy as well as of poetry), and also because any departure from
+established morality, even where this is not intended, is apt to be
+unsettling, it may be worth while to draw out a little more at length
+the objections to the Platonic marriage. In the first place, history
+shows that wherever polygamy has been largely allowed the race has
+deteriorated. One man to one woman is the law of God and nature. Nearly
+all the civilized peoples of the world at some period before the age of
+written records, have become monogamists; and the step when once taken
+has never been retraced. The exceptions occurring among Brahmins or
+Mahometans or the ancient Persians, are of that sort which may be said
+to prove the rule. The connexions formed between superior and
+inferior races hardly ever produce a noble offspring, because they are
+licentious; and because the children in such cases usually despise the
+mother and are neglected by the father who is ashamed of them.
+Barbarous nations when they are introduced by Europeans to vice die
+out; polygamist peoples either import and adopt children from other
+countries, or dwindle in numbers, or both. Dynasties and aristocracies
+which have disregarded the laws of nature have decreased in numbers and
+degenerated in stature; 'mariages de convenance' leave their enfeebling
+stamp on the offspring of them (King Lear). The marriage of near
+relations, or the marrying in and in of the same family tends constantly
+to weakness or idiocy in the children, sometimes assuming the form as
+they grow older of passionate licentiousness. The common prostitute
+rarely has any offspring. By such unmistakable evidence is the authority
+of morality asserted in the relations of the sexes: and so many more
+elements enter into this 'mystery' than are dreamed of by Plato and some
+other philosophers.
+
+Recent enquirers have indeed arrived at the conclusion that among
+primitive tribes there existed a community of wives as of property, and
+that the captive taken by the spear was the only wife or slave whom any
+man was permitted to call his own. The partial existence of such customs
+among some of the lower races of man, and the survival of peculiar
+ceremonies in the marriages of some civilized nations, are thought to
+furnish a proof of similar institutions having been once universal.
+There can be no question that the study of anthropology has considerably
+changed our views respecting the first appearance of man upon the earth.
+We know more about the aborigines of the world than formerly, but our
+increasing knowledge shows above all things how little we know. With all
+the helps which written monuments afford, we do but faintly realize the
+condition of man two thousand or three thousand years ago. Of what his
+condition was when removed to a distance 200,000 or 300,000 years, when
+the majority of mankind were lower and nearer the animals than any tribe
+now existing upon the earth, we cannot even entertain conjecture. Plato
+(Laws) and Aristotle (Metaph.) may have been more right than we imagine
+in supposing that some forms of civilisation were discovered and lost
+several times over. If we cannot argue that all barbarism is a degraded
+civilization, neither can we set any limits to the depth of degradation
+to which the human race may sink through war, disease, or isolation.
+And if we are to draw inferences about the origin of marriage from
+the practice of barbarous nations, we should also consider the
+remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the
+carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring
+which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of
+marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were almost
+animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue from
+what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized
+man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary,--the
+connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of
+social life is still more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit
+that our first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still
+the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative
+civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient
+Germans, are wholly unknown to us.
+
+Such speculations are apt to be unsettling, because they seem to show
+that an institution which was thought to be a revelation from heaven, is
+only the growth of history and experience. We ask what is the origin of
+marriage, and we are told that like the right of property, after many
+wars and contests, it has gradually arisen out of the selfishness of
+barbarians. We stand face to face with human nature in its primitive
+nakedness. We are compelled to accept, not the highest, but the lowest
+account of the origin of human society. But on the other hand we
+may truly say that every step in human progress has been in the same
+direction, and that in the course of ages the idea of marriage and of
+the family has been more and more defined and consecrated. The civilized
+East is immeasurably in advance of any savage tribes; the Greeks and
+Romans have improved upon the East; the Christian nations have been
+stricter in their views of the marriage relation than any of the
+ancients. In this as in so many other things, instead of looking back
+with regret to the past, we should look forward with hope to the future.
+We must consecrate that which we believe to be the most holy, and that
+'which is the most holy will be the most useful.' There is more reason
+for maintaining the sacredness of the marriage tie, when we see the
+benefit of it, than when we only felt a vague religious horror about
+the violation of it. But in all times of transition, when established
+beliefs are being undermined, there is a danger that in the passage from
+the old to the new we may insensibly let go the moral principle, finding
+an excuse for listening to the voice of passion in the uncertainty of
+knowledge, or the fluctuations of opinion. And there are many persons
+in our own day who, enlightened by the study of anthropology, and
+fascinated by what is new and strange, some using the language of fear,
+others of hope, are inclined to believe that a time will come when
+through the self-assertion of women, or the rebellious spirit of
+children, by the analysis of human relations, or by the force of outward
+circumstances, the ties of family life may be broken or greatly relaxed.
+They point to societies in America and elsewhere which tend to show that
+the destruction of the family need not necessarily involve the overthrow
+of all morality. Wherever we may think of such speculations, we can
+hardly deny that they have been more rife in this generation than in any
+other; and whither they are tending, who can predict?
+
+To the doubts and queries raised by these 'social reformers' respecting
+the relation of the sexes and the moral nature of man, there is a
+sufficient answer, if any is needed. The difference about them and us is
+really one of fact. They are speaking of man as they wish or fancy him
+to be, but we are speaking of him as he is. They isolate the animal
+part of his nature; we regard him as a creature having many sides, or
+aspects, moving between good and evil, striving to rise above himself
+and to become 'a little lower than the angels.' We also, to use
+a Platonic formula, are not ignorant of the dissatisfactions and
+incompatibilities of family life, of the meannesses of trade, of the
+flatteries of one class of society by another, of the impediments which
+the family throws in the way of lofty aims and aspirations. But we are
+conscious that there are evils and dangers in the background greater
+still, which are not appreciated, because they are either concealed
+or suppressed. What a condition of man would that be, in which human
+passions were controlled by no authority, divine or human, in which
+there was no shame or decency, no higher affection overcoming or
+sanctifying the natural instincts, but simply a rule of health! Is it
+for this that we are asked to throw away the civilization which is the
+growth of ages?
+
+For strength and health are not the only qualities to be desired; there
+are the more important considerations of mind and character and soul. We
+know how human nature may be degraded; we do not know how by artificial
+means any improvement in the breed can be effected. The problem is a
+complex one, for if we go back only four steps (and these at least enter
+into the composition of a child), there are commonly thirty progenitors
+to be taken into account. Many curious facts, rarely admitting of proof,
+are told us respecting the inheritance of disease or character from a
+remote ancestor. We can trace the physical resemblances of parents and
+children in the same family--
+
+'Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat';
+
+but scarcely less often the differences which distinguish children both
+from their parents and from one another. We are told of similar mental
+peculiarities running in families, and again of a tendency, as in
+the animals, to revert to a common or original stock. But we have a
+difficulty in distinguishing what is a true inheritance of genius or
+other qualities, and what is mere imitation or the result of similar
+circumstances. Great men and great women have rarely had great fathers
+and mothers. Nothing that we know of in the circumstances of their birth
+or lineage will explain their appearance. Of the English poets of the
+last and two preceding centuries scarcely a descendant remains,--none
+have ever been distinguished. So deeply has nature hidden her secret,
+and so ridiculous is the fancy which has been entertained by some that
+we might in time by suitable marriage arrangements or, as Plato would
+have said, 'by an ingenious system of lots,' produce a Shakespeare or
+a Milton. Even supposing that we could breed men having the tenacity
+of bulldogs, or, like the Spartans, 'lacking the wit to run away
+in battle,' would the world be any the better? Many of the noblest
+specimens of the human race have been among the weakest physically.
+Tyrtaeus or Aesop, or our own Newton, would have been exposed at Sparta;
+and some of the fairest and strongest men and women have been among the
+wickedest and worst. Not by the Platonic device of uniting the strong
+and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of sentiment and morality,
+nor yet by his other device of combining dissimilar natures (Statesman),
+have mankind gradually passed from the brutality and licentiousness of
+primitive marriage to marriage Christian and civilized.
+
+Few persons would deny that we bring into the world an inheritance of
+mental and physical qualities derived first from our parents, or through
+them from some remoter ancestor, secondly from our race, thirdly from
+the general condition of mankind into which we are born. Nothing is
+commoner than the remark, that 'So and so is like his father or his
+uncle'; and an aged person may not unfrequently note a resemblance in
+a youth to a long-forgotten ancestor, observing that 'Nature sometimes
+skips a generation.' It may be true also, that if we knew more about
+our ancestors, these similarities would be even more striking to us.
+Admitting the facts which are thus described in a popular way, we may
+however remark that there is no method of difference by which they can
+be defined or estimated, and that they constitute only a small part of
+each individual. The doctrine of heredity may seem to take out of our
+hands the conduct of our own lives, but it is the idea, not the fact,
+which is really terrible to us. For what we have received from our
+ancestors is only a fraction of what we are, or may become. The
+knowledge that drunkenness or insanity has been prevalent in a
+family may be the best safeguard against their recurrence in a future
+generation. The parent will be most awake to the vices or diseases in
+his child of which he is most sensible within himself. The whole of life
+may be directed to their prevention or cure. The traces of consumption
+may become fainter, or be wholly effaced: the inherent tendency to vice
+or crime may be eradicated. And so heredity, from being a curse, may
+become a blessing. We acknowledge that in the matter of our birth, as in
+our nature generally, there are previous circumstances which affect
+us. But upon this platform of circumstances or within this wall of
+necessity, we have still the power of creating a life for ourselves by
+the informing energy of the human will.
+
+There is another aspect of the marriage question to which Plato is a
+stranger. All the children born in his state are foundlings. It never
+occurred to him that the greater part of them, according to universal
+experience, would have perished. For children can only be brought up in
+families. There is a subtle sympathy between the mother and the child
+which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or by 'strong nurses one or
+more' (Laws). If Plato's 'pen' was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or
+the foundling hospital of Dublin, more than nine-tenths of his children
+would have perished. There would have been no need to expose or put
+out of the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of
+themselves. So emphatically does nature protest against the destruction
+of the family.
+
+What Plato had heard or seen of Sparta was applied by him in a mistaken
+way to his ideal commonwealth. He probably observed that both the
+Spartan men and women were superior in form and strength to the other
+Greeks; and this superiority he was disposed to attribute to the laws
+and customs relating to marriage. He did not consider that the desire
+of a noble offspring was a passion among the Spartans, or that their
+physical superiority was to be attributed chiefly, not to their marriage
+customs, but to their temperance and training. He did not reflect that
+Sparta was great, not in consequence of the relaxation of morality, but
+in spite of it, by virtue of a political principle stronger far than
+existed in any other Grecian state. Least of all did he observe that
+Sparta did not really produce the finest specimens of the Greek
+race. The genius, the political inspiration of Athens, the love of
+liberty--all that has made Greece famous with posterity, were wanting
+among the Spartans. They had no Themistocles, or Pericles, or Aeschylus,
+or Sophocles, or Socrates, or Plato. The individual was not allowed to
+appear above the state; the laws were fixed, and he had no business to
+alter or reform them. Yet whence has the progress of cities and nations
+arisen, if not from remarkable individuals, coming into the world we
+know not how, and from causes over which we have no control?
+Something too much may have been said in modern times of the value of
+individuality. But we can hardly condemn too strongly a system which,
+instead of fostering the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and
+character, tends to smother and extinguish them.
+
+Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither
+Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has hitherto
+been able to cope with this most difficult of social problems, and that
+the side from which Plato regarded it is that from which we turn away.
+Population is the most untameable force in the political and social
+world. Do we not find, especially in large cities, that the greatest
+hindrance to the amelioration of the poor is their improvidence in
+marriage?--a small fault truly, if not involving endless consequences.
+There are whole countries too, such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland,
+in which a right solution of the marriage question seems to lie at the
+foundation of the happiness of the community. There are too many people
+on a given space, or they marry too early and bring into the world a
+sickly and half-developed offspring; or owing to the very conditions
+of their existence, they become emaciated and hand on a similar life
+to their descendants. But who can oppose the voice of prudence to the
+'mightiest passions of mankind' (Laws), especially when they have
+been licensed by custom and religion? In addition to the influences of
+education, we seem to require some new principles of right and wrong in
+these matters, some force of opinion, which may indeed be already heard
+whispering in private, but has never affected the moral sentiments
+of mankind in general. We unavoidably lose sight of the principle of
+utility, just in that action of our lives in which we have the most need
+of it. The influences which we can bring to bear upon this question
+are chiefly indirect. In a generation or two, education, emigration,
+improvements in agriculture and manufactures, may have provided the
+solution. The state physician hardly likes to probe the wound: it is
+beyond his art; a matter which he cannot safely let alone, but which he
+dare not touch:
+
+'We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.'
+
+When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping
+into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents
+perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back silently to that day
+twenty-five or thirty years before on which under the fairest auspices,
+amid the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom
+joined hands with one another? In making such a reflection we are not
+opposing physical considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are
+seeking to make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the
+extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense. The late Dr. Combe is
+said by his biographer to have resisted the temptation to marriage,
+because he knew that he was subject to hereditary consumption. One who
+deserved to be called a man of genius, a friend of my youth, was in the
+habit of wearing a black ribbon on his wrist, in order to remind him
+that, being liable to outbreaks of insanity, he must not give way to the
+natural impulses of affection: he died unmarried in a lunatic asylum.
+These two little facts suggest the reflection that a very few persons
+have done from a sense of duty what the rest of mankind ought to have
+done under like circumstances, if they had allowed themselves to think
+of all the misery which they were about to bring into the world. If
+we could prevent such marriages without any violation of feeling or
+propriety, we clearly ought; and the prohibition in the course of time
+would be protected by a 'horror naturalis' similar to that which, in
+all civilized ages and countries, has prevented the marriage of near
+relations by blood. Mankind would have been the happier, if some things
+which are now allowed had from the beginning been denied to them; if the
+sanction of religion could have prohibited practices inimical to health;
+if sanitary principles could in early ages have been invested with a
+superstitious awe. But, living as we do far on in the world's history,
+we are no longer able to stamp at once with the impress of religion a
+new prohibition. A free agent cannot have his fancies regulated by law;
+and the execution of the law would be rendered impossible, owing to the
+uncertainty of the cases in which marriage was to be forbidden. Who
+can weigh virtue, or even fortune against health, or moral and mental
+qualities against bodily? Who can measure probabilities against
+certainties? There has been some good as well as evil in the discipline
+of suffering; and there are diseases, such as consumption, which have
+exercised a refining and softening influence on the character. Youth is
+too inexperienced to balance such nice considerations; parents do not
+often think of them, or think of them too late. They are at a distance
+and may probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the
+interests of a home may be the cure of them. So persons vainly reason
+when their minds are already made up and their fortunes irrevocably
+linked together. Nor is there any ground for supposing that marriages
+are to any great extent influenced by reflections of this sort, which
+seem unable to make any head against the irresistible impulse of
+individual attachment.
+
+Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the passions
+in youth, the difficulty of regulating them, and the effects on the
+whole mind and nature which follow from them, the stimulus which
+is given to them by the imagination, without feeling that there is
+something unsatisfactory in our method of treating them. That the most
+important influence on human life should be wholly left to chance or
+shrouded in mystery, and instead of being disciplined or understood,
+should be required to conform only to an external standard of
+propriety--cannot be regarded by the philosopher as a safe or
+satisfactory condition of human things. And still those who have the
+charge of youth may find a way by watchfulness, by affection, by the
+manliness and innocence of their own lives, by occasional hints, by
+general admonitions which every one can apply for himself, to mitigate
+this terrible evil which eats out the heart of individuals and corrupts
+the moral sentiments of nations. In no duty towards others is there more
+need of reticence and self-restraint. So great is the danger lest he who
+would be the counsellor of another should reveal the secret prematurely,
+lest he should get another too much into his power; or fix the passing
+impression of evil by demanding the confession of it.
+
+Nor is Plato wrong in asserting that family attachments may interfere
+with higher aims. If there have been some who 'to party gave up what was
+meant for mankind,' there have certainly been others who to family
+gave up what was meant for mankind or for their country. The cares
+of children, the necessity of procuring money for their support, the
+flatteries of the rich by the poor, the exclusiveness of caste, the
+pride of birth or wealth, the tendency of family life to divert men from
+the pursuit of the ideal or the heroic, are as lowering in our own age
+as in that of Plato. And if we prefer to look at the gentle influences
+of home, the development of the affections, the amenities of society,
+the devotion of one member of a family for the good of the others, which
+form one side of the picture, we must not quarrel with him, or perhaps
+ought rather to be grateful to him, for having presented to us the
+reverse. Without attempting to defend Plato on grounds of morality, we
+may allow that there is an aspect of the world which has not unnaturally
+led him into error.
+
+We hardly appreciate the power which the idea of the State, like all
+other abstract ideas, exercised over the mind of Plato. To us the State
+seems to be built up out of the family, or sometimes to be the framework
+in which family and social life is contained. But to Plato in his
+present mood of mind the family is only a disturbing influence which,
+instead of filling up, tends to disarrange the higher unity of the
+State. No organization is needed except a political, which,
+regarded from another point of view, is a military one. The State is
+all-sufficing for the wants of man, and, like the idea of the Church in
+later ages, absorbs all other desires and affections. In time of war the
+thousand citizens are to stand like a rampart impregnable against the
+world or the Persian host; in time of peace the preparation for war and
+their duties to the State, which are also their duties to one another,
+take up their whole life and time. The only other interest which is
+allowed to them besides that of war, is the interest of philosophy. When
+they are too old to be soldiers they are to retire from active life
+and to have a second novitiate of study and contemplation. There is an
+element of monasticism even in Plato's communism. If he could have done
+without children, he might have converted his Republic into a religious
+order. Neither in the Laws, when the daylight of common sense breaks in
+upon him, does he retract his error. In the state of which he would be
+the founder, there is no marrying or giving in marriage: but because of
+the infirmity of mankind, he condescends to allow the law of nature to
+prevail.
+
+(c) But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even greater
+paradox in reserve, which is summed up in the famous text, 'Until kings
+are philosophers or philosophers are kings, cities will never cease
+from ill.' And by philosophers he explains himself to mean those who
+are capable of apprehending ideas, especially the idea of good. To the
+attainment of this higher knowledge the second education is directed.
+Through a process of training which has already made them good citizens
+they are now to be made good legislators. We find with some surprise
+(not unlike the feeling which Aristotle in a well-known passage
+describes the hearers of Plato's lectures as experiencing, when they
+went to a discourse on the idea of good, expecting to be instructed in
+moral truths, and received instead of them arithmetical and mathematical
+formulae) that Plato does not propose for his future legislators any
+study of finance or law or military tactics, but only of abstract
+mathematics, as a preparation for the still more abstract conception of
+good. We ask, with Aristotle, What is the use of a man knowing the idea
+of good, if he does not know what is good for this individual, this
+state, this condition of society? We cannot understand how Plato's
+legislators or guardians are to be fitted for their work of statesmen by
+the study of the five mathematical sciences. We vainly search in Plato's
+own writings for any explanation of this seeming absurdity.
+
+The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to ravish the
+mind with a prophetic consciousness which takes away the power
+of estimating its value. No metaphysical enquirer has ever fairly
+criticised his own speculations; in his own judgment they have been
+above criticism; nor has he understood that what to him seemed to be
+absolute truth may reappear in the next generation as a form of logic
+or an instrument of thought. And posterity have also sometimes equally
+misapprehended the real value of his speculations. They appear to them
+to have contributed nothing to the stock of human knowledge. The IDEA
+of good is apt to be regarded by the modern thinker as an unmeaning
+abstraction; but he forgets that this abstraction is waiting ready for
+use, and will hereafter be filled up by the divisions of knowledge.
+When mankind do not as yet know that the world is subject to law, the
+introduction of the mere conception of law or design or final cause, and
+the far-off anticipation of the harmony of knowledge, are great steps
+onward. Even the crude generalization of the unity of all things leads
+men to view the world with different eyes, and may easily affect their
+conception of human life and of politics, and also their own conduct and
+character (Tim). We can imagine how a great mind like that of Pericles
+might derive elevation from his intercourse with Anaxagoras (Phaedr.).
+To be struggling towards a higher but unattainable conception is a more
+favourable intellectual condition than to rest satisfied in a narrow
+portion of ascertained fact. And the earlier, which have sometimes been
+the greater ideas of science, are often lost sight of at a later period.
+How rarely can we say of any modern enquirer in the magnificent language
+of Plato, that 'He is the spectator of all time and of all existence!'
+
+Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these vast
+metaphysical conceptions to practical and political life. In the first
+enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them everywhere, and to apply
+them in the most remote sphere. They do not understand that the
+experience of ages is required to enable them to fill up 'the
+intermediate axioms.' Plato himself seems to have imagined that the
+truths of psychology, like those of astronomy and harmonics, would be
+arrived at by a process of deduction, and that the method which he has
+pursued in the Fourth Book, of inferring them from experience and the
+use of language, was imperfect and only provisional. But when, after
+having arrived at the idea of good, which is the end of the science of
+dialectic, he is asked, What is the nature, and what are the divisions
+of the science? He refuses to answer, as if intending by the refusal to
+intimate that the state of knowledge which then existed was not such as
+would allow the philosopher to enter into his final rest. The previous
+sciences must first be studied, and will, we may add, continue to be
+studied tell the end of time, although in a sense different from any
+which Plato could have conceived. But we may observe, that while he is
+aware of the vacancy of his own ideal, he is full of enthusiasm in the
+contemplation of it. Looking into the orb of light, he sees nothing, but
+he is warmed and elevated. The Hebrew prophet believed that faith in
+God would enable him to govern the world; the Greek philosopher imagined
+that contemplation of the good would make a legislator. There is as much
+to be filled up in the one case as in the other, and the one mode of
+conception is to the Israelite what the other is to the Greek. Both find
+a repose in a divine perfection, which, whether in a more personal or
+impersonal form, exists without them and independently of them, as well
+as within them.
+
+There is no mention of the idea of good in the Timaeus, nor of the
+divine Creator of the world in the Republic; and we are naturally led
+to ask in what relation they stand to one another. Is God above or below
+the idea of good? Or is the Idea of Good another mode of conceiving God?
+The latter appears to be the truer answer. To the Greek philosopher
+the perfection and unity of God was a far higher conception than his
+personality, which he hardly found a word to express, and which to him
+would have seemed to be borrowed from mythology. To the Christian, on
+the other hand, or to the modern thinker in general, it is difficult,
+if not impossible, to attach reality to what he terms mere abstraction;
+while to Plato this very abstraction is the truest and most real of all
+things. Hence, from a difference in forms of thought, Plato appears to
+be resting on a creation of his own mind only. But if we may be allowed
+to paraphrase the idea of good by the words 'intelligent principle of
+law and order in the universe, embracing equally man and nature,' we
+begin to find a meeting-point between him and ourselves.
+
+The question whether the ruler or statesman should be a philosopher is
+one that has not lost interest in modern times. In most countries of
+Europe and Asia there has been some one in the course of ages who
+has truly united the power of command with the power of thought and
+reflection, as there have been also many false combinations of these
+qualities. Some kind of speculative power is necessary both in practical
+and political life; like the rhetorician in the Phaedrus, men require to
+have a conception of the varieties of human character, and to be raised
+on great occasions above the commonplaces of ordinary life. Yet the idea
+of the philosopher-statesman has never been popular with the mass of
+mankind; partly because he cannot take the world into his confidence or
+make them understand the motives from which he acts; and also because
+they are jealous of a power which they do not understand. The revolution
+which human nature desires to effect step by step in many ages is likely
+to be precipitated by him in a single year or life. They are afraid that
+in the pursuit of his greater aims he may disregard the common feelings
+of humanity, he is too apt to be looking into the distant future or back
+into the remote past, and unable to see actions or events which, to use
+an expression of Plato's 'are tumbling out at his feet.' Besides, as
+Plato would say, there are other corruptions of these philosophical
+statesmen. Either 'the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with
+the pale cast of thought,' and at the moment when action above all
+things is required he is undecided, or general principles are enunciated
+by him in order to cover some change of policy; or his ignorance of the
+world has made him more easily fall a prey to the arts of others; or in
+some cases he has been converted into a courtier, who enjoys the luxury
+of holding liberal opinions, but was never known to perform a liberal
+action. No wonder that mankind have been in the habit of calling
+statesmen of this class pedants, sophisters, doctrinaires, visionaries.
+For, as we may be allowed to say, a little parodying the words of Plato,
+'they have seen bad imitations of the philosopher-statesman.' But a man
+in whom the power of thought and action are perfectly balanced, equal to
+the present, reaching forward to the future, 'such a one,' ruling in a
+constitutional state, 'they have never seen.'
+
+But as the philosopher is apt to fail in the routine of political life,
+so the ordinary statesman is also apt to fail in extraordinary crises.
+When the face of the world is beginning to alter, and thunder is heard
+in the distance, he is still guided by his old maxims, and is the slave
+of his inveterate party prejudices; he cannot perceive the signs of the
+times; instead of looking forward he looks back; he learns nothing and
+forgets nothing; with 'wise saws and modern instances' he would stem the
+rising tide of revolution. He lives more and more within the circle of
+his own party, as the world without him becomes stronger. This seems to
+be the reason why the old order of things makes so poor a figure
+when confronted with the new, why churches can never reform, why most
+political changes are made blindly and convulsively. The great crises
+in the history of nations have often been met by an ecclesiastical
+positiveness, and a more obstinate reassertion of principles which
+have lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed ideas of a reactionary
+statesman may be compared to madness; they grow upon him, and he becomes
+possessed by them; no judgement of others is ever admitted by him to be
+weighed in the balance against his own.
+
+(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to have been
+a confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the individual, and fails
+to distinguish Ethics from Politics. He thinks that to be most of a
+state which is most like one man, and in which the citizens have the
+greatest uniformity of character. He does not see that the analogy is
+partly fallacious, and that the will or character of a state or nation
+is really the balance or rather the surplus of individual wills, which
+are limited by the condition of having to act in common. The movement
+of a body of men can never have the pliancy or facility of a single man;
+the freedom of the individual, which is always limited, becomes still
+more straitened when transferred to a nation. The powers of action and
+feeling are necessarily weaker and more balanced when they are diffused
+through a community; whence arises the often discussed question, 'Can a
+nation, like an individual, have a conscience?' We hesitate to say
+that the characters of nations are nothing more than the sum of the
+characters of the individuals who compose them; because there may be
+tendencies in individuals which react upon one another. A whole nation
+may be wiser than any one man in it; or may be animated by some common
+opinion or feeling which could not equally have affected the mind of
+a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader of genius to
+perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to have analysed
+the complications which arise out of the collective action of mankind.
+Neither is he capable of seeing that analogies, though specious as
+arguments, may often have no foundation in fact, or of distinguishing
+between what is intelligible or vividly present to the mind, and what
+is true. In this respect he is far below Aristotle, who is comparatively
+seldom imposed upon by false analogies. He cannot disentangle the arts
+from the virtues--at least he is always arguing from one to the other.
+His notion of music is transferred from harmony of sounds to harmony of
+life: in this he is assisted by the ambiguities of language as well as
+by the prevalence of Pythagorean notions. And having once assimilated
+the state to the individual, he imagines that he will find the
+succession of states paralleled in the lives of individuals.
+
+Still, through this fallacious medium, a real enlargement of ideas is
+attained. When the virtues as yet presented no distinct conception to
+the mind, a great advance was made by the comparison of them with the
+arts; for virtue is partly art, and has an outward form as well as an
+inward principle. The harmony of music affords a lively image of the
+harmonies of the world and of human life, and may be regarded as a
+splendid illustration which was naturally mistaken for a real analogy.
+In the same way the identification of ethics with politics has a
+tendency to give definiteness to ethics, and also to elevate and ennoble
+men's notions of the aims of government and of the duties of citizens;
+for ethics from one point of view may be conceived as an idealized law
+and politics; and politics, as ethics reduced to the conditions of human
+society. There have been evils which have arisen out of the attempt to
+identify them, and this has led to the separation or antagonism of
+them, which has been introduced by modern political writers. But we may
+likewise feel that something has been lost in their separation, and
+that the ancient philosophers who estimated the moral and intellectual
+wellbeing of mankind first, and the wealth of nations and individuals
+second, may have a salutary influence on the speculations of modern
+times. Many political maxims originate in a reaction against an opposite
+error; and when the errors against which they were directed have passed
+away, they in turn become errors.
+
+3. Plato's views of education are in several respects remarkable;
+like the rest of the Republic they are partly Greek and partly ideal,
+beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and extending
+to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that
+education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation
+for another in which education begins again. This is the continuous
+thread which runs through the Republic, and which more than any other of
+his ideas admits of an application to modern life.
+
+He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is
+disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are
+one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world
+into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the Republic the
+involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus,
+Sophist, and Laws (Protag., Apol., Gorg.). Nor do the so-called Platonic
+ideas recovered from a former state of existence affect his theory
+of mental improvement. Still we observe in him the remains of the old
+Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from within, and
+is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as
+he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than
+ten thousand eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred
+notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the
+first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest; the
+second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual,
+and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good. The
+world of sense is still depreciated and identified with opinion, though
+admitted to be a shadow of the true. In the Republic he is evidently
+impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from ignorance
+and may be cured by education; the multitude are hardly to be deemed
+responsible for what they do. A faint allusion to the doctrine of
+reminiscence occurs in the Tenth Book; but Plato's views of education
+have no more real connection with a previous state of existence than
+our own; he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there
+already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a
+vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.
+
+He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and
+false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the Republic he
+takes no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage counsels about the
+nursing of children and the management of the mothers, and would have
+an education which is even prior to birth. But in the Republic he begins
+with the age at which the child is capable of receiving ideas, and
+boldly asserts, in language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears,
+that he must be taught the false before he can learn the true. The
+modern and ancient philosophical world are not agreed about truth and
+falsehood; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact, the
+other with ideas. This is the difference between ourselves and Plato,
+which is, however, partly a difference of words. For we too should admit
+that a child must receive many lessons which he imperfectly understands;
+he must be taught some things in a figure only, some too which he can
+hardly be expected to believe when he grows older; but we should limit
+the use of fiction by the necessity of the case. Plato would draw the
+line differently; according to him the aim of early education is not
+truth as a matter of fact, but truth as a matter of principle; the child
+is to be taught first simple religious truths, and then simple moral
+truths, and insensibly to learn the lesson of good manners and good
+taste. He would make an entire reformation of the old mythology; like
+Xenophanes and Heracleitus he is sensible of the deep chasm which
+separates his own age from Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests
+with an imaginary authority, but only for his own purposes. The lusts
+and treacheries of the gods are to be banished; the terrors of the world
+below are to be dispelled; the misbehaviour of the Homeric heroes is
+not to be a model for youth. But there is another strain heard in Homer
+which may teach our youth endurance; and something may be learnt in
+medicine from the simple practice of the Homeric age. The principles
+on which religion is to be based are two only: first, that God is true;
+secondly, that he is good. Modern and Christian writers have often
+fallen short of these; they can hardly be said to have gone beyond them.
+
+The young are to be brought up in happy surroundings, out of the way of
+sights or sounds which may hurt the character or vitiate the taste.
+They are to live in an atmosphere of health; the breeze is always to
+be wafting to them the impressions of truth and goodness. Could such
+an education be realized, or if our modern religious education could
+be bound up with truth and virtue and good manners and good taste, that
+would be the best hope of human improvement. Plato, like ourselves,
+is looking forward to changes in the moral and religious world, and is
+preparing for them. He recognizes the danger of unsettling young men's
+minds by sudden changes of laws and principles, by destroying the
+sacredness of one set of ideas when there is nothing else to take their
+place. He is afraid too of the influence of the drama, on the ground
+that it encourages false sentiment, and therefore he would not have
+his children taken to the theatre; he thinks that the effect on the
+spectators is bad, and on the actors still worse. His idea of education
+is that of harmonious growth, in which are insensibly learnt the lessons
+of temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in equal
+proportions. The first principle which runs through all art and nature
+is simplicity; this also is to be the rule of human life.
+
+The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the period
+of muscular growth and development. The simplicity which is enforced in
+music is extended to gymnastic; Plato is aware that the training of the
+body may be inconsistent with the training of the mind, and that bodily
+exercise may be easily overdone. Excessive training of the body is
+apt to give men a headache or to render them sleepy at a lecture on
+philosophy, and this they attribute not to the true cause, but to the
+nature of the subject. Two points are noticeable in Plato's treatment of
+gymnastic:--First, that the time of training is entirely separated from
+the time of literary education. He seems to have thought that two things
+of an opposite and different nature could not be learnt at the same
+time. Here we can hardly agree with him; and, if we may judge by
+experience, the effect of spending three years between the ages of
+fourteen and seventeen in mere bodily exercise would be far from
+improving to the intellect. Secondly, he affirms that music and
+gymnastic are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the
+one for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that
+they are both equally designed for the improvement of the mind. The
+body, in his view, is the servant of the mind; the subjection of the
+lower to the higher is for the advantage of both. And doubtless the
+mind may exercise a very great and paramount influence over the body,
+if exerted not at particular moments and by fits and starts, but
+continuously, in making preparation for the whole of life. Other Greek
+writers saw the mischievous tendency of Spartan discipline (Arist. Pol;
+Thuc.). But only Plato recognized the fundamental error on which the
+practice was based.
+
+The subject of gymnastic leads Plato to the sister subject of medicine,
+which he further illustrates by the parallel of law. The modern
+disbelief in medicine has led in this, as in some other departments of
+knowledge, to a demand for greater simplicity; physicians are becoming
+aware that they often make diseases 'greater and more complicated' by
+their treatment of them (Rep.). In two thousand years their art has made
+but slender progress; what they have gained in the analysis of the parts
+is in a great degree lost by their feebler conception of the human frame
+as a whole. They have attended more to the cure of diseases than to the
+conditions of health; and the improvements in medicine have been more
+than counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training. Until lately
+they have hardly thought of air and water, the importance of which was
+well understood by the ancients; as Aristotle remarks, 'Air and water,
+being the elements which we most use, have the greatest effect upon
+health' (Polit.). For ages physicians have been under the dominion of
+prejudices which have only recently given way; and now there are as many
+opinions in medicine as in theology, and an equal degree of scepticism
+and some want of toleration about both. Plato has several good notions
+about medicine; according to him, 'the eye cannot be cured without the
+rest of the body, nor the body without the mind' (Charm.). No man
+of sense, he says in the Timaeus, would take physic; and we heartily
+sympathize with him in the Laws when he declares that 'the limbs of the
+rustic worn with toil will derive more benefit from warm baths than from
+the prescriptions of a not over wise doctor.' But we can hardly praise
+him when, in obedience to the authority of Homer, he depreciates diet,
+or approve of the inhuman spirit in which he would get rid of invalid
+and useless lives by leaving them to die. He does not seem to have
+considered that the 'bridle of Theages' might be accompanied by
+qualities which were of far more value to the State than the health
+or strength of the citizens; or that the duty of taking care of the
+helpless might be an important element of education in a State. The
+physician himself (this is a delicate and subtle observation) should
+not be a man in robust health; he should have, in modern phraseology,
+a nervous temperament; he should have experience of disease in his own
+person, in order that his powers of observation may be quickened in the
+case of others.
+
+The perplexity of medicine is paralleled by the perplexity of law; in
+which, again, Plato would have men follow the golden rule of simplicity.
+Greater matters are to be determined by the legislator or by the oracle
+of Delphi, lesser matters are to be left to the temporary regulation
+of the citizens themselves. Plato is aware that laissez faire is an
+important element of government. The diseases of a State are like the
+heads of a hydra; they multiply when they are cut off. The true remedy
+for them is not extirpation but prevention. And the way to prevent them
+is to take care of education, and education will take care of all the
+rest. So in modern times men have often felt that the only political
+measure worth having--the only one which would produce any certain or
+lasting effect, was a measure of national education. And in our own more
+than in any previous age the necessity has been recognized of restoring
+the ever-increasing confusion of law to simplicity and common sense.
+
+When the training in music and gymnastic is completed, there follows the
+first stage of active and public life. But soon education is to begin
+again from a new point of view. In the interval between the Fourth and
+Seventh Books we have discussed the nature of knowledge, and have thence
+been led to form a higher conception of what was required of us. For
+true knowledge, according to Plato, is of abstractions, and has to do,
+not with particulars or individuals, but with universals only; not with
+the beauties of poetry, but with the ideas of philosophy. And the great
+aim of education is the cultivation of the habit of abstraction. This
+is to be acquired through the study of the mathematical sciences. They
+alone are capable of giving ideas of relation, and of arousing the
+dormant energies of thought.
+
+Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part of that
+which is now included in them; but they bore a much larger proportion to
+the sum of human knowledge. They were the only organon of thought which
+the human mind at that time possessed, and the only measure by which
+the chaos of particulars could be reduced to rule and order. The
+faculty which they trained was naturally at war with the poetical
+or imaginative; and hence to Plato, who is everywhere seeking for
+abstractions and trying to get rid of the illusions of sense, nearly
+the whole of education is contained in them. They seemed to have an
+inexhaustible application, partly because their true limits were not yet
+understood. These Plato himself is beginning to investigate; though
+not aware that number and figure are mere abstractions of sense,
+he recognizes that the forms used by geometry are borrowed from the
+sensible world. He seeks to find the ultimate ground of mathematical
+ideas in the idea of good, though he does not satisfactorily explain the
+connexion between them; and in his conception of the relation of ideas
+to numbers, he falls very far short of the definiteness attributed to
+him by Aristotle (Met.). But if he fails to recognize the true limits of
+mathematics, he also reaches a point beyond them; in his view, ideas
+of number become secondary to a higher conception of knowledge. The
+dialectician is as much above the mathematician as the mathematician is
+above the ordinary man. The one, the self-proving, the good which is
+the higher sphere of dialectic, is the perfect truth to which all things
+ascend, and in which they finally repose.
+
+This self-proving unity or idea of good is a mere vision of which no
+distinct explanation can be given, relative only to a particular stage
+in Greek philosophy. It is an abstraction under which no individuals
+are comprehended, a whole which has no parts (Arist., Nic. Eth.). The
+vacancy of such a form was perceived by Aristotle, but not by Plato.
+Nor did he recognize that in the dialectical process are included two or
+more methods of investigation which are at variance with each other.
+He did not see that whether he took the longer or the shorter road, no
+advance could be made in this way. And yet such visions often have an
+immense effect; for although the method of science cannot anticipate
+science, the idea of science, not as it is, but as it will be in the
+future, is a great and inspiring principle. In the pursuit of knowledge
+we are always pressing forward to something beyond us; and as a false
+conception of knowledge, for example the scholastic philosophy, may lead
+men astray during many ages, so the true ideal, though vacant, may draw
+all their thoughts in a right direction. It makes a great difference
+whether the general expectation of knowledge, as this indefinite feeling
+may be termed, is based upon a sound judgment. For mankind may often
+entertain a true conception of what knowledge ought to be when they have
+but a slender experience of facts. The correlation of the sciences, the
+consciousness of the unity of nature, the idea of classification, the
+sense of proportion, the unwillingness to stop short of certainty or to
+confound probability with truth, are important principles of the higher
+education. Although Plato could tell us nothing, and perhaps knew that
+he could tell us nothing, of the absolute truth, he has exercised
+an influence on the human mind which even at the present day is not
+exhausted; and political and social questions may yet arise in which the
+thoughts of Plato may be read anew and receive a fresh meaning.
+
+The Idea of good is so called only in the Republic, but there are traces
+of it in other dialogues of Plato. It is a cause as well as an idea, and
+from this point of view may be compared with the creator of the Timaeus,
+who out of his goodness created all things. It corresponds to a certain
+extent with the modern conception of a law of nature, or of a final
+cause, or of both in one, and in this regard may be connected with the
+measure and symmetry of the Philebus. It is represented in the Symposium
+under the aspect of beauty, and is supposed to be attained there by
+stages of initiation, as here by regular gradations of knowledge. Viewed
+subjectively, it is the process or science of dialectic. This is the
+science which, according to the Phaedrus, is the true basis of rhetoric,
+which alone is able to distinguish the natures and classes of men and
+things; which divides a whole into the natural parts, and reunites the
+scattered parts into a natural or organized whole; which defines the
+abstract essences or universal ideas of all things, and connects them;
+which pierces the veil of hypotheses and reaches the final cause or
+first principle of all; which regards the sciences in relation to the
+idea of good. This ideal science is the highest process of thought,
+and may be described as the soul conversing with herself or holding
+communion with eternal truth and beauty, and in another form is
+the everlasting question and answer--the ceaseless interrogative of
+Socrates. The dialogues of Plato are themselves examples of the nature
+and method of dialectic. Viewed objectively, the idea of good is a power
+or cause which makes the world without us correspond with the world
+within. Yet this world without us is still a world of ideas. With Plato
+the investigation of nature is another department of knowledge, and in
+this he seeks to attain only probable conclusions (Timaeus).
+
+If we ask whether this science of dialectic which Plato only half
+explains to us is more akin to logic or to metaphysics, the answer is
+that in his mind the two sciences are not as yet distinguished, any more
+than the subjective and objective aspects of the world and of man, which
+German philosophy has revealed to us. Nor has he determined whether
+his science of dialectic is at rest or in motion, concerned with the
+contemplation of absolute being, or with a process of development
+and evolution. Modern metaphysics may be described as the science of
+abstractions, or as the science of the evolution of thought; modern
+logic, when passing beyond the bounds of mere Aristotelian forms, may be
+defined as the science of method. The germ of both of them is contained
+in the Platonic dialectic; all metaphysicians have something in common
+with the ideas of Plato; all logicians have derived something from
+the method of Plato. The nearest approach in modern philosophy to the
+universal science of Plato, is to be found in the Hegelian 'succession
+of moments in the unity of the idea.' Plato and Hegel alike seem to
+have conceived the world as the correlation of abstractions; and not
+impossibly they would have understood one another better than any of
+their commentators understand them (Swift's Voyage to Laputa. 'Having
+a desire to see those ancients who were most renowned for wit and
+learning, I set apart one day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and
+Aristotle might appear at the head of all their commentators; but these
+were so numerous that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court
+and outward rooms of the palace. I knew, and could distinguish these two
+heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd, but from each other.
+Homer was the taller and comelier person of the two, walked very erect
+for one of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever
+beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff. His visage was
+meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon discovered
+that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company,
+and had never seen or heard of them before. And I had a whisper from a
+ghost, who shall be nameless, "That these commentators always kept in
+the most distant quarters from their principals, in the lower world,
+through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly
+misrepresented the meaning of these authors to posterity." I introduced
+Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them
+better than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a
+genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But Aristotle was out of all
+patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented
+them to him; and he asked them "whether the rest of the tribe were as
+great dunces as themselves?"'). There is, however, a difference between
+them: for whereas Hegel is thinking of all the minds of men as one mind,
+which developes the stages of the idea in different countries or at
+different times in the same country, with Plato these gradations are
+regarded only as an order of thought or ideas; the history of the human
+mind had not yet dawned upon him.
+
+Many criticisms may be made on Plato's theory of education. While in
+some respects he unavoidably falls short of modern thinkers, in others
+he is in advance of them. He is opposed to the modes of education which
+prevailed in his own time; but he can hardly be said to have discovered
+new ones. He does not see that education is relative to the characters
+of individuals; he only desires to impress the same form of the state on
+the minds of all. He has no sufficient idea of the effect of literature
+on the formation of the mind, and greatly exaggerates that of
+mathematics. His aim is above all things to train the reasoning
+faculties; to implant in the mind the spirit and power of abstraction;
+to explain and define general notions, and, if possible, to connect
+them. No wonder that in the vacancy of actual knowledge his followers,
+and at times even he himself, should have fallen away from the doctrine
+of ideas, and have returned to that branch of knowledge in which alone
+the relation of the one and many can be truly seen--the science of
+number. In his views both of teaching and training he might be styled,
+in modern language, a doctrinaire; after the Spartan fashion he would
+have his citizens cast in one mould; he does not seem to consider that
+some degree of freedom, 'a little wholesome neglect,' is necessary to
+strengthen and develope the character and to give play to the individual
+nature. His citizens would not have acquired that knowledge which in
+the vision of Er is supposed to be gained by the pilgrims from their
+experience of evil.
+
+On the other hand, Plato is far in advance of modern philosophers and
+theologians when he teaches that education is to be continued through
+life and will begin again in another. He would never allow education of
+some kind to cease; although he was aware that the proverbial saying of
+Solon, 'I grow old learning many things,' cannot be applied literally.
+Himself ravished with the contemplation of the idea of good, and
+delighting in solid geometry (Rep.), he has no difficulty in imagining
+that a lifetime might be passed happily in such pursuits. We who know
+how many more men of business there are in the world than real students
+or thinkers, are not equally sanguine. The education which he proposes
+for his citizens is really the ideal life of the philosopher or man of
+genius, interrupted, but only for a time, by practical duties,--a life
+not for the many, but for the few.
+
+Yet the thought of Plato may not be wholly incapable of application to
+our own times. Even if regarded as an ideal which can never be realized,
+it may have a great effect in elevating the characters of mankind,
+and raising them above the routine of their ordinary occupation or
+profession. It is the best form under which we can conceive the whole
+of life. Nevertheless the idea of Plato is not easily put into practice.
+For the education of after life is necessarily the education which each
+one gives himself. Men and women cannot be brought together in schools
+or colleges at forty or fifty years of age; and if they could the result
+would be disappointing. The destination of most men is what Plato would
+call 'the Den' for the whole of life, and with that they are content.
+Neither have they teachers or advisers with whom they can take counsel
+in riper years. There is no 'schoolmaster abroad' who will tell them of
+their faults, or inspire them with the higher sense of duty, or with the
+ambition of a true success in life; no Socrates who will convict them
+of ignorance; no Christ, or follower of Christ, who will reprove them
+of sin. Hence they have a difficulty in receiving the first element of
+improvement, which is self-knowledge. The hopes of youth no longer stir
+them; they rather wish to rest than to pursue high objects. A few
+only who have come across great men and women, or eminent teachers of
+religion and morality, have received a second life from them, and have
+lighted a candle from the fire of their genius.
+
+The want of energy is one of the main reasons why so few persons
+continue to improve in later years. They have not the will, and do not
+know the way. They 'never try an experiment,' or look up a point
+of interest for themselves; they make no sacrifices for the sake of
+knowledge; their minds, like their bodies, at a certain age become
+fixed. Genius has been defined as 'the power of taking pains'; but
+hardly any one keeps up his interest in knowledge throughout a whole
+life. The troubles of a family, the business of making money, the
+demands of a profession destroy the elasticity of the mind. The waxen
+tablet of the memory which was once capable of receiving 'true thoughts
+and clear impressions' becomes hard and crowded; there is not room
+for the accumulations of a long life (Theaet.). The student, as years
+advance, rather makes an exchange of knowledge than adds to his stores.
+There is no pressing necessity to learn; the stock of Classics or
+History or Natural Science which was enough for a man at twenty-five is
+enough for him at fifty. Neither is it easy to give a definite answer to
+any one who asks how he is to improve. For self-education consists in a
+thousand things, commonplace in themselves,--in adding to what we are
+by nature something of what we are not; in learning to see ourselves as
+others see us; in judging, not by opinion, but by the evidence of facts;
+in seeking out the society of superior minds; in a study of lives and
+writings of great men; in observation of the world and character; in
+receiving kindly the natural influence of different times of life; in
+any act or thought which is raised above the practice or opinions of
+mankind; in the pursuit of some new or original enquiry; in any effort
+of mind which calls forth some latent power.
+
+If any one is desirous of carrying out in detail the Platonic education
+of after-life, some such counsels as the following may be offered to
+him:--That he shall choose the branch of knowledge to which his own mind
+most distinctly inclines, and in which he takes the greatest delight,
+either one which seems to connect with his own daily employment, or,
+perhaps, furnishes the greatest contrast to it. He may study from the
+speculative side the profession or business in which he is practically
+engaged. He may make Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, Bacon the friends
+and companions of his life. He may find opportunities of hearing the
+living voice of a great teacher. He may select for enquiry some point of
+history or some unexplained phenomenon of nature. An hour a day passed
+in such scientific or literary pursuits will furnish as many facts as
+the memory can retain, and will give him 'a pleasure not to be repented
+of' (Timaeus). Only let him beware of being the slave of crotchets, or
+of running after a Will o' the Wisp in his ignorance, or in his vanity
+of attributing to himself the gifts of a poet or assuming the air of
+a philosopher. He should know the limits of his own powers. Better to
+build up the mind by slow additions, to creep on quietly from one
+thing to another, to gain insensibly new powers and new interests in
+knowledge, than to form vast schemes which are never destined to be
+realized. But perhaps, as Plato would say, 'This is part of another
+subject' (Tim.); though we may also defend our digression by his example
+(Theaet.).
+
+4. We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the natural
+growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on political
+philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the attention of Plato
+and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with the mutability of human
+affairs; they could moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of
+empires (Plato, Statesman, and Sulpicius' Letter to Cicero); by them
+fate and chance were deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and
+to have had a great share in political events. The wiser of them like
+Thucydides believed that 'what had been would be again,' and that a
+tolerable idea of the future could be gathered from the past. Also they
+had dreams of a Golden Age which existed once upon a time and might
+still exist in some unknown land, or might return again in the remote
+future. But the regular growth of a state enlightened by experience,
+progressing in knowledge, improving in the arts, of which the citizens
+were educated by the fulfilment of political duties, appears never to
+have come within the range of their hopes and aspirations. Such a state
+had never been seen, and therefore could not be conceived by them. Their
+experience (Aristot. Metaph.; Plato, Laws) led them to conclude that
+there had been cycles of civilization in which the arts had been
+discovered and lost many times over, and cities had been overthrown and
+rebuilt again and again, and deluges and volcanoes and other natural
+convulsions had altered the face of the earth. Tradition told them of
+many destructions of mankind and of the preservation of a remnant.
+The world began again after a deluge and was reconstructed out of the
+fragments of itself. Also they were acquainted with empires of unknown
+antiquity, like the Egyptian or Assyrian; but they had never seen them
+grow, and could not imagine, any more than we can, the state of man
+which preceded them. They were puzzled and awestricken by the Egyptian
+monuments, of which the forms, as Plato says, not in a figure, but
+literally, were ten thousand years old (Laws), and they contrasted the
+antiquity of Egypt with their own short memories.
+
+The early legends of Hellas have no real connection with the later
+history: they are at a distance, and the intermediate region is
+concealed from view; there is no road or path which leads from one to
+the other. At the beginning of Greek history, in the vestibule of the
+temple, is seen standing first of all the figure of the legislator,
+himself the interpreter and servant of the God. The fundamental laws
+which he gives are not supposed to change with time and circumstances.
+The salvation of the state is held rather to depend on the inviolable
+maintenance of them. They were sanctioned by the authority of heaven,
+and it was deemed impiety to alter them. The desire to maintain
+them unaltered seems to be the origin of what at first sight is very
+surprising to us--the intolerant zeal of Plato against innovators in
+religion or politics (Laws); although with a happy inconsistency he
+is also willing that the laws of other countries should be studied and
+improvements in legislation privately communicated to the Nocturnal
+Council (Laws). The additions which were made to them in later ages in
+order to meet the increasing complexity of affairs were still ascribed
+by a fiction to the original legislator; and the words of such
+enactments at Athens were disputed over as if they had been the words of
+Solon himself. Plato hopes to preserve in a later generation the mind of
+the legislator; he would have his citizens remain within the lines
+which he has laid down for them. He would not harass them with minute
+regulations, he would have allowed some changes in the laws: but not
+changes which would affect the fundamental institutions of the state,
+such for example as would convert an aristocracy into a timocracy, or a
+timocracy into a popular form of government.
+
+Passing from speculations to facts, we observe that progress has been
+the exception rather than the law of human history. And therefore we are
+not surprised to find that the idea of progress is of modern rather than
+of ancient date; and, like the idea of a philosophy of history, is
+not more than a century or two old. It seems to have arisen out of the
+impression left on the human mind by the growth of the Roman Empire
+and of the Christian Church, and to be due to the political and social
+improvements which they introduced into the world; and still more in
+our own century to the idealism of the first French Revolution and the
+triumph of American Independence; and in a yet greater degree to the
+vast material prosperity and growth of population in England and her
+colonies and in America. It is also to be ascribed in a measure to the
+greater study of the philosophy of history. The optimist temperament of
+some great writers has assisted the creation of it, while the opposite
+character has led a few to regard the future of the world as dark.
+The 'spectator of all time and of all existence' sees more of 'the
+increasing purpose which through the ages ran' than formerly: but to the
+inhabitant of a small state of Hellas the vision was necessarily limited
+like the valley in which he dwelt. There was no remote past on which his
+eye could rest, nor any future from which the veil was partly lifted up
+by the analogy of history. The narrowness of view, which to ourselves
+appears so singular, was to him natural, if not unavoidable.
+
+5. For the relation of the Republic to the Statesman and the Laws, and
+the two other works of Plato which directly treat of politics, see the
+Introductions to the two latter; a few general points of comparison may
+be touched upon in this place.
+
+And first of the Laws.
+
+(1) The Republic, though probably written at intervals, yet speaking
+generally and judging by the indications of thought and style, may be
+reasonably ascribed to the middle period of Plato's life: the Laws are
+certainly the work of his declining years, and some portions of them at
+any rate seem to have been written in extreme old age.
+
+(2) The Republic is full of hope and aspiration: the Laws bear the stamp
+of failure and disappointment. The one is a finished work which received
+the last touches of the author: the other is imperfectly executed, and
+apparently unfinished. The one has the grace and beauty of youth: the
+other has lost the poetical form, but has more of the severity and
+knowledge of life which is characteristic of old age.
+
+(3) The most conspicuous defect of the Laws is the failure of dramatic
+power, whereas the Republic is full of striking contrasts of ideas and
+oppositions of character.
+
+(4) The Laws may be said to have more the nature of a sermon,
+the Republic of a poem; the one is more religious, the other more
+intellectual.
+
+(5) Many theories of Plato, such as the doctrine of ideas, the
+government of the world by philosophers, are not found in the Laws;
+the immortality of the soul is first mentioned in xii; the person of
+Socrates has altogether disappeared. The community of women and children
+is renounced; the institution of common or public meals for women (Laws)
+is for the first time introduced (Ar. Pol.).
+
+(6) There remains in the Laws the old enmity to the poets, who are
+ironically saluted in high-flown terms, and, at the same time, are
+peremptorily ordered out of the city, if they are not willing to submit
+their poems to the censorship of the magistrates (Rep.).
+
+(7) Though the work is in most respects inferior, there are a few
+passages in the Laws, such as the honour due to the soul, the evils
+of licentious or unnatural love, the whole of Book x. (religion), the
+dishonesty of retail trade, and bequests, which come more home to us,
+and contain more of what may be termed the modern element in Plato than
+almost anything in the Republic.
+
+The relation of the two works to one another is very well given:
+
+(1) by Aristotle in the Politics from the side of the Laws:--
+
+'The same, or nearly the same, objections apply to Plato's later work,
+the Laws, and therefore we had better examine briefly the constitution
+which is therein described. In the Republic, Socrates has definitely
+settled in all a few questions only; such as the community of women and
+children, the community of property, and the constitution of the state.
+The population is divided into two classes--one of husbandmen, and
+the other of warriors; from this latter is taken a third class of
+counsellors and rulers of the state. But Socrates has not determined
+whether the husbandmen and artists are to have a share in the
+government, and whether they too are to carry arms and share in military
+service or not. He certainly thinks that the women ought to share in the
+education of the guardians, and to fight by their side. The remainder of
+the work is filled up with digressions foreign to the main subject, and
+with discussions about the education of the guardians. In the Laws there
+is hardly anything but laws; not much is said about the constitution.
+This, which he had intended to make more of the ordinary type, he
+gradually brings round to the other or ideal form. For with the
+exception of the community of women and property, he supposes everything
+to be the same in both states; there is to be the same education; the
+citizens of both are to live free from servile occupations, and there
+are to be common meals in both. The only difference is that in the Laws
+the common meals are extended to women, and the warriors number about
+5000, but in the Republic only 1000.'
+
+(2) by Plato in the Laws (Book v.), from the side of the Republic:--
+
+'The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of
+the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying
+that "Friends have all things in common." Whether there is now, or ever
+will be, this communion of women and children and of property, in which
+the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things
+which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have
+become common, and all men express praise and blame, and feel joy
+and sorrow, on the same occasions, and the laws unite the city to the
+utmost,--whether all this is possible or not, I say that no man, acting
+upon any other principle, will ever constitute a state more exalted in
+virtue, or truer or better than this. Such a state, whether inhabited
+by Gods or sons of Gods, will make them blessed who dwell therein; and
+therefore to this we are to look for the pattern of the state, and to
+cling to this, and, as far as possible, to seek for one which is like
+this. The state which we have now in hand, when created, will be nearest
+to immortality and unity in the next degree; and after that, by the
+grace of God, we will complete the third one. And we will begin by
+speaking of the nature and origin of the second.'
+
+The comparatively short work called the Statesman or Politicus in its
+style and manner is more akin to the Laws, while in its idealism
+it rather resembles the Republic. As far as we can judge by various
+indications of language and thought, it must be later than the one and
+of course earlier than the other. In both the Republic and Statesman a
+close connection is maintained between Politics and Dialectic. In the
+Statesman, enquiries into the principles of Method are interspersed with
+discussions about Politics. The comparative advantages of the rule of
+law and of a person are considered, and the decision given in favour of
+a person (Arist. Pol.). But much may be said on the other side, nor is
+the opposition necessary; for a person may rule by law, and law may
+be so applied as to be the living voice of the legislator. As in the
+Republic, there is a myth, describing, however, not a future, but a
+former existence of mankind. The question is asked, 'Whether the state
+of innocence which is described in the myth, or a state like our own
+which possesses art and science and distinguishes good from evil, is
+the preferable condition of man.' To this question of the comparative
+happiness of civilized and primitive life, which was so often discussed
+in the last century and in our own, no answer is given. The Statesman,
+though less perfect in style than the Republic and of far less range,
+may justly be regarded as one of the greatest of Plato's dialogues.
+
+6. Others as well as Plato have chosen an ideal Republic to be the
+vehicle of thoughts which they could not definitely express, or which
+went beyond their own age. The classical writing which approaches most
+nearly to the Republic of Plato is the 'De Republica' of Cicero; but
+neither in this nor in any other of his dialogues does he rival the
+art of Plato. The manners are clumsy and inferior; the hand of the
+rhetorician is apparent at every turn. Yet noble sentiments are
+constantly recurring: the true note of Roman patriotism--'We Romans are
+a great people'--resounds through the whole work. Like Socrates, Cicero
+turns away from the phenomena of the heavens to civil and political
+life. He would rather not discuss the 'two Suns' of which all Rome was
+talking, when he can converse about 'the two nations in one' which had
+divided Rome ever since the days of the Gracchi. Like Socrates again,
+speaking in the person of Scipio, he is afraid lest he should assume
+too much the character of a teacher, rather than of an equal who is
+discussing among friends the two sides of a question. He would confine
+the terms King or State to the rule of reason and justice, and he will
+not concede that title either to a democracy or to a monarchy. But under
+the rule of reason and justice he is willing to include the natural
+superior ruling over the natural inferior, which he compares to the soul
+ruling over the body. He prefers a mixture of forms of government to any
+single one. The two portraits of the just and the unjust, which occur in
+the second book of the Republic, are transferred to the state--Philus,
+one of the interlocutors, maintaining against his will the necessity
+of injustice as a principle of government, while the other, Laelius,
+supports the opposite thesis. His views of language and number are
+derived from Plato; like him he denounces the drama. He also declares
+that if his life were to be twice as long he would have no time to read
+the lyric poets. The picture of democracy is translated by him word for
+word, though he had hardly shown himself able to 'carry the jest' of
+Plato. He converts into a stately sentence the humorous fancy about the
+animals, who 'are so imbued with the spirit of democracy that they make
+the passers-by get out of their way.' His description of the tyrant is
+imitated from Plato, but is far inferior. The second book is historical,
+and claims for the Roman constitution (which is to him the ideal) a
+foundation of fact such as Plato probably intended to have given to the
+Republic in the Critias. His most remarkable imitation of Plato is the
+adaptation of the vision of Er, which is converted by Cicero into the
+'Somnium Scipionis'; he has 'romanized' the myth of the Republic, adding
+an argument for the immortality of the soul taken from the Phaedrus,
+and some other touches derived from the Phaedo and the Timaeus. Though a
+beautiful tale and containing splendid passages, the 'Somnium Scipionis;
+is very inferior to the vision of Er; it is only a dream, and hardly
+allows the reader to suppose that the writer believes in his own
+creation. Whether his dialogues were framed on the model of the lost
+dialogues of Aristotle, as he himself tells us, or of Plato, to which
+they bear many superficial resemblances, he is still the Roman orator;
+he is not conversing, but making speeches, and is never able to mould
+the intractable Latin to the grace and ease of the Greek Platonic
+dialogue. But if he is defective in form, much more is he inferior to
+the Greek in matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings leaves
+upon our minds the impression of an original thinker.
+
+Plato's Republic has been said to be a church and not a state; and such
+an ideal of a city in the heavens has always hovered over the Christian
+world, and is embodied in St. Augustine's 'De Civitate Dei,' which is
+suggested by the decay and fall of the Roman Empire, much in the same
+manner in which we may imagine the Republic of Plato to have been
+influenced by the decline of Greek politics in the writer's own age. The
+difference is that in the time of Plato the degeneracy, though certain,
+was gradual and insensible: whereas the taking of Rome by the Goths
+stirred like an earthquake the age of St. Augustine. Men were inclined
+to believe that the overthrow of the city was to be ascribed to the
+anger felt by the old Roman deities at the neglect of their worship. St.
+Augustine maintains the opposite thesis; he argues that the destruction
+of the Roman Empire is due, not to the rise of Christianity, but to
+the vices of Paganism. He wanders over Roman history, and over Greek
+philosophy and mythology, and finds everywhere crime, impiety and
+falsehood. He compares the worst parts of the Gentile religions with
+the best elements of the faith of Christ. He shows nothing of the spirit
+which led others of the early Christian Fathers to recognize in the
+writings of the Greek philosophers the power of the divine truth. He
+traces the parallel of the kingdom of God, that is, the history of the
+Jews, contained in their scriptures, and of the kingdoms of the world,
+which are found in gentile writers, and pursues them both into an ideal
+future. It need hardly be remarked that his use both of Greek and
+of Roman historians and of the sacred writings of the Jews is wholly
+uncritical. The heathen mythology, the Sybilline oracles, the myths
+of Plato, the dreams of Neo-Platonists are equally regarded by him as
+matter of fact. He must be acknowledged to be a strictly polemical or
+controversial writer who makes the best of everything on one side and
+the worst of everything on the other. He has no sympathy with the old
+Roman life as Plato has with Greek life, nor has he any idea of the
+ecclesiastical kingdom which was to arise out of the ruins of the Roman
+empire. He is not blind to the defects of the Christian Church, and
+looks forward to a time when Christian and Pagan shall be alike brought
+before the judgment-seat, and the true City of God shall appear...The
+work of St. Augustine is a curious repertory of antiquarian learning and
+quotations, deeply penetrated with Christian ethics, but showing little
+power of reasoning, and a slender knowledge of the Greek literature
+and language. He was a great genius, and a noble character, yet hardly
+capable of feeling or understanding anything external to his own
+theology. Of all the ancient philosophers he is most attracted by Plato,
+though he is very slightly acquainted with his writings. He is inclined
+to believe that the idea of creation in the Timaeus is derived from the
+narrative in Genesis; and he is strangely taken with the coincidence (?)
+of Plato's saying that 'the philosopher is the lover of God,' and
+the words of the Book of Exodus in which God reveals himself to Moses
+(Exod.) He dwells at length on miracles performed in his own day, of
+which the evidence is regarded by him as irresistible. He speaks in a
+very interesting manner of the beauty and utility of nature and of the
+human frame, which he conceives to afford a foretaste of the heavenly
+state and of the resurrection of the body. The book is not really what
+to most persons the title of it would imply, and belongs to an age which
+has passed away. But it contains many fine passages and thoughts which
+are for all time.
+
+The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most remarkable
+of mediaeval ideals, and bears the impress of the great genius in whom
+Italy and the Middle Ages are so vividly reflected. It is the vision of
+an Universal Empire, which is supposed to be the natural and necessary
+government of the world, having a divine authority distinct from the
+Papacy, yet coextensive with it. It is not 'the ghost of the dead Roman
+Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,' but the legitimate heir
+and successor of it, justified by the ancient virtues of the Romans and
+the beneficence of their rule. Their right to be the governors of the
+world is also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and acknowledged
+by St. Paul when he appealed to Caesar, and even more emphatically by
+Christ Himself, Who could not have made atonement for the sins of men
+if He had not been condemned by a divinely authorized tribunal. The
+necessity for the establishment of an Universal Empire is proved partly
+by a priori arguments such as the unity of God and the unity of the
+family or nation; partly by perversions of Scripture and history, by
+false analogies of nature, by misapplied quotations from the classics,
+and by odd scraps and commonplaces of logic, showing a familiar but by
+no means exact knowledge of Aristotle (of Plato there is none). But
+a more convincing argument still is the miserable state of the world,
+which he touchingly describes. He sees no hope of happiness or peace
+for mankind until all nations of the earth are comprehended in a single
+empire. The whole treatise shows how deeply the idea of the Roman Empire
+was fixed in the minds of his contemporaries. Not much argument was
+needed to maintain the truth of a theory which to his own contemporaries
+seemed so natural and congenial. He speaks, or rather preaches, from the
+point of view, not of the ecclesiastic, but of the layman, although, as
+a good Catholic, he is willing to acknowledge that in certain respects
+the Empire must submit to the Church. The beginning and end of all his
+noble reflections and of his arguments, good and bad, is the aspiration
+'that in this little plot of earth belonging to mortal man life may pass
+in freedom and peace.' So inextricably is his vision of the future bound
+up with the beliefs and circumstances of his own age.
+
+The 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius,
+and shows a reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries. The book was
+written by him at the age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the generous
+sentiments of youth. He brings the light of Plato to bear upon the
+miserable state of his own country. Living not long after the Wars of
+the Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is
+indignant at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility
+and gentry, at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by
+war. To the eye of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay;
+and side by side with the misery and oppression which he has described
+in the First Book of the Utopia, he places in the Second Book the ideal
+state which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The times were full
+of stir and intellectual interest. The distant murmur of the Reformation
+was beginning to be heard. To minds like More's, Greek literature was
+a revelation: there had arisen an art of interpretation, and the New
+Testament was beginning to be understood as it had never been before,
+and has not often been since, in its natural sense. The life there
+depicted appeared to him wholly unlike that of Christian commonwealths,
+in which 'he saw nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring
+their own commodities under the name and title of the Commonwealth.'
+He thought that Christ, like Plato, 'instituted all things common,' for
+which reason, he tells us, the citizens of Utopia were the more willing
+to receive his doctrines ('Howbeit, I think this was no small help and
+furtherance in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted
+among his, all things common, and that the same community doth yet
+remain in the rightest Christian communities' (Utopia).). The community
+of property is a fixed idea with him, though he is aware of the
+arguments which may be urged on the other side ('These things (I say),
+when I consider with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing
+marvel that he would make no laws for them that refused those laws,
+whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of riches and
+commodities. For the wise men did easily foresee this to be the one and
+only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all things should
+be brought in and established' (Utopia).). We wonder how in the reign of
+Henry VIII, though veiled in another language and published in a foreign
+country, such speculations could have been endured.
+
+He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one who
+succeeded him, with the exception of Swift. In the art of feigning he is
+a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting from a small portion
+of fact, he founds his tale with admirable skill on a few lines in the
+Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He is very precise
+about dates and facts, and has the power of making us believe that the
+narrator of the tale must have been an eyewitness. We are fairly puzzled
+by his manner of mixing up real and imaginary persons; his boy John
+Clement and Peter Giles, citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes
+about the precise words which are supposed to have been used by the
+(imaginary) Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday. 'I have the more
+cause,' says Hythloday, 'to fear that my words shall not be believed,
+for that I know how difficultly and hardly I myself would have believed
+another man telling the same, if I had not myself seen it with mine own
+eyes.' Or again: 'If you had been with me in Utopia, and had presently
+seen their fashions and laws as I did which lived there five years and
+more, and would never have come thence, but only to make the new land
+known here,' etc. More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask Hythloday
+in what part of the world Utopia is situated; he 'would have spent no
+small sum of money rather than it should have escaped him,' and he begs
+Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and obtain an answer to the
+question. After this we are not surprised to hear that a Professor of
+Divinity (perhaps 'a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,' as the
+translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a missionary by
+the High Bishop, 'yea, and that he may himself be made Bishop of Utopia,
+nothing doubting that he must obtain this Bishopric with suit; and he
+counteth that a godly suit which proceedeth not of the desire of honour
+or lucre, but only of a godly zeal.' The design may have failed through
+the disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we have 'very uncertain
+news' after his departure. There is no doubt, however, that he had told
+More and Giles the exact situation of the island, but unfortunately at
+the same moment More's attention, as he is reminded in a letter from
+Giles, was drawn off by a servant, and one of the company from a cold
+caught on shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent Giles from hearing.
+And 'the secret has perished' with him; to this day the place of Utopia
+remains unknown.
+
+The words of Phaedrus, 'O Socrates, you can easily invent Egyptians or
+anything,' are recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike fiction.
+Yet the greater merit of the work is not the admirable art, but the
+originality of thought. More is as free as Plato from the prejudices
+of his age, and far more tolerant. The Utopians do not allow him
+who believes not in the immortality of the soul to share in the
+administration of the state (Laws), 'howbeit they put him to no
+punishment, because they be persuaded that it is in no man's power to
+believe what he list'; and 'no man is to be blamed for reasoning in
+support of his own religion ('One of our company in my presence was
+sharply punished. He, as soon as he was baptised, began, against our
+wills, with more earnest affection than wisdom, to reason of Christ's
+religion, and began to wax so hot in his matter, that he did not only
+prefer our religion before all other, but also did despise and condemn
+all other, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and
+devilish, and the children of everlasting damnation. When he had thus
+long reasoned the matter, they laid hold on him, accused him, and
+condemned him into exile, not as a despiser of religion, but as a
+seditious person and a raiser up of dissension among the people').'
+In the public services 'no prayers be used, but such as every man
+may boldly pronounce without giving offence to any sect.' He says
+significantly, 'There be that give worship to a man that was once of
+excellent virtue or of famous glory, not only as God, but also the
+chiefest and highest God. But the most and the wisest part, rejecting
+all these, believe that there is a certain godly power unknown, far
+above the capacity and reach of man's wit, dispersed throughout all the
+world, not in bigness, but in virtue and power. Him they call the Father
+of all. To Him alone they attribute the beginnings, the increasings, the
+proceedings, the changes, and the ends of all things. Neither give they
+any divine honours to any other than him.' So far was More from sharing
+the popular beliefs of his time. Yet at the end he reminds us that he
+does not in all respects agree with the customs and opinions of the
+Utopians which he describes. And we should let him have the benefit of
+this saving clause, and not rudely withdraw the veil behind which he has
+been pleased to conceal himself.
+
+Nor is he less in advance of popular opinion in his political and moral
+speculations. He would like to bring military glory into contempt; he
+would set all sorts of idle people to profitable occupation, including
+in the same class, priests, women, noblemen, gentlemen, and 'sturdy and
+valiant beggars,' that the labour of all may be reduced to six hours a
+day. His dislike of capital punishment, and plans for the reformation of
+offenders; his detestation of priests and lawyers (Compare his satirical
+observation: 'They (the Utopians) have priests of exceeding holiness,
+and therefore very few.); his remark that 'although every one may hear
+of ravenous dogs and wolves and cruel man-eaters, it is not easy to find
+states that are well and wisely governed,' are curiously at variance
+with the notions of his age and indeed with his own life. There are many
+points in which he shows a modern feeling and a prophetic insight like
+Plato. He is a sanitary reformer; he maintains that civilized states
+have a right to the soil of waste countries; he is inclined to the
+opinion which places happiness in virtuous pleasures, but herein, as he
+thinks, not disagreeing from those other philosophers who define virtue
+to be a life according to nature. He extends the idea of happiness so as
+to include the happiness of others; and he argues ingeniously, 'All men
+agree that we ought to make others happy; but if others, how much more
+ourselves!' And still he thinks that there may be a more excellent way,
+but to this no man's reason can attain unless heaven should inspire him
+with a higher truth. His ceremonies before marriage; his humane proposal
+that war should be carried on by assassinating the leaders of the enemy,
+may be compared to some of the paradoxes of Plato. He has a charming
+fancy, like the affinities of Greeks and barbarians in the Timaeus, that
+the Utopians learnt the language of the Greeks with the more readiness
+because they were originally of the same race with them. He is
+penetrated with the spirit of Plato, and quotes or adapts many thoughts
+both from the Republic and from the Timaeus. He prefers public duties to
+private, and is somewhat impatient of the importunity of relations. His
+citizens have no silver or gold of their own, but are ready enough to
+pay them to their mercenaries. There is nothing of which he is more
+contemptuous than the love of money. Gold is used for fetters of
+criminals, and diamonds and pearls for children's necklaces (When the
+ambassadors came arrayed in gold and peacocks' feathers 'to the eyes of
+all the Utopians except very few, which had been in other countries for
+some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed shameful
+and reproachful. In so much that they most reverently saluted the
+vilest and most abject of them for lords--passing over the ambassadors
+themselves without any honour, judging them by their wearing of golden
+chains to be bondmen. You should have seen children also, that had cast
+away their pearls and precious stones, when they saw the like sticking
+upon the ambassadors' caps, dig and push their mothers under the sides,
+saying thus to them--"Look, though he were a little child still." But
+the mother; yea and that also in good earnest: "Peace, son," saith she,
+"I think he be some of the ambassadors' fools."')
+
+Like Plato he is full of satirical reflections on governments and
+princes; on the state of the world and of knowledge. The hero of his
+discourse (Hythloday) is very unwilling to become a minister of state,
+considering that he would lose his independence and his advice would
+never be heeded (Compare an exquisite passage, of which the conclusion
+is as follows: 'And verily it is naturally given...suppressed and
+ended.') He ridicules the new logic of his time; the Utopians could
+never be made to understand the doctrine of Second Intentions ('For they
+have not devised one of all those rules of restrictions, amplifications,
+and suppositions, very wittily invented in the small Logicals, which
+here our children in every place do learn. Furthermore, they were never
+yet able to find out the second intentions; insomuch that none of them
+all could ever see man himself in common, as they call him, though he be
+(as you know) bigger than was ever any giant, yea, and pointed to of us
+even with our finger.') He is very severe on the sports of the gentry;
+the Utopians count 'hunting the lowest, the vilest, and the most abject
+part of butchery.' He quotes the words of the Republic in which the
+philosopher is described 'standing out of the way under a wall until the
+driving storm of sleet and rain be overpast,' which admit of a singular
+application to More's own fate; although, writing twenty years before
+(about the year 1514), he can hardly be supposed to have foreseen this.
+There is no touch of satire which strikes deeper than his quiet remark
+that the greater part of the precepts of Christ are more at variance
+with the lives of ordinary Christians than the discourse of Utopia ('And
+yet the most part of them is more dissident from the manners of the
+world now a days, than my communication was. But preachers, sly and
+wily men, following your counsel (as I suppose) because they saw men
+evil-willing to frame their manners to Christ's rule, they have wrested
+and wried his doctrine, and, like a rule of lead, have applied it to
+men's manners, that by some means at the least way, they might agree
+together.')
+
+The 'New Atlantis' is only a fragment, and far inferior in merit to the
+'Utopia.' The work is full of ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy,
+and by no means impresses the reader with a sense of credibility. In
+some places Lord Bacon is characteristically different from Sir Thomas
+More, as, for example, in the external state which he attributes to the
+governor of Solomon's House, whose dress he minutely describes, while to
+Sir Thomas More such trappings appear simple ridiculous. Yet, after this
+programme of dress, Bacon adds the beautiful trait, 'that he had a look
+as though he pitied men.' Several things are borrowed by him from the
+Timaeus; but he has injured the unity of style by adding thoughts and
+passages which are taken from the Hebrew Scriptures.
+
+The 'City of the Sun' written by Campanella (1568-1639), a Dominican
+friar, several years after the 'New Atlantis' of Bacon, has many
+resemblances to the Republic of Plato. The citizens have wives and
+children in common; their marriages are of the same temporary sort, and
+are arranged by the magistrates from time to time. They do not, however,
+adopt his system of lots, but bring together the best natures, male and
+female, 'according to philosophical rules.' The infants until two years
+of age are brought up by their mothers in public temples; and since
+individuals for the most part educate their children badly, at the
+beginning of their third year they are committed to the care of the
+State, and are taught at first, not out of books, but from paintings of
+all kinds, which are emblazoned on the walls of the city. The city has
+six interior circuits of walls, and an outer wall which is the
+seventh. On this outer wall are painted the figures of legislators and
+philosophers, and on each of the interior walls the symbols or forms
+of some one of the sciences are delineated. The women are, for the most
+part, trained, like the men, in warlike and other exercises; but they
+have two special occupations of their own. After a battle, they and the
+boys soothe and relieve the wounded warriors; also they encourage them
+with embraces and pleasant words. Some elements of the Christian or
+Catholic religion are preserved among them. The life of the Apostles is
+greatly admired by this people because they had all things in common;
+and the short prayer which Jesus Christ taught men is used in their
+worship. It is a duty of the chief magistrates to pardon sins, and
+therefore the whole people make secret confession of them to the
+magistrates, and they to their chief, who is a sort of Rector
+Metaphysicus; and by this means he is well informed of all that is going
+on in the minds of men. After confession, absolution is granted to
+the citizens collectively, but no one is mentioned by name. There
+also exists among them a practice of perpetual prayer, performed by
+a succession of priests, who change every hour. Their religion is
+a worship of God in Trinity, that is of Wisdom, Love and Power,
+but without any distinction of persons. They behold in the sun the
+reflection of His glory; mere graven images they reject, refusing to
+fall under the 'tyranny' of idolatry.
+
+Many details are given about their customs of eating and drinking, about
+their mode of dressing, their employments, their wars. Campanella looks
+forward to a new mode of education, which is to be a study of nature,
+and not of Aristotle. He would not have his citizens waste their time
+in the consideration of what he calls 'the dead signs of things.' He
+remarks that he who knows one science only, does not really know that
+one any more than the rest, and insists strongly on the necessity of a
+variety of knowledge. More scholars are turned out in the City of the
+Sun in one year than by contemporary methods in ten or fifteen. He
+evidently believes, like Bacon, that henceforward natural science will
+play a great part in education, a hope which seems hardly to have
+been realized, either in our own or in any former age; at any rate the
+fulfilment of it has been long deferred.
+
+There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this work, and
+a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little or no charm
+of style, and falls very far short of the 'New Atlantis' of Bacon,
+and still more of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More. It is full of
+inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a superficial
+acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as one might expect
+to have been written by a philosopher and man of genius who was also a
+friar, and who had spent twenty-seven years of his life in a prison of
+the Inquisition. The most interesting feature of the book, common to
+Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is shown by the
+writer, of the misery and ignorance prevailing among the lower classes
+in his own time. Campanella takes note of Aristotle's answer to Plato's
+community of property, that in a society where all things are common, no
+individual would have any motive to work (Arist. Pol.): he replies, that
+his citizens being happy and contented in themselves (they are required
+to work only four hours a day), will have greater regard for their
+fellows than exists among men at present. He thinks, like Plato, that if
+he abolishes private feelings and interests, a great public feeling will
+take their place.
+
+Other writings on ideal states, such as the 'Oceana' of Harrington, in
+which the Lord Archon, meaning Cromwell, is described, not as he was,
+but as he ought to have been; or the 'Argenis' of Barclay, which is an
+historical allegory of his own time, are too unlike Plato to be worth
+mentioning. More interesting than either of these, and far more Platonic
+in style and thought, is Sir John Eliot's 'Monarchy of Man,' in which
+the prisoner of the Tower, no longer able 'to be a politician in the
+land of his birth,' turns away from politics to view 'that other city
+which is within him,' and finds on the very threshold of the grave that
+the secret of human happiness is the mastery of self. The change of
+government in the time of the English Commonwealth set men thinking
+about first principles, and gave rise to many works of this class...The
+great original genius of Swift owes nothing to Plato; nor is there
+any trace in the conversation or in the works of Dr. Johnson of any
+acquaintance with his writings. He probably would have refuted Plato
+without reading him, in the same fashion in which he supposed himself to
+have refuted Bishop Berkeley's theory of the non-existence of matter.
+If we except the so-called English Platonists, or rather Neo-Platonists,
+who never understood their master, and the writings of Coleridge,
+who was to some extent a kindred spirit, Plato has left no permanent
+impression on English literature.
+
+7. Human life and conduct are affected by ideals in the same way that
+they are affected by the examples of eminent men. Neither the one nor
+the other are immediately applicable to practice, but there is a virtue
+flowing from them which tends to raise individuals above the common
+routine of society or trade, and to elevate States above the mere
+interests of commerce or the necessities of self-defence. Like the
+ideals of art they are partly framed by the omission of particulars;
+they require to be viewed at a certain distance, and are apt to fade
+away if we attempt to approach them. They gain an imaginary distinctness
+when embodied in a State or in a system of philosophy, but they still
+remain the visions of 'a world unrealized.' More striking and obvious to
+the ordinary mind are the examples of great men, who have served their
+own generation and are remembered in another. Even in our own family
+circle there may have been some one, a woman, or even a child, in
+whose face has shone forth a goodness more than human. The ideal then
+approaches nearer to us, and we fondly cling to it. The ideal of the
+past, whether of our own past lives or of former states of society, has
+a singular fascination for the minds of many. Too late we learn that
+such ideals cannot be recalled, though the recollection of them may
+have a humanizing influence on other times. But the abstractions of
+philosophy are to most persons cold and vacant; they give light without
+warmth; they are like the full moon in the heavens when there are no
+stars appearing. Men cannot live by thought alone; the world of sense is
+always breaking in upon them. They are for the most part confined to a
+corner of earth, and see but a little way beyond their own home or place
+of abode; they 'do not lift up their eyes to the hills'; they are not
+awake when the dawn appears. But in Plato we have reached a height from
+which a man may look into the distance and behold the future of the
+world and of philosophy. The ideal of the State and of the life of
+the philosopher; the ideal of an education continuing through life and
+extending equally to both sexes; the ideal of the unity and correlation
+of knowledge; the faith in good and immortality--are the vacant forms of
+light on which Plato is seeking to fix the eye of mankind.
+
+8. Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek
+Philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day: one seen more
+clearly than formerly, as though each year and each generation brought
+us nearer to some great change; the other almost in the same degree
+retiring from view behind the laws of nature, as if oppressed by them,
+but still remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the
+heart of man. The first ideal is the future of the human race in this
+world; the second the future of the individual in another. The first is
+the more perfect realization of our own present life; the second,
+the abnegation of it: the one, limited by experience, the other,
+transcending it. Both of them have been and are powerful motives of
+action; there are a few in whom they have taken the place of all earthly
+interests. The hope of a future for the human race at first sight seems
+to be the more disinterested, the hope of individual existence the more
+egotistical, of the two motives. But when men have learned to resolve
+their hope of a future either for themselves or for the world into the
+will of God--'not my will but Thine,' the difference between them falls
+away; and they may be allowed to make either of them the basis of their
+lives, according to their own individual character or temperament. There
+is as much faith in the willingness to work for an unseen future in this
+world as in another. Neither is it inconceivable that some rare nature
+may feel his duty to another generation, or to another century, almost
+as strongly as to his own, or that living always in the presence of God,
+he may realize another world as vividly as he does this.
+
+The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under
+similitudes derived from human qualities; although sometimes, like the
+Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures of speech and describe
+the nature of God only in negatives. These again by degrees acquire a
+positive meaning. It would be well, if when meditating on the higher
+truths either of philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one
+form of expression for another, lest through the necessities of language
+we should become the slaves of mere words.
+
+There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which has a
+place in the home and heart of every believer in the religion of Christ,
+and in which men seem to find a nearer and more familiar truth,
+the Divine man, the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, Who is the
+first-born and head of the whole family in heaven and earth, in Whom
+the Divine and human, that which is without and that which is within the
+range of our earthly faculties, are indissolubly united. Neither is this
+divine form of goodness wholly separable from the ideal of the Christian
+Church, which is said in the New Testament to be 'His body,' or at
+variance with those other images of good which Plato sets before us. We
+see Him in a figure only, and of figures of speech we select but a few,
+and those the simplest, to be the expression of Him. We behold Him in
+a picture, but He is not there. We gather up the fragments of His
+discourses, but neither do they represent Him as He truly was. His
+dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, but in the heart of man.
+This is that image which Plato saw dimly in the distance, which, when
+existing among men, he called, in the language of Homer, 'the likeness
+of God,' the likeness of a nature which in all ages men have felt to be
+greater and better than themselves, and which in endless forms, whether
+derived from Scripture or nature, from the witness of history or from
+the human heart, regarded as a person or not as a person, with or
+without parts or passions, existing in space or not in space, is and
+will always continue to be to mankind the Idea of Good.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE REPUBLIC.
+
+
+
+
+PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE.
+
+Socrates, who is the narrator.
+
+Glaucon.
+
+Adeimantus.
+
+Polemarchus.
+
+Cephalus.
+
+Thrasymachus.
+
+Cleitophon.
+
+And others who are mute auditors.
+
+The scene is laid in the house of Cephalus at the Piraeus; and the whole
+dialogue is narrated by Socrates the day after it actually took place to
+Timaeus, Hermocrates, Critias, and a nameless person, who are introduced
+in the Timaeus.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston,
+that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian
+Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would
+celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the
+procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally,
+if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the
+spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant
+Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a
+distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to
+run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak
+behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.
+
+I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
+
+There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
+
+Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus
+appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son
+of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession.
+
+Polemarchus said to me: I perceive, Socrates, that you and your
+companion are already on your way to the city.
+
+You are not far wrong, I said.
+
+But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
+
+Of course.
+
+And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain
+where you are.
+
+May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to
+let us go?
+
+But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
+
+Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
+
+Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
+
+Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in
+honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?
+
+With horses! I replied: That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches
+and pass them one to another during the race?
+
+Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will be
+celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon
+after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young
+men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse.
+
+Glaucon said: I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
+
+Very good, I replied.
+
+Accordingly we went with Polemarchus to his house; and there we found
+his brothers Lysias and Euthydemus, and with them Thrasymachus the
+Chalcedonian, Charmantides the Paeanian, and Cleitophon the son of
+Aristonymus. There too was Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, whom I
+had not seen for a long time, and I thought him very much aged. He was
+seated on a cushioned chair, and had a garland on his head, for he had
+been sacrificing in the court; and there were some other chairs in the
+room arranged in a semicircle, upon which we sat down by him. He saluted
+me eagerly, and then he said:--
+
+You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were
+still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me. But
+at my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come
+oftener to the Piraeus. For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures
+of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm
+of conversation. Do not then deny my request, but make our house your
+resort and keep company with these young men; we are old friends, and
+you will be quite at home with us.
+
+I replied: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus,
+than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who
+have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to
+enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.
+And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have
+arrived at that time which the poets call the 'threshold of old age'--Is
+life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?
+
+I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my
+age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says;
+and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is--I cannot
+eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away:
+there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer
+life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations,
+and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the
+cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which
+is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old,
+and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not
+my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I
+remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How
+does love suit with age, Sophocles,--are you still the man you were?
+Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you
+speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His
+words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to
+me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has
+a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold,
+then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad
+master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets,
+and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the
+same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for
+he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of
+age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are
+equally a burden.
+
+I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go
+on--Yes, Cephalus, I said: but I rather suspect that people in general
+are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old
+age sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but
+because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
+
+You are right, he replied; they are not convinced: and there is
+something in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine. I
+might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing
+him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he
+was an Athenian: 'If you had been a native of my country or I of yours,
+neither of us would have been famous.' And to those who are not rich and
+are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good
+poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever
+have peace with himself.
+
+May I ask, Cephalus, whether your fortune was for the most part
+inherited or acquired by you?
+
+Acquired! Socrates; do you want to know how much I acquired? In the art
+of making money I have been midway between my father and grandfather:
+for my grandfather, whose name I bear, doubled and trebled the value of
+his patrimony, that which he inherited being much what I possess now;
+but my father Lysanias reduced the property below what it is at present:
+and I shall be satisfied if I leave to these my sons not less but a
+little more than I received.
+
+That was why I asked you the question, I replied, because I see that you
+are indifferent about money, which is a characteristic rather of those
+who have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them;
+the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of
+their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or
+of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the
+sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence
+they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the
+praises of wealth.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+Yes, that is very true, but may I ask another question?--What do you
+consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your
+wealth?
+
+One, he said, of which I could not expect easily to convince others.
+For let me tell you, Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be near
+death, fears and cares enter into his mind which he never had before;
+the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there
+of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he
+is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the
+weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other
+place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms
+crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what
+wrongs he has done to others. And when he finds that the sum of his
+transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his
+sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who
+is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the
+kind nurse of his age:
+
+'Hope,' he says, 'cherishes the soul of him who lives in justice
+and holiness, and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his
+journey;--hope which is mightiest to sway the restless soul of man.'
+
+How admirable are his words! And the great blessing of riches, I do not
+say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to
+deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally;
+and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension
+about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men. Now to
+this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and
+therefore I say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many
+advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my
+opinion the greatest.
+
+Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is
+it?--to speak the truth and to pay your debts--no more than this? And
+even to this are there not exceptions? Suppose that a friend when in his
+right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is
+not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? No one would
+say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more than
+they would say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in
+his condition.
+
+You are quite right, he replied.
+
+But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a
+correct definition of justice.
+
+Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said
+Polemarchus interposing.
+
+I fear, said Cephalus, that I must go now, for I have to look after the
+sacrifices, and I hand over the argument to Polemarchus and the company.
+
+Is not Polemarchus your heir? I said.
+
+To be sure, he answered, and went away laughing to the sacrifices.
+
+Tell me then, O thou heir of the argument, what did Simonides say, and
+according to you truly say, about justice?
+
+He said that the repayment of a debt is just, and in saying so he
+appears to me to be right.
+
+I should be sorry to doubt the word of such a wise and inspired man, but
+his meaning, though probably clear to you, is the reverse of clear to
+me. For he certainly does not mean, as we were just now saying, that I
+ought to return a deposit of arms or of anything else to one who asks
+for it when he is not in his right senses; and yet a deposit cannot be
+denied to be a debt.
+
+True.
+
+Then when the person who asks me is not in his right mind I am by no
+means to make the return?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+When Simonides said that the repayment of a debt was justice, he did not
+mean to include that case?
+
+Certainly not; for he thinks that a friend ought always to do good to a
+friend and never evil.
+
+You mean that the return of a deposit of gold which is to the injury of
+the receiver, if the two parties are friends, is not the repayment of a
+debt,--that is what you would imagine him to say?
+
+Yes.
+
+And are enemies also to receive what we owe to them?
+
+To be sure, he said, they are to receive what we owe them, and an enemy,
+as I take it, owes to an enemy that which is due or proper to him--that
+is to say, evil.
+
+Simonides, then, after the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken
+darkly of the nature of justice; for he really meant to say that justice
+is the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a
+debt.
+
+That must have been his meaning, he said.
+
+By heaven! I replied; and if we asked him what due or proper thing is
+given by medicine, and to whom, what answer do you think that he would
+make to us?
+
+He would surely reply that medicine gives drugs and meat and drink to
+human bodies.
+
+And what due or proper thing is given by cookery, and to what?
+
+Seasoning to food.
+
+And what is that which justice gives, and to whom?
+
+If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the preceding
+instances, then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil
+to enemies.
+
+That is his meaning then?
+
+I think so.
+
+And who is best able to do good to his friends and evil to his enemies
+in time of sickness?
+
+The physician.
+
+Or when they are on a voyage, amid the perils of the sea?
+
+The pilot.
+
+And in what sort of actions or with a view to what result is the just
+man most able to do harm to his enemy and good to his friend?
+
+In going to war against the one and in making alliances with the other.
+
+But when a man is well, my dear Polemarchus, there is no need of a
+physician?
+
+No.
+
+And he who is not on a voyage has no need of a pilot?
+
+No.
+
+Then in time of peace justice will be of no use?
+
+I am very far from thinking so.
+
+You think that justice may be of use in peace as well as in war?
+
+Yes.
+
+Like husbandry for the acquisition of corn?
+
+Yes.
+
+Or like shoemaking for the acquisition of shoes,--that is what you mean?
+
+Yes.
+
+And what similar use or power of acquisition has justice in time of
+peace?
+
+In contracts, Socrates, justice is of use.
+
+And by contracts you mean partnerships?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But is the just man or the skilful player a more useful and better
+partner at a game of draughts?
+
+The skilful player.
+
+And in the laying of bricks and stones is the just man a more useful or
+better partner than the builder?
+
+Quite the reverse.
+
+Then in what sort of partnership is the just man a better partner than
+the harp-player, as in playing the harp the harp-player is certainly a
+better partner than the just man?
+
+In a money partnership.
+
+Yes, Polemarchus, but surely not in the use of money; for you do not
+want a just man to be your counsellor in the purchase or sale of a
+horse; a man who is knowing about horses would be better for that, would
+he not?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And when you want to buy a ship, the shipwright or the pilot would be
+better?
+
+True.
+
+Then what is that joint use of silver or gold in which the just man is
+to be preferred?
+
+When you want a deposit to be kept safely.
+
+You mean when money is not wanted, but allowed to lie?
+
+Precisely.
+
+That is to say, justice is useful when money is useless?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+And when you want to keep a pruning-hook safe, then justice is useful to
+the individual and to the state; but when you want to use it, then the
+art of the vine-dresser?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And when you want to keep a shield or a lyre, and not to use them, you
+would say that justice is useful; but when you want to use them, then
+the art of the soldier or of the musician?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And so of all other things;--justice is useful when they are useless,
+and useless when they are useful?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+Then justice is not good for much. But let us consider this further
+point: Is not he who can best strike a blow in a boxing match or in any
+kind of fighting best able to ward off a blow?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And he who is most skilful in preventing or escaping from a disease is
+best able to create one?
+
+True.
+
+And he is the best guard of a camp who is best able to steal a march
+upon the enemy?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?
+
+That, I suppose, is to be inferred.
+
+Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing
+it.
+
+That is implied in the argument.
+
+Then after all the just man has turned out to be a thief. And this is
+a lesson which I suspect you must have learnt out of Homer; for he,
+speaking of Autolycus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, who is a
+favourite of his, affirms that
+
+'He was excellent above all men in theft and perjury.'
+
+And so, you and Homer and Simonides are agreed that justice is an art of
+theft; to be practised however 'for the good of friends and for the harm
+of enemies,'--that was what you were saying?
+
+No, certainly not that, though I do not now know what I did say; but I
+still stand by the latter words.
+
+Well, there is another question: By friends and enemies do we mean those
+who are so really, or only in seeming?
+
+Surely, he said, a man may be expected to love those whom he thinks
+good, and to hate those whom he thinks evil.
+
+Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not
+good seem to be so, and conversely?
+
+That is true.
+
+Then to them the good will be enemies and the evil will be their
+friends? True.
+
+And in that case they will be right in doing good to the evil and evil
+to the good?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But the good are just and would not do an injustice?
+
+True.
+
+Then according to your argument it is just to injure those who do no
+wrong?
+
+Nay, Socrates; the doctrine is immoral.
+
+Then I suppose that we ought to do good to the just and harm to the
+unjust?
+
+I like that better.
+
+But see the consequence:--Many a man who is ignorant of human nature
+has friends who are bad friends, and in that case he ought to do harm to
+them; and he has good enemies whom he ought to benefit; but, if so, we
+shall be saying the very opposite of that which we affirmed to be the
+meaning of Simonides.
+
+Very true, he said: and I think that we had better correct an error
+into which we seem to have fallen in the use of the words 'friend' and
+'enemy.'
+
+What was the error, Polemarchus? I asked.
+
+We assumed that he is a friend who seems to be or who is thought good.
+
+And how is the error to be corrected?
+
+We should rather say that he is a friend who is, as well as seems, good;
+and that he who seems only, and is not good, only seems to be and is not
+a friend; and of an enemy the same may be said.
+
+You would argue that the good are our friends and the bad our enemies?
+
+Yes.
+
+And instead of saying simply as we did at first, that it is just to do
+good to our friends and harm to our enemies, we should further say: It
+is just to do good to our friends when they are good and harm to our
+enemies when they are evil?
+
+Yes, that appears to me to be the truth.
+
+But ought the just to injure any one at all?
+
+Undoubtedly he ought to injure those who are both wicked and his
+enemies.
+
+When horses are injured, are they improved or deteriorated?
+
+The latter.
+
+Deteriorated, that is to say, in the good qualities of horses, not of
+dogs?
+
+Yes, of horses.
+
+And dogs are deteriorated in the good qualities of dogs, and not of
+horses?
+
+Of course.
+
+And will not men who are injured be deteriorated in that which is the
+proper virtue of man?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that human virtue is justice?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?
+
+That is the result.
+
+But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking generally, can
+the good by virtue make them bad?
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+Any more than heat can produce cold?
+
+It cannot.
+
+Or drought moisture?
+
+Clearly not.
+
+Nor can the good harm any one?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the just is the good?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then to injure a friend or any one else is not the act of a just man,
+but of the opposite, who is the unjust?
+
+I think that what you say is quite true, Socrates.
+
+Then if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and
+that good is the debt which a just man owes to his friends, and evil the
+debt which he owes to his enemies,--to say this is not wise; for it is
+not true, if, as has been clearly shown, the injuring of another can be
+in no case just.
+
+I agree with you, said Polemarchus.
+
+Then you and I are prepared to take up arms against any one who
+attributes such a saying to Simonides or Bias or Pittacus, or any other
+wise man or seer?
+
+I am quite ready to do battle at your side, he said.
+
+Shall I tell you whose I believe the saying to be?
+
+Whose?
+
+I believe that Periander or Perdiccas or Xerxes or Ismenias the Theban,
+or some other rich and mighty man, who had a great opinion of his own
+power, was the first to say that justice is 'doing good to your friends
+and harm to your enemies.'
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Yes, I said; but if this definition of justice also breaks down, what
+other can be offered?
+
+Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an
+attempt to get the argument into his own hands, and had been put down
+by the rest of the company, who wanted to hear the end. But when
+Polemarchus and I had done speaking and there was a pause, he could no
+longer hold his peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at us like a
+wild beast, seeking to devour us. We were quite panic-stricken at the
+sight of him.
+
+He roared out to the whole company: What folly, Socrates, has taken
+possession of you all? And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to
+one another? I say that if you want really to know what justice is,
+you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to
+yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer;
+for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer. And now I will
+not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain
+or interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have
+clearness and accuracy.
+
+I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without
+trembling. Indeed I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I
+should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked
+at him first, and was therefore able to reply to him.
+
+Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don't be hard upon us. Polemarchus
+and I may have been guilty of a little mistake in the argument, but I
+can assure you that the error was not intentional. If we were seeking
+for a piece of gold, you would not imagine that we were 'knocking under
+to one another,' and so losing our chance of finding it. And why, when
+we are seeking for justice, a thing more precious than many pieces of
+gold, do you say that we are weakly yielding to one another and not
+doing our utmost to get at the truth? Nay, my good friend, we are most
+willing and anxious to do so, but the fact is that we cannot. And if so,
+you people who know all things should pity us and not be angry with us.
+
+How characteristic of Socrates! he replied, with a bitter laugh;--that's
+your ironical style! Did I not foresee--have I not already told you,
+that whatever he was asked he would refuse to answer, and try irony or
+any other shuffle, in order that he might avoid answering?
+
+You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if
+you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit
+him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six
+times two, or four times three, 'for this sort of nonsense will not do
+for me,'--then obviously, if that is your way of putting the
+question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort,
+'Thrasymachus, what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you
+interdict be the true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some
+other number which is not the right one?--is that your meaning?'--How
+would you answer him?
+
+Just as if the two cases were at all alike! he said.
+
+Why should they not be? I replied; and even if they are not, but only
+appear to be so to the person who is asked, ought he not to say what he
+thinks, whether you and I forbid him or not?
+
+I presume then that you are going to make one of the interdicted
+answers?
+
+I dare say that I may, notwithstanding the danger, if upon reflection I
+approve of any of them.
+
+But what if I give you an answer about justice other and better, he
+said, than any of these? What do you deserve to have done to you?
+
+Done to me!--as becomes the ignorant, I must learn from the wise--that
+is what I deserve to have done to me.
+
+What, and no payment! a pleasant notion!
+
+I will pay when I have the money, I replied.
+
+But you have, Socrates, said Glaucon: and you, Thrasymachus, need be
+under no anxiety about money, for we will all make a contribution for
+Socrates.
+
+Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does--refuse to
+answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of some one else.
+
+Why, my good friend, I said, how can any one answer who knows, and says
+that he knows, just nothing; and who, even if he has some faint notions
+of his own, is told by a man of authority not to utter them? The
+natural thing is, that the speaker should be some one like yourself
+who professes to know and can tell what he knows. Will you then kindly
+answer, for the edification of the company and of myself?
+
+Glaucon and the rest of the company joined in my request, and
+Thrasymachus, as any one might see, was in reality eager to speak;
+for he thought that he had an excellent answer, and would distinguish
+himself. But at first he affected to insist on my answering; at length
+he consented to begin. Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he
+refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he
+never even says Thank you.
+
+That I learn of others, I replied, is quite true; but that I am
+ungrateful I wholly deny. Money I have none, and therefore I pay in
+praise, which is all I have; and how ready I am to praise any one who
+appears to me to speak well you will very soon find out when you answer;
+for I expect that you will answer well.
+
+Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than
+the interest of the stronger. And now why do you not praise me? But of
+course you won't.
+
+Let me first understand you, I replied. Justice, as you say, is the
+interest of the stronger. What, Thrasymachus, is the meaning of this?
+You cannot mean to say that because Polydamas, the pancratiast, is
+stronger than we are, and finds the eating of beef conducive to his
+bodily strength, that to eat beef is therefore equally for our good who
+are weaker than he is, and right and just for us?
+
+That's abominable of you, Socrates; you take the words in the sense
+which is most damaging to the argument.
+
+Not at all, my good sir, I said; I am trying to understand them; and I
+wish that you would be a little clearer.
+
+Well, he said, have you never heard that forms of government differ;
+there are tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are
+aristocracies?
+
+Yes, I know.
+
+And the government is the ruling power in each state?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the different forms of government make laws democratical,
+aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests;
+and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the
+justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses
+them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what
+I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of
+justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government
+must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that
+everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of
+the stronger.
+
+Now I understand you, I said; and whether you are right or not I will
+try to discover. But let me remark, that in defining justice you have
+yourself used the word 'interest' which you forbade me to use. It is
+true, however, that in your definition the words 'of the stronger' are
+added.
+
+A small addition, you must allow, he said.
+
+Great or small, never mind about that: we must first enquire whether
+what you are saying is the truth. Now we are both agreed that justice
+is interest of some sort, but you go on to say 'of the stronger'; about
+this addition I am not so sure, and must therefore consider further.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I will; and first tell me, Do you admit that it is just for subjects to
+obey their rulers?
+
+I do.
+
+But are the rulers of states absolutely infallible, or are they
+sometimes liable to err?
+
+To be sure, he replied, they are liable to err.
+
+Then in making their laws they may sometimes make them rightly, and
+sometimes not?
+
+True.
+
+When they make them rightly, they make them agreeably to their interest;
+when they are mistaken, contrary to their interest; you admit that?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the laws which they make must be obeyed by their subjects,--and that
+is what you call justice?
+
+Doubtless.
+
+Then justice, according to your argument, is not only obedience to the
+interest of the stronger but the reverse?
+
+What is that you are saying? he asked.
+
+I am only repeating what you are saying, I believe. But let us consider:
+Have we not admitted that the rulers may be mistaken about their own
+interest in what they command, and also that to obey them is justice?
+Has not that been admitted?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then you must also have acknowledged justice not to be for the interest
+of the stronger, when the rulers unintentionally command things to be
+done which are to their own injury. For if, as you say, justice is the
+obedience which the subject renders to their commands, in that case, O
+wisest of men, is there any escape from the conclusion that the weaker
+are commanded to do, not what is for the interest, but what is for the
+injury of the stronger?
+
+Nothing can be clearer, Socrates, said Polemarchus.
+
+Yes, said Cleitophon, interposing, if you are allowed to be his witness.
+
+But there is no need of any witness, said Polemarchus, for Thrasymachus
+himself acknowledges that rulers may sometimes command what is not for
+their own interest, and that for subjects to obey them is justice.
+
+Yes, Polemarchus,--Thrasymachus said that for subjects to do what was
+commanded by their rulers is just.
+
+Yes, Cleitophon, but he also said that justice is the interest of the
+stronger, and, while admitting both these propositions, he further
+acknowledged that the stronger may command the weaker who are his
+subjects to do what is not for his own interest; whence follows that
+justice is the injury quite as much as the interest of the stronger.
+
+But, said Cleitophon, he meant by the interest of the stronger what the
+stronger thought to be his interest,--this was what the weaker had to
+do; and this was affirmed by him to be justice.
+
+Those were not his words, rejoined Polemarchus.
+
+Never mind, I replied, if he now says that they are, let us accept his
+statement. Tell me, Thrasymachus, I said, did you mean by justice what
+the stronger thought to be his interest, whether really so or not?
+
+Certainly not, he said. Do you suppose that I call him who is mistaken
+the stronger at the time when he is mistaken?
+
+Yes, I said, my impression was that you did so, when you admitted that
+the ruler was not infallible but might be sometimes mistaken.
+
+You argue like an informer, Socrates. Do you mean, for example, that he
+who is mistaken about the sick is a physician in that he is mistaken?
+or that he who errs in arithmetic or grammar is an arithmetician or
+grammarian at the time when he is making the mistake, in respect of the
+mistake? True, we say that the physician or arithmetician or grammarian
+has made a mistake, but this is only a way of speaking; for the fact is
+that neither the grammarian nor any other person of skill ever makes a
+mistake in so far as he is what his name implies; they none of them
+err unless their skill fails them, and then they cease to be skilled
+artists. No artist or sage or ruler errs at the time when he is what
+his name implies; though he is commonly said to err, and I adopted the
+common mode of speaking. But to be perfectly accurate, since you are
+such a lover of accuracy, we should say that the ruler, in so far as he
+is a ruler, is unerring, and, being unerring, always commands that which
+is for his own interest; and the subject is required to execute his
+commands; and therefore, as I said at first and now repeat, justice is
+the interest of the stronger.
+
+Indeed, Thrasymachus, and do I really appear to you to argue like an
+informer?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And do you suppose that I ask these questions with any design of
+injuring you in the argument?
+
+Nay, he replied, 'suppose' is not the word--I know it; but you will be
+found out, and by sheer force of argument you will never prevail.
+
+I shall not make the attempt, my dear man; but to avoid any
+misunderstanding occurring between us in future, let me ask, in what
+sense do you speak of a ruler or stronger whose interest, as you were
+saying, he being the superior, it is just that the inferior should
+execute--is he a ruler in the popular or in the strict sense of the
+term?
+
+In the strictest of all senses, he said. And now cheat and play the
+informer if you can; I ask no quarter at your hands. But you never will
+be able, never.
+
+And do you imagine, I said, that I am such a madman as to try and cheat,
+Thrasymachus? I might as well shave a lion.
+
+Why, he said, you made the attempt a minute ago, and you failed.
+
+Enough, I said, of these civilities. It will be better that I should ask
+you a question: Is the physician, taken in that strict sense of which
+you are speaking, a healer of the sick or a maker of money? And remember
+that I am now speaking of the true physician.
+
+A healer of the sick, he replied.
+
+And the pilot--that is to say, the true pilot--is he a captain of
+sailors or a mere sailor?
+
+A captain of sailors.
+
+The circumstance that he sails in the ship is not to be taken into
+account; neither is he to be called a sailor; the name pilot by which he
+is distinguished has nothing to do with sailing, but is significant of
+his skill and of his authority over the sailors.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now, I said, every art has an interest?
+
+Certainly.
+
+For which the art has to consider and provide?
+
+Yes, that is the aim of art.
+
+And the interest of any art is the perfection of it--this and nothing
+else?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean what I may illustrate negatively by the example of the body.
+Suppose you were to ask me whether the body is self-sufficing or has
+wants, I should reply: Certainly the body has wants; for the body may
+be ill and require to be cured, and has therefore interests to which
+the art of medicine ministers; and this is the origin and intention of
+medicine, as you will acknowledge. Am I not right?
+
+Quite right, he replied.
+
+But is the art of medicine or any other art faulty or deficient in any
+quality in the same way that the eye may be deficient in sight or the
+ear fail of hearing, and therefore requires another art to provide
+for the interests of seeing and hearing--has art in itself, I say, any
+similar liability to fault or defect, and does every art require another
+supplementary art to provide for its interests, and that another and
+another without end? Or have the arts to look only after their
+own interests? Or have they no need either of themselves or of
+another?--having no faults or defects, they have no need to correct
+them, either by the exercise of their own art or of any other; they have
+only to consider the interest of their subject-matter. For every art
+remains pure and faultless while remaining true--that is to say, while
+perfect and unimpaired. Take the words in your precise sense, and tell
+me whether I am not right.
+
+Yes, clearly.
+
+Then medicine does not consider the interest of medicine, but the
+interest of the body?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Nor does the art of horsemanship consider the interests of the art of
+horsemanship, but the interests of the horse; neither do any other arts
+care for themselves, for they have no needs; they care only for that
+which is the subject of their art?
+
+True, he said.
+
+But surely, Thrasymachus, the arts are the superiors and rulers of their
+own subjects?
+
+To this he assented with a good deal of reluctance.
+
+Then, I said, no science or art considers or enjoins the interest of the
+stronger or superior, but only the interest of the subject and weaker?
+
+He made an attempt to contest this proposition also, but finally
+acquiesced.
+
+Then, I continued, no physician, in so far as he is a physician,
+considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of his
+patient; for the true physician is also a ruler having the human body as
+a subject, and is not a mere money-maker; that has been admitted?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the pilot likewise, in the strict sense of the term, is a ruler of
+sailors and not a mere sailor?
+
+That has been admitted.
+
+And such a pilot and ruler will provide and prescribe for the interest
+of the sailor who is under him, and not for his own or the ruler's
+interest?
+
+He gave a reluctant 'Yes.'
+
+Then, I said, Thrasymachus, there is no one in any rule who, in so far
+as he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but
+always what is for the interest of his subject or suitable to his art;
+to that he looks, and that alone he considers in everything which he
+says and does.
+
+When we had got to this point in the argument, and every one saw that
+the definition of justice had been completely upset, Thrasymachus,
+instead of replying to me, said: Tell me, Socrates, have you got a
+nurse?
+
+Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be
+answering?
+
+Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not
+even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep.
+
+What makes you say that? I replied.
+
+Because you fancy that the shepherd or neatherd fattens or tends the
+sheep or oxen with a view to their own good and not to the good of
+himself or his master; and you further imagine that the rulers of
+states, if they are true rulers, never think of their subjects as sheep,
+and that they are not studying their own advantage day and night. Oh,
+no; and so entirely astray are you in your ideas about the just and
+unjust as not even to know that justice and the just are in reality
+another's good; that is to say, the interest of the ruler and stronger,
+and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice the opposite; for
+the unjust is lord over the truly simple and just: he is the stronger,
+and his subjects do what is for his interest, and minister to his
+happiness, which is very far from being their own. Consider further,
+most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a loser in comparison
+with the unjust. First of all, in private contracts: wherever the unjust
+is the partner of the just you will find that, when the partnership is
+dissolved, the unjust man has always more and the just less. Secondly,
+in their dealings with the State: when there is an income-tax, the just
+man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income;
+and when there is anything to be received the one gains nothing and the
+other much. Observe also what happens when they take an office; there is
+the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses,
+and getting nothing out of the public, because he is just; moreover he
+is hated by his friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in
+unlawful ways. But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man.
+I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the
+advantage of the unjust is most apparent; and my meaning will be most
+clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the
+criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse
+to do injustice are the most miserable--that is to say tyranny, which by
+fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little
+but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane,
+private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected
+perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur
+great disgrace--they who do such wrong in particular cases are called
+robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and
+thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens
+has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is
+termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who
+hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind
+censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not
+because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown,
+Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and
+freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is
+the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit
+and interest.
+
+Thrasymachus, when he had thus spoken, having, like a bath-man, deluged
+our ears with his words, had a mind to go away. But the company
+would not let him; they insisted that he should remain and defend his
+position; and I myself added my own humble request that he would not
+leave us. Thrasymachus, I said to him, excellent man, how suggestive
+are your remarks! And are you going to run away before you have fairly
+taught or learned whether they are true or not? Is the attempt to
+determine the way of man's life so small a matter in your eyes--to
+determine how life may be passed by each one of us to the greatest
+advantage?
+
+And do I differ from you, he said, as to the importance of the enquiry?
+
+You appear rather, I replied, to have no care or thought about us,
+Thrasymachus--whether we live better or worse from not knowing what you
+say you know, is to you a matter of indifference. Prithee, friend,
+do not keep your knowledge to yourself; we are a large party; and any
+benefit which you confer upon us will be amply rewarded. For my own
+part I openly declare that I am not convinced, and that I do not believe
+injustice to be more gainful than justice, even if uncontrolled and
+allowed to have free play. For, granting that there may be an unjust
+man who is able to commit injustice either by fraud or force, still this
+does not convince me of the superior advantage of injustice, and there
+may be others who are in the same predicament with myself. Perhaps we
+may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are
+mistaken in preferring justice to injustice.
+
+And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced
+by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me
+put the proof bodily into your souls?
+
+Heaven forbid! I said; I would only ask you to be consistent; or, if you
+change, change openly and let there be no deception. For I must remark,
+Thrasymachus, if you will recall what was previously said, that although
+you began by defining the true physician in an exact sense, you did not
+observe a like exactness when speaking of the shepherd; you thought that
+the shepherd as a shepherd tends the sheep not with a view to their own
+good, but like a mere diner or banquetter with a view to the pleasures
+of the table; or, again, as a trader for sale in the market, and not as
+a shepherd. Yet surely the art of the shepherd is concerned only with
+the good of his subjects; he has only to provide the best for them,
+since the perfection of the art is already ensured whenever all the
+requirements of it are satisfied. And that was what I was saying just
+now about the ruler. I conceived that the art of the ruler, considered
+as ruler, whether in a state or in private life, could only regard the
+good of his flock or subjects; whereas you seem to think that the rulers
+in states, that is to say, the true rulers, like being in authority.
+
+Think! Nay, I am sure of it.
+
+Then why in the case of lesser offices do men never take them willingly
+without payment, unless under the idea that they govern for the
+advantage not of themselves but of others? Let me ask you a question:
+Are not the several arts different, by reason of their each having a
+separate function? And, my dear illustrious friend, do say what you
+think, that we may make a little progress.
+
+Yes, that is the difference, he replied.
+
+And each art gives us a particular good and not merely a general
+one--medicine, for example, gives us health; navigation, safety at sea,
+and so on?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And the art of payment has the special function of giving pay: but we do
+not confuse this with other arts, any more than the art of the pilot is
+to be confused with the art of medicine, because the health of the pilot
+may be improved by a sea voyage. You would not be inclined to say, would
+you, that navigation is the art of medicine, at least if we are to adopt
+your exact use of language?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or because a man is in good health when he receives pay you would not
+say that the art of payment is medicine?
+
+I should not.
+
+Nor would you say that medicine is the art of receiving pay because a
+man takes fees when he is engaged in healing?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And we have admitted, I said, that the good of each art is specially
+confined to the art?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then, if there be any good which all artists have in common, that is to
+be attributed to something of which they all have the common use?
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And when the artist is benefited by receiving pay the advantage is
+gained by an additional use of the art of pay, which is not the art
+professed by him?
+
+He gave a reluctant assent to this.
+
+Then the pay is not derived by the several artists from their respective
+arts. But the truth is, that while the art of medicine gives health, and
+the art of the builder builds a house, another art attends them which
+is the art of pay. The various arts may be doing their own business and
+benefiting that over which they preside, but would the artist receive
+any benefit from his art unless he were paid as well?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+But does he therefore confer no benefit when he works for nothing?
+
+Certainly, he confers a benefit.
+
+Then now, Thrasymachus, there is no longer any doubt that neither arts
+nor governments provide for their own interests; but, as we were before
+saying, they rule and provide for the interests of their subjects who
+are the weaker and not the stronger--to their good they attend and
+not to the good of the superior. And this is the reason, my dear
+Thrasymachus, why, as I was just now saying, no one is willing to
+govern; because no one likes to take in hand the reformation of evils
+which are not his concern without remuneration. For, in the execution of
+his work, and in giving his orders to another, the true artist does not
+regard his own interest, but always that of his subjects; and therefore
+in order that rulers may be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of
+three modes of payment, money, or honour, or a penalty for refusing.
+
+What do you mean, Socrates? said Glaucon. The first two modes of payment
+are intelligible enough, but what the penalty is I do not understand, or
+how a penalty can be a payment.
+
+You mean that you do not understand the nature of this payment which to
+the best men is the great inducement to rule? Of course you know that
+ambition and avarice are held to be, as indeed they are, a disgrace?
+
+Very true.
+
+And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for
+them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing
+and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves
+out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being
+ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be
+laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of
+punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness
+to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed
+dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who
+refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.
+And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office,
+not because they would, but because they cannot help--not under the idea
+that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as
+a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling
+to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there
+is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men,
+then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to
+obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the
+true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but that
+of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to
+receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of conferring
+one. So far am I from agreeing with Thrasymachus that justice is the
+interest of the stronger. This latter question need not be further
+discussed at present; but when Thrasymachus says that the life of the
+unjust is more advantageous than that of the just, his new statement
+appears to me to be of a far more serious character. Which of us has
+spoken truly? And which sort of life, Glaucon, do you prefer?
+
+I for my part deem the life of the just to be the more advantageous, he
+answered.
+
+Did you hear all the advantages of the unjust which Thrasymachus was
+rehearsing?
+
+Yes, I heard him, he replied, but he has not convinced me.
+
+Then shall we try to find some way of convincing him, if we can, that he
+is saying what is not true?
+
+Most certainly, he replied.
+
+If, I said, he makes a set speech and we make another recounting all the
+advantages of being just, and he answers and we rejoin, there must be a
+numbering and measuring of the goods which are claimed on either side,
+and in the end we shall want judges to decide; but if we proceed in our
+enquiry as we lately did, by making admissions to one another, we shall
+unite the offices of judge and advocate in our own persons.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+And which method do I understand you to prefer? I said.
+
+That which you propose.
+
+Well, then, Thrasymachus, I said, suppose you begin at the beginning and
+answer me. You say that perfect injustice is more gainful than perfect
+justice?
+
+Yes, that is what I say, and I have given you my reasons.
+
+And what is your view about them? Would you call one of them virtue and
+the other vice?
+
+Certainly.
+
+I suppose that you would call justice virtue and injustice vice?
+
+What a charming notion! So likely too, seeing that I affirm injustice to
+be profitable and justice not.
+
+What else then would you say?
+
+The opposite, he replied.
+
+And would you call justice vice?
+
+No, I would rather say sublime simplicity.
+
+Then would you call injustice malignity?
+
+No; I would rather say discretion.
+
+And do the unjust appear to you to be wise and good?
+
+Yes, he said; at any rate those of them who are able to be perfectly
+unjust, and who have the power of subduing states and nations; but
+perhaps you imagine me to be talking of cutpurses. Even this profession
+if undetected has advantages, though they are not to be compared with
+those of which I was just now speaking.
+
+I do not think that I misapprehend your meaning, Thrasymachus, I
+replied; but still I cannot hear without amazement that you class
+injustice with wisdom and virtue, and justice with the opposite.
+
+Certainly I do so class them.
+
+Now, I said, you are on more substantial and almost unanswerable ground;
+for if the injustice which you were maintaining to be profitable had
+been admitted by you as by others to be vice and deformity, an answer
+might have been given to you on received principles; but now I perceive
+that you will call injustice honourable and strong, and to the unjust
+you will attribute all the qualities which were attributed by us before
+to the just, seeing that you do not hesitate to rank injustice with
+wisdom and virtue.
+
+You have guessed most infallibly, he replied.
+
+Then I certainly ought not to shrink from going through with the
+argument so long as I have reason to think that you, Thrasymachus, are
+speaking your real mind; for I do believe that you are now in earnest
+and are not amusing yourself at our expense.
+
+I may be in earnest or not, but what is that to you?--to refute the
+argument is your business.
+
+Very true, I said; that is what I have to do: But will you be so good
+as answer yet one more question? Does the just man try to gain any
+advantage over the just?
+
+Far otherwise; if he did he would not be the simple amusing creature
+which he is.
+
+And would he try to go beyond just action?
+
+He would not.
+
+And how would he regard the attempt to gain an advantage over the
+unjust; would that be considered by him as just or unjust?
+
+He would think it just, and would try to gain the advantage; but he
+would not be able.
+
+Whether he would or would not be able, I said, is not to the point. My
+question is only whether the just man, while refusing to have more than
+another just man, would wish and claim to have more than the unjust?
+
+Yes, he would.
+
+And what of the unjust--does he claim to have more than the just man and
+to do more than is just?
+
+Of course, he said, for he claims to have more than all men.
+
+And the unjust man will strive and struggle to obtain more than the
+unjust man or action, in order that he may have more than all?
+
+True.
+
+We may put the matter thus, I said--the just does not desire more than
+his like but more than his unlike, whereas the unjust desires more than
+both his like and his unlike?
+
+Nothing, he said, can be better than that statement.
+
+And the unjust is good and wise, and the just is neither?
+
+Good again, he said.
+
+And is not the unjust like the wise and good and the just unlike them?
+
+Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who are
+of a certain nature; he who is not, not.
+
+Each of them, I said, is such as his like is?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+Very good, Thrasymachus, I said; and now to take the case of the arts:
+you would admit that one man is a musician and another not a musician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And which is wise and which is foolish?
+
+Clearly the musician is wise, and he who is not a musician is foolish.
+
+And he is good in as far as he is wise, and bad in as far as he is
+foolish?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you would say the same sort of thing of the physician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And do you think, my excellent friend, that a musician when he adjusts
+the lyre would desire or claim to exceed or go beyond a musician in the
+tightening and loosening the strings?
+
+I do not think that he would.
+
+But he would claim to exceed the non-musician?
+
+Of course.
+
+And what would you say of the physician? In prescribing meats and drinks
+would he wish to go beyond another physician or beyond the practice of
+medicine?
+
+He would not.
+
+But he would wish to go beyond the non-physician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And about knowledge and ignorance in general; see whether you think that
+any man who has knowledge ever would wish to have the choice of saying
+or doing more than another man who has knowledge. Would he not rather
+say or do the same as his like in the same case?
+
+That, I suppose, can hardly be denied.
+
+And what of the ignorant? would he not desire to have more than either
+the knowing or the ignorant?
+
+I dare say.
+
+And the knowing is wise?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the wise is good?
+
+True.
+
+Then the wise and good will not desire to gain more than his like, but
+more than his unlike and opposite?
+
+I suppose so.
+
+Whereas the bad and ignorant will desire to gain more than both?
+
+Yes.
+
+But did we not say, Thrasymachus, that the unjust goes beyond both his
+like and unlike? Were not these your words?
+
+They were.
+
+And you also said that the just will not go beyond his like but his
+unlike?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil
+and ignorant?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+And each of them is such as his like is?
+
+That was admitted.
+
+Then the just has turned out to be wise and good and the unjust evil and
+ignorant.
+
+Thrasymachus made all these admissions, not fluently, as I repeat
+them, but with extreme reluctance; it was a hot summer's day, and the
+perspiration poured from him in torrents; and then I saw what I had
+never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing. As we were now agreed that
+justice was virtue and wisdom, and injustice vice and ignorance, I
+proceeded to another point:
+
+Well, I said, Thrasymachus, that matter is now settled; but were we not
+also saying that injustice had strength; do you remember?
+
+Yes, I remember, he said, but do not suppose that I approve of what you
+are saying or have no answer; if however I were to answer, you would be
+quite certain to accuse me of haranguing; therefore either permit me to
+have my say out, or if you would rather ask, do so, and I will answer
+'Very good,' as they say to story-telling old women, and will nod 'Yes'
+and 'No.'
+
+Certainly not, I said, if contrary to your real opinion.
+
+Yes, he said, I will, to please you, since you will not let me speak.
+What else would you have?
+
+Nothing in the world, I said; and if you are so disposed I will ask and
+you shall answer.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Then I will repeat the question which I asked before, in order that
+our examination of the relative nature of justice and injustice may be
+carried on regularly. A statement was made that injustice is stronger
+and more powerful than justice, but now justice, having been identified
+with wisdom and virtue, is easily shown to be stronger than injustice,
+if injustice is ignorance; this can no longer be questioned by any one.
+But I want to view the matter, Thrasymachus, in a different way: You
+would not deny that a state may be unjust and may be unjustly attempting
+to enslave other states, or may have already enslaved them, and may be
+holding many of them in subjection?
+
+True, he replied; and I will add that the best and most perfectly unjust
+state will be most likely to do so.
+
+I know, I said, that such was your position; but what I would further
+consider is, whether this power which is possessed by the superior state
+can exist or be exercised without justice or only with justice.
+
+If you are right in your view, and justice is wisdom, then only with
+justice; but if I am right, then without justice.
+
+I am delighted, Thrasymachus, to see you not only nodding assent and
+dissent, but making answers which are quite excellent.
+
+That is out of civility to you, he replied.
+
+You are very kind, I said; and would you have the goodness also to
+inform me, whether you think that a state, or an army, or a band of
+robbers and thieves, or any other gang of evil-doers could act at all if
+they injured one another?
+
+No indeed, he said, they could not.
+
+But if they abstained from injuring one another, then they might act
+together better?
+
+Yes.
+
+And this is because injustice creates divisions and hatreds and
+fighting, and justice imparts harmony and friendship; is not that true,
+Thrasymachus?
+
+I agree, he said, because I do not wish to quarrel with you.
+
+How good of you, I said; but I should like to know also whether
+injustice, having this tendency to arouse hatred, wherever existing,
+among slaves or among freemen, will not make them hate one another and
+set them at variance and render them incapable of common action?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And even if injustice be found in two only, will they not quarrel and
+fight, and become enemies to one another and to the just?
+
+They will.
+
+And suppose injustice abiding in a single person, would your wisdom say
+that she loses or that she retains her natural power?
+
+Let us assume that she retains her power.
+
+Yet is not the power which injustice exercises of such a nature that
+wherever she takes up her abode, whether in a city, in an army, in a
+family, or in any other body, that body is, to begin with, rendered
+incapable of united action by reason of sedition and distraction; and
+does it not become its own enemy and at variance with all that opposes
+it, and with the just? Is not this the case?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person; in
+the first place rendering him incapable of action because he is not
+at unity with himself, and in the second place making him an enemy to
+himself and the just? Is not that true, Thrasymachus?
+
+Yes.
+
+And O my friend, I said, surely the gods are just?
+
+Granted that they are.
+
+But if so, the unjust will be the enemy of the gods, and the just will
+be their friend?
+
+Feast away in triumph, and take your fill of the argument; I will not
+oppose you, lest I should displease the company.
+
+Well then, proceed with your answers, and let me have the remainder of
+my repast. For we have already shown that the just are clearly wiser and
+better and abler than the unjust, and that the unjust are incapable of
+common action; nay more, that to speak as we did of men who are evil
+acting at any time vigorously together, is not strictly true, for
+if they had been perfectly evil, they would have laid hands upon one
+another; but it is evident that there must have been some remnant of
+justice in them, which enabled them to combine; if there had not been
+they would have injured one another as well as their victims; they
+were but half-villains in their enterprises; for had they been whole
+villains, and utterly unjust, they would have been utterly incapable of
+action. That, as I believe, is the truth of the matter, and not what you
+said at first. But whether the just have a better and happier life than
+the unjust is a further question which we also proposed to consider. I
+think that they have, and for the reasons which I have given; but still
+I should like to examine further, for no light matter is at stake,
+nothing less than the rule of human life.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I will proceed by asking a question: Would you not say that a horse has
+some end?
+
+I should.
+
+And the end or use of a horse or of anything would be that which could
+not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any other thing?
+
+I do not understand, he said.
+
+Let me explain: Can you see, except with the eye?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or hear, except with the ear?
+
+No.
+
+These then may be truly said to be the ends of these organs?
+
+They may.
+
+But you can cut off a vine-branch with a dagger or with a chisel, and in
+many other ways?
+
+Of course.
+
+And yet not so well as with a pruning-hook made for the purpose?
+
+True.
+
+May we not say that this is the end of a pruning-hook?
+
+We may.
+
+Then now I think you will have no difficulty in understanding my meaning
+when I asked the question whether the end of anything would be that
+which could not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any
+other thing?
+
+I understand your meaning, he said, and assent.
+
+And that to which an end is appointed has also an excellence? Need I ask
+again whether the eye has an end?
+
+It has.
+
+And has not the eye an excellence?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the ear has an end and an excellence also?
+
+True.
+
+And the same is true of all other things; they have each of them an end
+and a special excellence?
+
+That is so.
+
+Well, and can the eyes fulfil their end if they are wanting in their own
+proper excellence and have a defect instead?
+
+How can they, he said, if they are blind and cannot see?
+
+You mean to say, if they have lost their proper excellence, which is
+sight; but I have not arrived at that point yet. I would rather ask
+the question more generally, and only enquire whether the things which
+fulfil their ends fulfil them by their own proper excellence, and fail
+of fulfilling them by their own defect?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+I might say the same of the ears; when deprived of their own proper
+excellence they cannot fulfil their end?
+
+True.
+
+And the same observation will apply to all other things?
+
+I agree.
+
+Well; and has not the soul an end which nothing else can fulfil? for
+example, to superintend and command and deliberate and the like. Are not
+these functions proper to the soul, and can they rightly be assigned to
+any other?
+
+To no other.
+
+And is not life to be reckoned among the ends of the soul?
+
+Assuredly, he said.
+
+And has not the soul an excellence also?
+
+Yes.
+
+And can she or can she not fulfil her own ends when deprived of that
+excellence?
+
+She cannot.
+
+Then an evil soul must necessarily be an evil ruler and superintendent,
+and the good soul a good ruler?
+
+Yes, necessarily.
+
+And we have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and
+injustice the defect of the soul?
+
+That has been admitted.
+
+Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man
+will live ill?
+
+That is what your argument proves.
+
+And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the
+reverse of happy?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable?
+
+So be it.
+
+But happiness and not misery is profitable.
+
+Of course.
+
+Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable
+than justice.
+
+Let this, Socrates, he said, be your entertainment at the Bendidea.
+
+For which I am indebted to you, I said, now that you have grown gentle
+towards me and have left off scolding. Nevertheless, I have not been
+well entertained; but that was my own fault and not yours. As an epicure
+snatches a taste of every dish which is successively brought to table,
+he not having allowed himself time to enjoy the one before, so have I
+gone from one subject to another without having discovered what I sought
+at first, the nature of justice. I left that enquiry and turned away
+to consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil and folly; and
+when there arose a further question about the comparative advantages of
+justice and injustice, I could not refrain from passing on to that. And
+the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all.
+For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know
+whether it is or is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is
+happy or unhappy.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+With these words I was thinking that I had made an end of the
+discussion; but the end, in truth, proved to be only a beginning. For
+Glaucon, who is always the most pugnacious of men, was dissatisfied at
+Thrasymachus' retirement; he wanted to have the battle out. So he said
+to me: Socrates, do you wish really to persuade us, or only to seem to
+have persuaded us, that to be just is always better than to be unjust?
+
+I should wish really to persuade you, I replied, if I could.
+
+Then you certainly have not succeeded. Let me ask you now:--How would
+you arrange goods--are there not some which we welcome for their
+own sakes, and independently of their consequences, as, for example,
+harmless pleasures and enjoyments, which delight us at the time,
+although nothing follows from them?
+
+I agree in thinking that there is such a class, I replied.
+
+Is there not also a second class of goods, such as knowledge, sight,
+health, which are desirable not only in themselves, but also for their
+results?
+
+Certainly, I said.
+
+And would you not recognize a third class, such as gymnastic, and the
+care of the sick, and the physician's art; also the various ways of
+money-making--these do us good but we regard them as disagreeable; and
+no one would choose them for their own sakes, but only for the sake of
+some reward or result which flows from them?
+
+There is, I said, this third class also. But why do you ask?
+
+Because I want to know in which of the three classes you would place
+justice?
+
+In the highest class, I replied,--among those goods which he who would
+be happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their
+results.
+
+Then the many are of another mind; they think that justice is to be
+reckoned in the troublesome class, among goods which are to be pursued
+for the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are
+disagreeable and rather to be avoided.
+
+I know, I said, that this is their manner of thinking, and that this was
+the thesis which Thrasymachus was maintaining just now, when he censured
+justice and praised injustice. But I am too stupid to be convinced by
+him.
+
+I wish, he said, that you would hear me as well as him, and then I shall
+see whether you and I agree. For Thrasymachus seems to me, like a snake,
+to have been charmed by your voice sooner than he ought to have been;
+but to my mind the nature of justice and injustice have not yet been
+made clear. Setting aside their rewards and results, I want to know what
+they are in themselves, and how they inwardly work in the soul. If you,
+please, then, I will revive the argument of Thrasymachus. And first I
+will speak of the nature and origin of justice according to the common
+view of them. Secondly, I will show that all men who practise justice do
+so against their will, of necessity, but not as a good. And thirdly, I
+will argue that there is reason in this view, for the life of the unjust
+is after all better far than the life of the just--if what they say
+is true, Socrates, since I myself am not of their opinion. But still I
+acknowledge that I am perplexed when I hear the voices of Thrasymachus
+and myriads of others dinning in my ears; and, on the other hand, I have
+never yet heard the superiority of justice to injustice maintained by
+any one in a satisfactory way. I want to hear justice praised in respect
+of itself; then I shall be satisfied, and you are the person from whom
+I think that I am most likely to hear this; and therefore I will praise
+the unjust life to the utmost of my power, and my manner of speaking
+will indicate the manner in which I desire to hear you too praising
+justice and censuring injustice. Will you say whether you approve of my
+proposal?
+
+Indeed I do; nor can I imagine any theme about which a man of sense
+would oftener wish to converse.
+
+I am delighted, he replied, to hear you say so, and shall begin by
+speaking, as I proposed, of the nature and origin of justice.
+
+They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice,
+evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have
+both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not
+being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they
+had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise
+laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed
+by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of
+justice;--it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is
+to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to
+suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at
+a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as
+the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do
+injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit
+to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he
+did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of
+justice.
+
+Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they
+have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something
+of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do
+what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them;
+then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be
+proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all
+natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the path of
+justice by the force of law. The liberty which we are supposing may be
+most completely given to them in the form of such a power as is said
+to have been possessed by Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian.
+According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of
+the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an
+opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed
+at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels,
+he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and
+looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than
+human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the
+finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together,
+according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the
+flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his
+finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet
+of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the
+rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no
+longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring
+he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials
+of the ring, and always with the same result--when he turned the collet
+inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he
+contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court;
+whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help
+conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose
+now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of
+them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an
+iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his
+hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he
+liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at
+his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all
+respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be
+as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same
+point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is
+just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him
+individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he
+can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their
+hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than
+justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they
+are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming
+invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he
+would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although
+they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances
+with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.
+Enough of this.
+
+Now, if we are to form a real judgment of the life of the just and
+unjust, we must isolate them; there is no other way; and how is the
+isolation to be effected? I answer: Let the unjust man be entirely
+unjust, and the just man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away from
+either of them, and both are to be perfectly furnished for the work
+of their respective lives. First, let the unjust be like other
+distinguished masters of craft; like the skilful pilot or physician, who
+knows intuitively his own powers and keeps within their limits, and who,
+if he fails at any point, is able to recover himself. So let the unjust
+make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means
+to be great in his injustice: (he who is found out is nobody:) for
+the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed just when you are not.
+Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most
+perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow
+him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest
+reputation for justice. If he have taken a false step he must be able to
+recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any of his
+deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is required
+by his courage and strength, and command of money and friends. And at
+his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity,
+wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no
+seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and
+then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or
+for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in
+justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a
+state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men,
+and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the
+proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of
+infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of
+death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the
+uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let
+judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two.
+
+Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them
+up for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two
+statues.
+
+I do my best, he said. And now that we know what they are like there
+is no difficulty in tracing out the sort of life which awaits either
+of them. This I will proceed to describe; but as you may think the
+description a little too coarse, I ask you to suppose, Socrates, that
+the words which follow are not mine.--Let me put them into the mouths of
+the eulogists of injustice: They will tell you that the just man who is
+thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound--will have his eyes
+burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be
+impaled: Then he will understand that he ought to seem only, and not to
+be, just; the words of Aeschylus may be more truly spoken of the unjust
+than of the just. For the unjust is pursuing a reality; he does not live
+with a view to appearances--he wants to be really unjust and not to seem
+only:--
+
+'His mind has a soil deep and fertile, Out of which spring his prudent
+counsels.'
+
+In the first place, he is thought just, and therefore bears rule in the
+city; he can marry whom he will, and give in marriage to whom he
+will; also he can trade and deal where he likes, and always to his own
+advantage, because he has no misgivings about injustice; and at every
+contest, whether in public or private, he gets the better of his
+antagonists, and gains at their expense, and is rich, and out of his
+gains he can benefit his friends, and harm his enemies; moreover, he
+can offer sacrifices, and dedicate gifts to the gods abundantly and
+magnificently, and can honour the gods or any man whom he wants to
+honour in a far better style than the just, and therefore he is likely
+to be dearer than they are to the gods. And thus, Socrates, gods and men
+are said to unite in making the life of the unjust better than the life
+of the just.
+
+I was going to say something in answer to Glaucon, when Adeimantus, his
+brother, interposed: Socrates, he said, you do not suppose that there is
+nothing more to be urged?
+
+Why, what else is there? I answered.
+
+The strongest point of all has not been even mentioned, he replied.
+
+Well, then, according to the proverb, 'Let brother help brother'--if
+he fails in any part do you assist him; although I must confess that
+Glaucon has already said quite enough to lay me in the dust, and take
+from me the power of helping justice.
+
+Nonsense, he replied. But let me add something more: There is another
+side to Glaucon's argument about the praise and censure of justice
+and injustice, which is equally required in order to bring out what I
+believe to be his meaning. Parents and tutors are always telling their
+sons and their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the sake
+of justice, but for the sake of character and reputation; in the hope of
+obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those offices, marriages,
+and the like which Glaucon has enumerated among the advantages accruing
+to the unjust from the reputation of justice. More, however, is made of
+appearances by this class of persons than by the others; for they
+throw in the good opinion of the gods, and will tell you of a shower of
+benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain upon the pious; and this
+accords with the testimony of the noble Hesiod and Homer, the first of
+whom says, that the gods make the oaks of the just--
+
+   'To bear acorns at their summit, and bees in the middle;
+   And the sheep are bowed down with the weight of their fleeces,'
+
+and many other blessings of a like kind are provided for them. And Homer
+has a very similar strain; for he speaks of one whose fame is--
+
+'As the fame of some blameless king who, like a god, Maintains justice;
+to whom the black earth brings forth Wheat and barley, whose trees are
+bowed with fruit, And his sheep never fail to bear, and the sea gives
+him fish.'
+
+Still grander are the gifts of heaven which Musaeus and his son
+vouchsafe to the just; they take them down into the world below, where
+they have the saints lying on couches at a feast, everlastingly drunk,
+crowned with garlands; their idea seems to be that an immortality of
+drunkenness is the highest meed of virtue. Some extend their rewards
+yet further; the posterity, as they say, of the faithful and just shall
+survive to the third and fourth generation. This is the style in which
+they praise justice. But about the wicked there is another strain; they
+bury them in a slough in Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve;
+also while they are yet living they bring them to infamy, and inflict
+upon them the punishments which Glaucon described as the portion of the
+just who are reputed to be unjust; nothing else does their invention
+supply. Such is their manner of praising the one and censuring the
+other.
+
+Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way of speaking
+about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets, but
+is found in prose writers. The universal voice of mankind is always
+declaring that justice and virtue are honourable, but grievous and
+toilsome; and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of
+attainment, and are only censured by law and opinion. They say also that
+honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty; and they
+are quite ready to call wicked men happy, and to honour them both in
+public and private when they are rich or in any other way influential,
+while they despise and overlook those who may be weak and poor, even
+though acknowledging them to be better than the others. But most
+extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking about virtue and the
+gods: they say that the gods apportion calamity and misery to many good
+men, and good and happiness to the wicked. And mendicant prophets go to
+rich men's doors and persuade them that they have a power committed
+to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man's own or his
+ancestor's sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and feasts; and
+they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a small cost;
+with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they say, to execute
+their will. And the poets are the authorities to whom they appeal, now
+smoothing the path of vice with the words of Hesiod;--
+
+'Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her
+dwelling-place is near. But before virtue the gods have set toil,'
+
+and a tedious and uphill road: then citing Homer as a witness that the
+gods may be influenced by men; for he also says:--
+
+'The gods, too, may be turned from their purpose; and men pray to them
+and avert their wrath by sacrifices and soothing entreaties, and by
+libations and the odour of fat, when they have sinned and transgressed.'
+
+And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus,
+who were children of the Moon and the Muses--that is what they
+say--according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only
+individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin
+may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and
+are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort
+they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if
+we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.
+
+He proceeded: And now when the young hear all this said about virtue and
+vice, and the way in which gods and men regard them, how are their minds
+likely to be affected, my dear Socrates,--those of them, I mean, who are
+quickwitted, and, like bees on the wing, light on every flower, and from
+all that they hear are prone to draw conclusions as to what manner of
+persons they should be and in what way they should walk if they would
+make the best of life? Probably the youth will say to himself in the
+words of Pindar--
+
+'Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower
+which may be a fortress to me all my days?'
+
+For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought
+just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand
+are unmistakeable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of
+justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers
+prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to
+appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and
+shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I
+will trail the subtle and crafty fox, as Archilochus, greatest of sages,
+recommends. But I hear some one exclaiming that the concealment of
+wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, Nothing great is easy.
+Nevertheless, the argument indicates this, if we would be happy, to be
+the path along which we should proceed. With a view to concealment we
+will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there
+are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and
+assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall
+make unlawful gains and not be punished. Still I hear a voice saying
+that the gods cannot be deceived, neither can they be compelled. But
+what if there are no gods? or, suppose them to have no care of human
+things--why in either case should we mind about concealment? And even if
+there are gods, and they do care about us, yet we know of them only
+from tradition and the genealogies of the poets; and these are the very
+persons who say that they may be influenced and turned by 'sacrifices
+and soothing entreaties and by offerings.' Let us be consistent then,
+and believe both or neither. If the poets speak truly, why then we had
+better be unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for if we are
+just, although we may escape the vengeance of heaven, we shall lose the
+gains of injustice; but, if we are unjust, we shall keep the gains, and
+by our sinning and praying, and praying and sinning, the gods will be
+propitiated, and we shall not be punished. 'But there is a world below
+in which either we or our posterity will suffer for our unjust deeds.'
+Yes, my friend, will be the reflection, but there are mysteries and
+atoning deities, and these have great power. That is what mighty
+cities declare; and the children of the gods, who were their poets and
+prophets, bear a like testimony.
+
+On what principle, then, shall we any longer choose justice rather than
+the worst injustice? when, if we only unite the latter with a deceitful
+regard to appearances, we shall fare to our mind both with gods and
+men, in life and after death, as the most numerous and the highest
+authorities tell us. Knowing all this, Socrates, how can a man who
+has any superiority of mind or person or rank or wealth, be willing to
+honour justice; or indeed to refrain from laughing when he hears justice
+praised? And even if there should be some one who is able to disprove
+the truth of my words, and who is satisfied that justice is best, still
+he is not angry with the unjust, but is very ready to forgive them,
+because he also knows that men are not just of their own free will;
+unless, peradventure, there be some one whom the divinity within him may
+have inspired with a hatred of injustice, or who has attained knowledge
+of the truth--but no other man. He only blames injustice who, owing to
+cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the power of being unjust.
+And this is proved by the fact that when he obtains the power, he
+immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.
+
+The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning of
+the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were to
+find that of all the professing panegyrists of justice--beginning with
+the ancient heroes of whom any memorial has been preserved to us, and
+ending with the men of our own time--no one has ever blamed injustice or
+praised justice except with a view to the glories, honours, and benefits
+which flow from them. No one has ever adequately described either in
+verse or prose the true essential nature of either of them abiding in
+the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye; or shown that of
+all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is
+the greatest good, and injustice the greatest evil. Had this been the
+universal strain, had you sought to persuade us of this from our youth
+upwards, we should not have been on the watch to keep one another from
+doing wrong, but every one would have been his own watchman, because
+afraid, if he did wrong, of harbouring in himself the greatest of
+evils. I dare say that Thrasymachus and others would seriously hold the
+language which I have been merely repeating, and words even stronger
+than these about justice and injustice, grossly, as I conceive,
+perverting their true nature. But I speak in this vehement manner, as
+I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from you the
+opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the superiority
+which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have on the
+possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil
+to him. And please, as Glaucon requested of you, to exclude reputations;
+for unless you take away from each of them his true reputation and
+add on the false, we shall say that you do not praise justice, but the
+appearance of it; we shall think that you are only exhorting us to keep
+injustice dark, and that you really agree with Thrasymachus in thinking
+that justice is another's good and the interest of the stronger, and
+that injustice is a man's own profit and interest, though injurious to
+the weaker. Now as you have admitted that justice is one of that highest
+class of goods which are desired indeed for their results, but in a far
+greater degree for their own sakes--like sight or hearing or knowledge
+or health, or any other real and natural and not merely conventional
+good--I would ask you in your praise of justice to regard one point
+only: I mean the essential good and evil which justice and injustice
+work in the possessors of them. Let others praise justice and censure
+injustice, magnifying the rewards and honours of the one and abusing the
+other; that is a manner of arguing which, coming from them, I am
+ready to tolerate, but from you who have spent your whole life in the
+consideration of this question, unless I hear the contrary from your own
+lips, I expect something better. And therefore, I say, not only prove to
+us that justice is better than injustice, but show what they either of
+them do to the possessor of them, which makes the one to be a good and
+the other an evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and men.
+
+I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but on
+hearing these words I was quite delighted, and said: Sons of an
+illustrious father, that was not a bad beginning of the Elegiac verses
+which the admirer of Glaucon made in honour of you after you had
+distinguished yourselves at the battle of Megara:--
+
+'Sons of Ariston,' he sang, 'divine offspring of an illustrious hero.'
+
+The epithet is very appropriate, for there is something truly divine in
+being able to argue as you have done for the superiority of injustice,
+and remaining unconvinced by your own arguments. And I do believe that
+you are not convinced--this I infer from your general character, for had
+I judged only from your speeches I should have mistrusted you. But
+now, the greater my confidence in you, the greater is my difficulty in
+knowing what to say. For I am in a strait between two; on the one hand I
+feel that I am unequal to the task; and my inability is brought home to
+me by the fact that you were not satisfied with the answer which I made
+to Thrasymachus, proving, as I thought, the superiority which justice
+has over injustice. And yet I cannot refuse to help, while breath and
+speech remain to me; I am afraid that there would be an impiety in being
+present when justice is evil spoken of and not lifting up a hand in her
+defence. And therefore I had best give such help as I can.
+
+Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question
+drop, but to proceed in the investigation. They wanted to arrive at the
+truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly,
+about their relative advantages. I told them, what I really thought,
+that the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would require very
+good eyes. Seeing then, I said, that we are no great wits, I think that
+we had better adopt a method which I may illustrate thus; suppose that
+a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters
+from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be
+found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were
+larger--if they were the same and he could read the larger letters
+first, and then proceed to the lesser--this would have been thought a
+rare piece of good fortune.
+
+Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our
+enquiry?
+
+I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our
+enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an
+individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And is not a State larger than an individual?
+
+It is.
+
+Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and
+more easily discernible. I propose therefore that we enquire into the
+nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and
+secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser
+and comparing them.
+
+That, he said, is an excellent proposal.
+
+And if we imagine the State in process of creation, we shall see the
+justice and injustice of the State in process of creation also.
+
+I dare say.
+
+When the State is completed there may be a hope that the object of our
+search will be more easily discovered.
+
+Yes, far more easily.
+
+But ought we to attempt to construct one? I said; for to do so, as I am
+inclined to think, will be a very serious task. Reflect therefore.
+
+I have reflected, said Adeimantus, and am anxious that you should
+proceed.
+
+A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind;
+no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other
+origin of a State be imagined?
+
+There can be no other.
+
+Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them,
+one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and when
+these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the
+body of inhabitants is termed a State.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives,
+under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true
+creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.
+
+Of course, he replied.
+
+Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the
+condition of life and existence.
+
+Certainly.
+
+The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.
+
+True.
+
+And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great
+demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder,
+some one else a weaver--shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps
+some other purveyor to our bodily wants?
+
+Quite right.
+
+The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And how will they proceed? Will each bring the result of his labours
+into a common stock?--the individual husbandman, for example, producing
+for four, and labouring four times as long and as much as he need in the
+provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself;
+or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of
+producing for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food
+in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three fourths of his time
+be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no
+partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants?
+
+Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at
+producing everything.
+
+Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you
+say this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there
+are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different
+occupations.
+
+Very true.
+
+And will you have a work better done when the workman has many
+occupations, or when he has only one?
+
+When he has only one.
+
+Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when not done at
+the right time?
+
+No doubt.
+
+For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the business is
+at leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the
+business his first object.
+
+He must.
+
+And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully
+and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is
+natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Then more than four citizens will be required; for the husbandman will
+not make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of agriculture,
+if they are to be good for anything. Neither will the builder make
+his tools--and he too needs many; and in like manner the weaver and
+shoemaker.
+
+True.
+
+Then carpenters, and smiths, and many other artisans, will be sharers in
+our little State, which is already beginning to grow?
+
+True.
+
+Yet even if we add neatherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen, in order
+that our husbandmen may have oxen to plough with, and builders as well
+as husbandmen may have draught cattle, and curriers and weavers fleeces
+and hides,--still our State will not be very large.
+
+That is true; yet neither will it be a very small State which contains
+all these.
+
+Then, again, there is the situation of the city--to find a place where
+nothing need be imported is wellnigh impossible.
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring the required
+supply from another city?
+
+There must.
+
+But if the trader goes empty-handed, having nothing which they require
+who would supply his need, he will come back empty-handed.
+
+That is certain.
+
+And therefore what they produce at home must be not only enough for
+themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate
+those from whom their wants are supplied.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then more husbandmen and more artisans will be required?
+
+They will.
+
+Not to mention the importers and exporters, who are called merchants?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then we shall want merchants?
+
+We shall.
+
+And if merchandise is to be carried over the sea, skilful sailors will
+also be needed, and in considerable numbers?
+
+Yes, in considerable numbers.
+
+Then, again, within the city, how will they exchange their productions?
+To secure such an exchange was, as you will remember, one of our
+principal objects when we formed them into a society and constituted a
+State.
+
+Clearly they will buy and sell.
+
+Then they will need a market-place, and a money-token for purposes of
+exchange.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production
+to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with
+him,--is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?
+
+Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake
+the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those
+who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for
+any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money
+in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from
+those who desire to buy.
+
+This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our State. Is
+not 'retailer' the term which is applied to those who sit in the
+market-place engaged in buying and selling, while those who wander from
+one city to another are called merchants?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And there is another class of servants, who are intellectually hardly
+on the level of companionship; still they have plenty of bodily strength
+for labour, which accordingly they sell, and are called, if I do not
+mistake, hirelings, hire being the name which is given to the price of
+their labour.
+
+True.
+
+Then hirelings will help to make up our population?
+
+Yes.
+
+And now, Adeimantus, is our State matured and perfected?
+
+I think so.
+
+Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the
+State did they spring up?
+
+Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another. I cannot
+imagine that they are more likely to be found any where else.
+
+I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better
+think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.
+
+Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life,
+now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and
+wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And
+when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and
+barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed
+on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making
+noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on
+clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew
+or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine
+which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the
+praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will
+take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye
+to poverty or war.
+
+But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to
+their meal.
+
+True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a
+relish--salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs
+such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs,
+and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns
+at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be
+expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a
+similar life to their children after them.
+
+Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs,
+how else would you feed the beasts?
+
+But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
+
+Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life.
+People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and
+dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern
+style.
+
+Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me
+consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created;
+and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be
+more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion
+the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have
+described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have
+no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the
+simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables,
+and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and
+courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every
+variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first
+speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the
+painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and
+ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is
+no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a
+multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such
+as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class
+have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of
+music--poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers,
+contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's
+dresses. And we shall want more servants. Will not tutors be also in
+request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as
+confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who were not needed and
+therefore had no place in the former edition of our State, but are
+needed now? They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of
+many other kinds, if people eat them.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians
+than before?
+
+Much greater.
+
+And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants
+will be too small now, and not enough?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture
+and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves,
+they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the
+unlimited accumulation of wealth?
+
+That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
+
+And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?
+
+Most certainly, he replied.
+
+Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much
+we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes
+which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as
+well as public.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And our State must once more enlarge; and this time the enlargement will
+be nothing short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight
+with the invaders for all that we have, as well as for the things and
+persons whom we were describing above.
+
+Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves?
+
+No, I said; not if we were right in the principle which was acknowledged
+by all of us when we were framing the State: the principle, as you will
+remember, was that one man cannot practise many arts with success.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But is not war an art?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And the shoemaker was not allowed by us to be a husbandman, or a weaver,
+or a builder--in order that we might have our shoes well made; but to
+him and to every other worker was assigned one work for which he was by
+nature fitted, and at that he was to continue working all his life long
+and at no other; he was not to let opportunities slip, and then he would
+become a good workman. Now nothing can be more important than that
+the work of a soldier should be well done. But is war an art so easily
+acquired that a man may be a warrior who is also a husbandman, or
+shoemaker, or other artisan; although no one in the world would be a
+good dice or draught player who merely took up the game as a recreation,
+and had not from his earliest years devoted himself to this and nothing
+else? No tools will make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence,
+nor be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has
+never bestowed any attention upon them. How then will he who takes up
+a shield or other implement of war become a good fighter all in a day,
+whether with heavy-armed or any other kind of troops?
+
+Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use would be
+beyond price.
+
+And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more time, and
+skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?
+
+No doubt, he replied.
+
+Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then it will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted
+for the task of guarding the city?
+
+It will.
+
+And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we must be brave
+and do our best.
+
+We must.
+
+Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding
+and watching?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to overtake
+the enemy when they see him; and strong too if, when they have caught
+him, they have to fight with him.
+
+All these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.
+
+Well, and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog
+or any other animal? Have you never observed how invincible and
+unconquerable is spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any
+creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?
+
+I have.
+
+Then now we have a clear notion of the bodily qualities which are
+required in the guardian.
+
+True.
+
+And also of the mental ones; his soul is to be full of spirit?
+
+Yes.
+
+But are not these spirited natures apt to be savage with one another,
+and with everybody else?
+
+A difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.
+
+Whereas, I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle
+to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting
+for their enemies to destroy them.
+
+True, he said.
+
+What is to be done then? I said; how shall we find a gentle nature which
+has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the other?
+
+True.
+
+He will not be a good guardian who is wanting in either of these two
+qualities; and yet the combination of them appears to be impossible; and
+hence we must infer that to be a good guardian is impossible.
+
+I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.
+
+Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had preceded.--My
+friend, I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have lost
+sight of the image which we had before us.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean to say that there do exist natures gifted with those opposite
+qualities.
+
+And where do you find them?
+
+Many animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog
+is a very good one: you know that well-bred dogs are perfectly gentle to
+their familiars and acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.
+
+Yes, I know.
+
+Then there is nothing impossible or out of the order of nature in our
+finding a guardian who has a similar combination of qualities?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited
+nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?
+
+I do not apprehend your meaning.
+
+The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the
+dog, and is remarkable in the animal.
+
+What trait?
+
+Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance,
+he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the
+other any good. Did this never strike you as curious?
+
+The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of
+your remark.
+
+And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;--your dog is a
+true philosopher.
+
+Why?
+
+Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only
+by the criterion of knowing and not knowing. And must not an animal be a
+lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test
+of knowledge and ignorance?
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?
+
+They are the same, he replied.
+
+And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is likely to be
+gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover of
+wisdom and knowledge?
+
+That we may safely affirm.
+
+Then he who is to be a really good and noble guardian of the State will
+require to unite in himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness and
+strength?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them,
+how are they to be reared and educated? Is not this an enquiry which
+may be expected to throw light on the greater enquiry which is our final
+end--How do justice and injustice grow up in States? for we do not want
+either to omit what is to the point or to draw out the argument to an
+inconvenient length.
+
+Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great service to us.
+
+Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up, even if
+somewhat long.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our
+story shall be the education of our heroes.
+
+By all means.
+
+And what shall be their education? Can we find a better than the
+traditional sort?--and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body,
+and music for the soul.
+
+True.
+
+Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?
+
+By all means.
+
+And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?
+
+I do.
+
+And literature may be either true or false?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the
+false?
+
+I do not understand your meaning, he said.
+
+You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which,
+though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious;
+and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn
+gymnastics.
+
+Very true.
+
+That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before
+gymnastics.
+
+Quite right, he said.
+
+You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work,
+especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time
+at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is
+more readily taken.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales
+which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds
+ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish
+them to have when they are grown up?
+
+We cannot.
+
+Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of
+fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good,
+and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their
+children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such
+tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but
+most of those which are now in use must be discarded.
+
+Of what tales are you speaking? he said.
+
+You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are
+necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of
+them.
+
+Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term
+the greater.
+
+Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of
+the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.
+
+But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with
+them?
+
+A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and,
+what is more, a bad lie.
+
+But when is this fault committed?
+
+Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and
+heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a
+likeness to the original.
+
+Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what
+are the stories which you mean?
+
+First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high
+places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie
+too,--I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated
+on him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son
+inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be
+lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had
+better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity
+for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and
+they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and
+unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few
+indeed.
+
+Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.
+
+Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the
+young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he
+is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his
+father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following
+the example of the first and greatest among the gods.
+
+I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are
+quite unfit to be repeated.
+
+Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of
+quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should
+any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and
+fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true. No,
+we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be
+embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable
+other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.
+If they would only believe us we would tell them that quarrelling
+is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel
+between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by
+telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told
+to compose for them in a similar spirit. But the narrative of Hephaestus
+binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying
+for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of
+the gods in Homer--these tales must not be admitted into our State,
+whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For
+a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal;
+anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become
+indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the
+tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.
+
+There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such
+models to be found and of what tales are you speaking--how shall we
+answer him?
+
+I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets,
+but founders of a State: now the founders of a State ought to know the
+general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits
+which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their
+business.
+
+Very true, he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?
+
+Something of this kind, I replied:--God is always to be represented as
+he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in
+which the representation is given.
+
+Right.
+
+And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And no good thing is hurtful?
+
+No, indeed.
+
+And that which is not hurtful hurts not?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And that which hurts not does no evil?
+
+No.
+
+And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the good is advantageous?
+
+Yes.
+
+And therefore the cause of well-being?
+
+Yes.
+
+It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but
+of the good only?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many
+assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things
+that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the
+evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the
+causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
+
+That appears to me to be most true, he said.
+
+Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of
+the folly of saying that two casks
+
+'Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of
+evil lots,'
+
+and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two
+
+'Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;'
+
+but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,
+
+'Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.'
+
+And again--
+
+'Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.'
+
+And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which
+was really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athene and Zeus,
+or that the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis
+and Zeus, he shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our
+young men to hear the words of Aeschylus, that
+
+'God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house.'
+
+And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe--the subject of the
+tragedy in which these iambic verses occur--or of the house of Pelops,
+or of the Trojan war or on any similar theme, either we must not permit
+him to say that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he
+must devise some explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must say
+that God did what was just and right, and they were the better for being
+punished; but that those who are punished are miserable, and that God
+is the author of their misery--the poet is not to be permitted to say;
+though he may say that the wicked are miserable because they require
+to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from God;
+but that God being good is the author of evil to any one is to be
+strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or heard in verse or
+prose by any one whether old or young in any well-ordered commonwealth.
+Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.
+
+I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.
+
+Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to
+which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform,--that God is
+not the author of all things, but of good only.
+
+That will do, he said.
+
+And what do you think of a second principle? Shall I ask you whether God
+is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in one shape,
+and now in another--sometimes himself changing and passing into
+many forms, sometimes deceiving us with the semblance of such
+transformations; or is he one and the same immutably fixed in his own
+proper image?
+
+I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.
+
+Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that change must
+be effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+And things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered
+or discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the human
+frame is least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant
+which is in the fullest vigour also suffers least from winds or the heat
+of the sun or any similar causes.
+
+Of course.
+
+And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged
+by any external influence?
+
+True.
+
+And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all composite
+things--furniture, houses, garments: when good and well made, they are
+least altered by time and circumstances.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then everything which is good, whether made by art or nature, or both,
+is least liable to suffer change from without?
+
+True.
+
+But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?
+
+Of course they are.
+
+Then he can hardly be compelled by external influence to take many
+shapes?
+
+He cannot.
+
+But may he not change and transform himself?
+
+Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at all.
+
+And will he then change himself for the better and fairer, or for the
+worse and more unsightly?
+
+If he change at all he can only change for the worse, for we cannot
+suppose him to be deficient either in virtue or beauty.
+
+Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God or man,
+desire to make himself worse?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being,
+as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every God
+remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.
+
+That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.
+
+Then, I said, my dear friend, let none of the poets tell us that
+
+'The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up
+and down cities in all sorts of forms;'
+
+and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either
+in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in
+the likeness of a priestess asking an alms
+
+'For the life-giving daughters of Inachus the river of Argos;'
+
+--let us have no more lies of that sort. Neither must we have mothers
+under the influence of the poets scaring their children with a bad
+version of these myths--telling how certain gods, as they say, 'Go about
+by night in the likeness of so many strangers and in divers forms;' but
+let them take heed lest they make cowards of their children, and at the
+same time speak blasphemy against the gods.
+
+Heaven forbid, he said.
+
+But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by witchcraft
+and deception they may make us think that they appear in various forms?
+
+Perhaps, he replied.
+
+Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie, whether in
+word or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?
+
+I cannot say, he replied.
+
+Do you not know, I said, that the true lie, if such an expression may be
+allowed, is hated of gods and men?
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest and
+highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters; there,
+above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.
+
+Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.
+
+The reason is, I replied, that you attribute some profound meaning to
+my words; but I am only saying that deception, or being deceived
+or uninformed about the highest realities in the highest part of
+themselves, which is the soul, and in that part of them to have and to
+hold the lie, is what mankind least like;--that, I say, is what they
+utterly detest.
+
+There is nothing more hateful to them.
+
+And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul of him who
+is deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only a
+kind of imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the soul,
+not pure unadulterated falsehood. Am I not right?
+
+Perfectly right.
+
+The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?
+
+Yes.
+
+Whereas the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in
+dealing with enemies--that would be an instance; or again, when those
+whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to
+do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or
+preventive; also in the tales of mythology, of which we were just now
+speaking--because we do not know the truth about ancient times, we make
+falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so turn it to account.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But can any of these reasons apply to God? Can we suppose that he is
+ignorant of antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?
+
+That would be ridiculous, he said.
+
+Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?
+
+I should say not.
+
+Or perhaps he may tell a lie because he is afraid of enemies?
+
+That is inconceivable.
+
+But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?
+
+But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.
+
+Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?
+
+None whatever.
+
+Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes
+not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision.
+
+Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.
+
+You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in
+which we should write and speak about divine things. The gods are not
+magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in
+any way.
+
+I grant that.
+
+Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying
+dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses
+of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials
+
+'Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long,
+and to know no sickness. And when he had spoken of my lot as in all
+things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my
+soul. And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of
+prophecy, would not fail. And now he himself who uttered the strain,
+he who was present at the banquet, and who said this--he it is who has
+slain my son.'
+
+These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our
+anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall
+we allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young,
+meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be
+true worshippers of the gods and like them.
+
+I entirely agree, he said, in these principles, and promise to make them
+my laws.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+Such then, I said, are our principles of theology--some tales are to be
+told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth
+upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to
+value friendship with one another.
+
+Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.
+
+But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons
+besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of
+death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle
+rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real
+and terrible?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales
+as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather
+to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions
+are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.
+
+That will be our duty, he said.
+
+Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages,
+beginning with the verses,
+
+'I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than
+rule over all the dead who have come to nought.'
+
+We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,
+
+'Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen
+both of mortals and immortals.'
+
+And again:--
+
+'O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form
+but no mind at all!'
+
+Again of Tiresias:--
+
+'(To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,) that he alone
+should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.'
+
+Again:--
+
+'The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate,
+leaving manhood and youth.'
+
+Again:--
+
+'And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.'
+
+And,--
+
+'As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped
+out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling
+to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they
+moved.'
+
+And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike
+out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or
+unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical
+charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who
+are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names which
+describe the world below--Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and
+sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a
+shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them. I do not
+say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but
+there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too
+excitable and effeminate by them.
+
+There is a real danger, he said.
+
+Then we must have no more of them.
+
+True.
+
+Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous
+men?
+
+They will go with the rest.
+
+But shall we be right in getting rid of them? Reflect: our principle is
+that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man
+who is his comrade.
+
+Yes; that is our principle.
+
+And therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he
+had suffered anything terrible?
+
+He will not.
+
+Such an one, as we further maintain, is sufficient for himself and his
+own happiness, and therefore is least in need of other men.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the deprivation of
+fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will bear with the
+greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall him.
+
+Yes, he will feel such a misfortune far less than another.
+
+Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous men,
+and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good for
+anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated
+by us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the like.
+
+That will be very right.
+
+Then we will once more entreat Homer and the other poets not to depict
+Achilles, who is the son of a goddess, first lying on his side, then on
+his back, and then on his face; then starting up and sailing in a frenzy
+along the shores of the barren sea; now taking the sooty ashes in both
+his hands and pouring them over his head, or weeping and wailing in the
+various modes which Homer has delineated. Nor should he describe Priam
+the kinsman of the gods as praying and beseeching,
+
+'Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.'
+
+Still more earnestly will we beg of him at all events not to introduce
+the gods lamenting and saying,
+
+'Alas! my misery! Alas! that I bore the bravest to my sorrow.'
+
+But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so
+completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him
+say--
+
+'O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased
+round and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.'
+
+Or again:--
+
+Woe is me that I am fated to have Sarpedon, dearest of men to me,
+subdued at the hands of Patroclus the son of Menoetius.'
+
+For if, my sweet Adeimantus, our youth seriously listen to such unworthy
+representations of the gods, instead of laughing at them as they ought,
+hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be
+dishonoured by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination
+which may arise in his mind to say and do the like. And instead
+of having any shame or self-control, he will be always whining and
+lamenting on slight occasions.
+
+Yes, he said, that is most true.
+
+Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as the argument
+has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until it is
+disproved by a better.
+
+It ought not to be.
+
+Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter. For a fit of
+laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a
+violent reaction.
+
+So I believe.
+
+Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be represented
+as overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation of
+the gods be allowed.
+
+Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.
+
+Then we shall not suffer such an expression to be used about the gods as
+that of Homer when he describes how
+
+'Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw
+Hephaestus bustling about the mansion.'
+
+On your views, we must not admit them.
+
+On my views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit
+them is certain.
+
+Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is
+useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the
+use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private
+individuals have no business with them.
+
+Clearly not, he said.
+
+Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of
+the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with
+enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public
+good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and
+although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to
+them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient
+or the pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily
+illnesses to the physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to
+tell the captain what is happening about the ship and the rest of the
+crew, and how things are going with himself or his fellow sailors.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,
+
+'Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,'
+
+he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally
+subversive and destructive of ship or State.
+
+Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out.
+
+In the next place our youth must be temperate?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Are not the chief elements of temperance, speaking generally, obedience
+to commanders and self-control in sensual pleasures?
+
+True.
+
+Then we shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer,
+
+'Friend, sit still and obey my word,'
+
+and the verses which follow,
+
+'The Greeks marched breathing prowess, ...in silent awe of their
+leaders,'
+
+and other sentiments of the same kind.
+
+We shall.
+
+What of this line,
+
+'O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog and the heart of a stag,'
+
+and of the words which follow? Would you say that these, or any similar
+impertinences which private individuals are supposed to address to their
+rulers, whether in verse or prose, are well or ill spoken?
+
+They are ill spoken.
+
+They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do not conduce
+to temperance. And therefore they are likely to do harm to our young
+men--you would agree with me there?
+
+Yes.
+
+And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing in his
+opinion is more glorious than
+
+'When the tables are full of bread and meat, and the cup-bearer carries
+round wine which he draws from the bowl and pours into the cups,'
+
+is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to hear such words?
+Or the verse
+
+'The saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?'
+
+What would you say again to the tale of Zeus, who, while other gods and
+men were asleep and he the only person awake, lay devising plans, but
+forgot them all in a moment through his lust, and was so completely
+overcome at the sight of Here that he would not even go into the hut,
+but wanted to lie with her on the ground, declaring that he had never
+been in such a state of rapture before, even when they first met one
+another
+
+'Without the knowledge of their parents;'
+
+or that other tale of how Hephaestus, because of similar goings on, cast
+a chain around Ares and Aphrodite?
+
+Indeed, he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear
+that sort of thing.
+
+But any deeds of endurance which are done or told by famous men, these
+they ought to see and hear; as, for example, what is said in the verses,
+
+'He smote his breast, and thus reproached his heart, Endure, my heart;
+far worse hast thou endured!'
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of gifts or lovers
+of money.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Neither must we sing to them of
+
+'Gifts persuading gods, and persuading reverend kings.'
+
+Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be approved or deemed to
+have given his pupil good counsel when he told him that he should take
+the gifts of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift he
+should not lay aside his anger. Neither will we believe or acknowledge
+Achilles himself to have been such a lover of money that he took
+Agamemnon's gifts, or that when he had received payment he restored the
+dead body of Hector, but that without payment he was unwilling to do so.
+
+Undoubtedly, he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.
+
+Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in attributing these
+feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly attributed
+to him, he is guilty of downright impiety. As little can I believe the
+narrative of his insolence to Apollo, where he says,
+
+'Thou hast wronged me, O far-darter, most abominable of deities. Verily
+I would be even with thee, if I had only the power;'
+
+or his insubordination to the river-god, on whose divinity he is ready
+to lay hands; or his offering to the dead Patroclus of his own hair,
+which had been previously dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius,
+and that he actually performed this vow; or that he dragged Hector round
+the tomb of Patroclus, and slaughtered the captives at the pyre; of all
+this I cannot believe that he was guilty, any more than I can allow
+our citizens to believe that he, the wise Cheiron's pupil, the son of a
+goddess and of Peleus who was the gentlest of men and third in descent
+from Zeus, was so disordered in his wits as to be at one time the slave
+of two seemingly inconsistent passions, meanness, not untainted by
+avarice, combined with overweening contempt of gods and men.
+
+You are quite right, he replied.
+
+And let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be repeated, the tale
+of Theseus son of Poseidon, or of Peirithous son of Zeus, going forth as
+they did to perpetrate a horrid rape; or of any other hero or son of
+a god daring to do such impious and dreadful things as they falsely
+ascribe to them in our day: and let us further compel the poets to
+declare either that these acts were not done by them, or that they
+were not the sons of gods;--both in the same breath they shall not be
+permitted to affirm. We will not have them trying to persuade our youth
+that the gods are the authors of evil, and that heroes are no better
+than men--sentiments which, as we were saying, are neither pious nor
+true, for we have already proved that evil cannot come from the gods.
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear them;
+for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is convinced
+that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by--
+
+'The kindred of the gods, the relatives of Zeus, whose ancestral altar,
+the altar of Zeus, is aloft in air on the peak of Ida,'
+
+and who have
+
+'the blood of deities yet flowing in their veins.'
+
+And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity
+of morals among the young.
+
+By all means, he replied.
+
+But now that we are determining what classes of subjects are or are not
+to be spoken of, let us see whether any have been omitted by us. The
+manner in which gods and demigods and heroes and the world below should
+be treated has been already laid down.
+
+Very true.
+
+And what shall we say about men? That is clearly the remaining portion
+of our subject.
+
+Clearly so.
+
+But we are not in a condition to answer this question at present, my
+friend.
+
+Why not?
+
+Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that about men poets
+and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when
+they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable;
+and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a
+man's own loss and another's gain--these things we shall forbid them to
+utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.
+
+To be sure we shall, he replied.
+
+But if you admit that I am right in this, then I shall maintain that you
+have implied the principle for which we have been all along contending.
+
+I grant the truth of your inference.
+
+That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question which
+we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and how
+naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or
+not.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Enough of the subjects of poetry: let us now speak of the style; and
+when this has been considered, both matter and manner will have been
+completely treated.
+
+I do not understand what you mean, said Adeimantus.
+
+Then I must make you understand; and perhaps I may be more intelligible
+if I put the matter in this way. You are aware, I suppose, that all
+mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or
+to come?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union
+of the two?
+
+That again, he said, I do not quite understand.
+
+I fear that I must be a ridiculous teacher when I have so much
+difficulty in making myself apprehended. Like a bad speaker, therefore,
+I will not take the whole of the subject, but will break a piece off in
+illustration of my meaning. You know the first lines of the Iliad,
+in which the poet says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his
+daughter, and that Agamemnon flew into a passion with him; whereupon
+Chryses, failing of his object, invoked the anger of the God against the
+Achaeans. Now as far as these lines,
+
+'And he prayed all the Greeks, but especially the two sons of Atreus,
+the chiefs of the people,'
+
+the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose
+that he is any one else. But in what follows he takes the person of
+Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the
+speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself. And in this double
+form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at
+Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.
+
+Yes.
+
+And a narrative it remains both in the speeches which the poet recites
+from time to time and in the intermediate passages?
+
+Quite true.
+
+But when the poet speaks in the person of another, may we not say that
+he assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs you,
+is going to speak?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice
+or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes?
+
+Of course.
+
+Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by
+way of imitation?
+
+Very true.
+
+Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then
+again the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration.
+However, in order that I may make my meaning quite clear, and that you
+may no more say, 'I don't understand,' I will show how the change might
+be effected. If Homer had said, 'The priest came, having his daughter's
+ransom in his hands, supplicating the Achaeans, and above all the
+kings;' and then if, instead of speaking in the person of Chryses,
+he had continued in his own person, the words would have been, not
+imitation, but simple narration. The passage would have run as follows
+(I am no poet, and therefore I drop the metre), 'The priest came and
+prayed the gods on behalf of the Greeks that they might capture Troy
+and return safely home, but begged that they would give him back his
+daughter, and take the ransom which he brought, and respect the God.
+Thus he spoke, and the other Greeks revered the priest and assented. But
+Agamemnon was wroth, and bade him depart and not come again, lest the
+staff and chaplets of the God should be of no avail to him--the daughter
+of Chryses should not be released, he said--she should grow old with him
+in Argos. And then he told him to go away and not to provoke him, if he
+intended to get home unscathed. And the old man went away in fear and
+silence, and, when he had left the camp, he called upon Apollo by his
+many names, reminding him of everything which he had done pleasing to
+him, whether in building his temples, or in offering sacrifice, and
+praying that his good deeds might be returned to him, and that the
+Achaeans might expiate his tears by the arrows of the god,'--and so on.
+In this way the whole becomes simple narrative.
+
+I understand, he said.
+
+Or you may suppose the opposite case--that the intermediate passages are
+omitted, and the dialogue only left.
+
+That also, he said, I understand; you mean, for example, as in tragedy.
+
+You have conceived my meaning perfectly; and if I mistake not, what you
+failed to apprehend before is now made clear to you, that poetry and
+mythology are, in some cases, wholly imitative--instances of this are
+supplied by tragedy and comedy; there is likewise the opposite style,
+in which the poet is the only speaker--of this the dithyramb affords
+the best example; and the combination of both is found in epic, and in
+several other styles of poetry. Do I take you with me?
+
+Yes, he said; I see now what you meant.
+
+I will ask you to remember also what I began by saying, that we had done
+with the subject and might proceed to the style.
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+In saying this, I intended to imply that we must come to an
+understanding about the mimetic art,--whether the poets, in narrating
+their stories, are to be allowed by us to imitate, and if so, whether
+in whole or in part, and if the latter, in what parts; or should all
+imitation be prohibited?
+
+You mean, I suspect, to ask whether tragedy and comedy shall be admitted
+into our State?
+
+Yes, I said; but there may be more than this in question: I really do
+not know as yet, but whither the argument may blow, thither we go.
+
+And go we will, he said.
+
+Then, Adeimantus, let me ask you whether our guardians ought to be
+imitators; or rather, has not this question been decided by the rule
+already laid down that one man can only do one thing well, and not many;
+and that if he attempt many, he will altogether fail of gaining much
+reputation in any?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this is equally true of imitation; no one man can imitate many
+things as well as he would imitate a single one?
+
+He cannot.
+
+Then the same person will hardly be able to play a serious part in life,
+and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other parts as
+well; for even when two species of imitation are nearly allied, the same
+persons cannot succeed in both, as, for example, the writers of tragedy
+and comedy--did you not just now call them imitations?
+
+Yes, I did; and you are right in thinking that the same persons cannot
+succeed in both.
+
+Any more than they can be rhapsodists and actors at once?
+
+True.
+
+Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these things are
+but imitations.
+
+They are so.
+
+And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been coined into yet
+smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well, as
+of performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies.
+
+Quite true, he replied.
+
+If then we adhere to our original notion and bear in mind that
+our guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate
+themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making
+this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this
+end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they
+imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those
+characters which are suitable to their profession--the courageous,
+temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be
+skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from
+imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never
+observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into
+life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting
+body, voice, and mind?
+
+Yes, certainly, he said.
+
+Then, I said, we will not allow those for whom we profess a care and of
+whom we say that they ought to be good men, to imitate a woman, whether
+young or old, quarrelling with her husband, or striving and vaunting
+against the gods in conceit of her happiness, or when she is in
+affliction, or sorrow, or weeping; and certainly not one who is in
+sickness, love, or labour.
+
+Very right, he said.
+
+Neither must they represent slaves, male or female, performing the
+offices of slaves?
+
+They must not.
+
+And surely not bad men, whether cowards or any others, who do the
+reverse of what we have just been prescribing, who scold or mock or
+revile one another in drink or out of drink, or who in any other manner
+sin against themselves and their neighbours in word or deed, as the
+manner of such is. Neither should they be trained to imitate the action
+or speech of men or women who are mad or bad; for madness, like vice, is
+to be known but not to be practised or imitated.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Neither may they imitate smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, or
+boatswains, or the like?
+
+How can they, he said, when they are not allowed to apply their minds to
+the callings of any of these?
+
+Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls, the
+murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that sort of
+thing?
+
+Nay, he said, if madness be forbidden, neither may they copy the
+behaviour of madmen.
+
+You mean, I said, if I understand you aright, that there is one sort of
+narrative style which may be employed by a truly good man when he has
+anything to say, and that another sort will be used by a man of an
+opposite character and education.
+
+And which are these two sorts? he asked.
+
+Suppose, I answered, that a just and good man in the course of a
+narration comes on some saying or action of another good man,--I should
+imagine that he will like to personate him, and will not be ashamed of
+this sort of imitation: he will be most ready to play the part of the
+good man when he is acting firmly and wisely; in a less degree when
+he is overtaken by illness or love or drink, or has met with any other
+disaster. But when he comes to a character which is unworthy of him, he
+will not make a study of that; he will disdain such a person, and will
+assume his likeness, if at all, for a moment only when he is performing
+some good action; at other times he will be ashamed to play a part which
+he has never practised, nor will he like to fashion and frame himself
+after the baser models; he feels the employment of such an art, unless
+in jest, to be beneath him, and his mind revolts at it.
+
+So I should expect, he replied.
+
+Then he will adopt a mode of narration such as we have illustrated
+out of Homer, that is to say, his style will be both imitative and
+narrative; but there will be very little of the former, and a great deal
+of the latter. Do you agree?
+
+Certainly, he said; that is the model which such a speaker must
+necessarily take.
+
+But there is another sort of character who will narrate anything, and,
+the worse he is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will be too
+bad for him: and he will be ready to imitate anything, not as a joke,
+but in right good earnest, and before a large company. As I was just now
+saying, he will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of
+wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various
+sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments: he will
+bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock; his entire art
+will consist in imitation of voice and gesture, and there will be very
+little narration.
+
+That, he said, will be his mode of speaking.
+
+These, then, are the two kinds of style?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you would agree with me in saying that one of them is simple and has
+but slight changes; and if the harmony and rhythm are also chosen
+for their simplicity, the result is that the speaker, if he speaks
+correctly, is always pretty much the same in style, and he will keep
+within the limits of a single harmony (for the changes are not great),
+and in like manner he will make use of nearly the same rhythm?
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+Whereas the other requires all sorts of harmonies and all sorts of
+rhythms, if the music and the style are to correspond, because the style
+has all sorts of changes.
+
+That is also perfectly true, he replied.
+
+And do not the two styles, or the mixture of the two, comprehend all
+poetry, and every form of expression in words? No one can say anything
+except in one or other of them or in both together.
+
+They include all, he said.
+
+And shall we receive into our State all the three styles, or one only of
+the two unmixed styles? or would you include the mixed?
+
+I should prefer only to admit the pure imitator of virtue.
+
+Yes, I said, Adeimantus, but the mixed style is also very charming: and
+indeed the pantomimic, which is the opposite of the one chosen by you,
+is the most popular style with children and their attendants, and with
+the world in general.
+
+I do not deny it.
+
+But I suppose you would argue that such a style is unsuitable to our
+State, in which human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man
+plays one part only?
+
+Yes; quite unsuitable.
+
+And this is the reason why in our State, and in our State only, we
+shall find a shoemaker to be a shoemaker and not a pilot also, and a
+husbandman to be a husbandman and not a dicast also, and a soldier a
+soldier and not a trader also, and the same throughout?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so
+clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal
+to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as
+a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that
+in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not
+allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a
+garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city.
+For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet
+or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and
+will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the
+education of our soldiers.
+
+We certainly will, he said, if we have the power.
+
+Then now, my friend, I said, that part of music or literary education
+which relates to the story or myth may be considered to be finished; for
+the matter and manner have both been discussed.
+
+I think so too, he said.
+
+Next in order will follow melody and song.
+
+That is obvious.
+
+Every one can see already what we ought to say about them, if we are to
+be consistent with ourselves.
+
+I fear, said Glaucon, laughing, that the word 'every one' hardly
+includes me, for I cannot at the moment say what they should be; though
+I may guess.
+
+At any rate you can tell that a song or ode has three parts--the words,
+the melody, and the rhythm; that degree of knowledge I may presuppose?
+
+Yes, he said; so much as that you may.
+
+And as for the words, there will surely be no difference between words
+which are and which are not set to music; both will conform to the same
+laws, and these have been already determined by us?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the melody and rhythm will depend upon the words?
+
+Certainly.
+
+We were saying, when we spoke of the subject-matter, that we had no need
+of lamentation and strains of sorrow?
+
+True.
+
+And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow? You are musical, and
+can tell me.
+
+The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian, and the
+full-toned or bass Lydian, and such like.
+
+These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a character
+to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men.
+
+Certainly.
+
+In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly
+unbecoming the character of our guardians.
+
+Utterly unbecoming.
+
+And which are the soft or drinking harmonies?
+
+The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed 'relaxed.'
+
+Well, and are these of any military use?
+
+Quite the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian are
+the only ones which you have left.
+
+I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one
+warlike, to sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the
+hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he
+is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and
+at every such crisis meets the blows of fortune with firm step and a
+determination to endure; and another to be used by him in times of peace
+and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity, and he is
+seeking to persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and admonition,
+or on the other hand, when he is expressing his willingness to yield to
+persuasion or entreaty or admonition, and which represents him when
+by prudent conduct he has attained his end, not carried away by his
+success, but acting moderately and wisely under the circumstances, and
+acquiescing in the event. These two harmonies I ask you to leave;
+the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the
+unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and
+the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.
+
+And these, he replied, are the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies of which I
+was just now speaking.
+
+Then, I said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and
+melodies, we shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic
+scale?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with three
+corners and complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed
+curiously-harmonised instruments?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players? Would you admit
+them into our State when you reflect that in this composite use of
+harmony the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put
+together; even the panharmonic music is only an imitation of the flute?
+
+Clearly not.
+
+There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the city, and
+the shepherds may have a pipe in the country.
+
+That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.
+
+The preferring of Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his
+instruments is not at all strange, I said.
+
+Not at all, he replied.
+
+And so, by the dog of Egypt, we have been unconsciously purging the
+State, which not long ago we termed luxurious.
+
+And we have done wisely, he replied.
+
+Then let us now finish the purgation, I said. Next in order to
+harmonies, rhythms will naturally follow, and they should be subject to
+the same rules, for we ought not to seek out complex systems of metre,
+or metres of every kind, but rather to discover what rhythms are the
+expressions of a courageous and harmonious life; and when we have found
+them, we shall adapt the foot and the melody to words having a like
+spirit, not the words to the foot and melody. To say what these rhythms
+are will be your duty--you must teach me them, as you have already
+taught me the harmonies.
+
+But, indeed, he replied, I cannot tell you. I only know that there
+are some three principles of rhythm out of which metrical systems are
+framed, just as in sounds there are four notes (i.e. the four notes of
+the tetrachord.) out of which all the harmonies are composed; that is
+an observation which I have made. But of what sort of lives they are
+severally the imitations I am unable to say.
+
+Then, I said, we must take Damon into our counsels; and he will tell us
+what rhythms are expressive of meanness, or insolence, or fury, or other
+unworthiness, and what are to be reserved for the expression of opposite
+feelings. And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his
+mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic, and he
+arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making
+the rhythms equal in the rise and fall of the foot, long and short
+alternating; and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well
+as of a trochaic rhythm, and assigned to them short and long quantities.
+Also in some cases he appeared to praise or censure the movement of the
+foot quite as much as the rhythm; or perhaps a combination of the two;
+for I am not certain what he meant. These matters, however, as I was
+saying, had better be referred to Damon himself, for the analysis of
+the subject would be difficult, you know? (Socrates expresses himself
+carelessly in accordance with his assumed ignorance of the details of
+the subject. In the first part of the sentence he appears to be speaking
+of paeonic rhythms which are in the ratio of 3/2; in the second part, of
+dactylic and anapaestic rhythms, which are in the ratio of 1/1; in the
+last clause, of iambic and trochaic rhythms, which are in the ratio of
+1/2 or 2/1.)
+
+Rather so, I should say.
+
+But there is no difficulty in seeing that grace or the absence of grace
+is an effect of good or bad rhythm.
+
+None at all.
+
+And also that good and bad rhythm naturally assimilate to a good and bad
+style; and that harmony and discord in like manner follow style; for our
+principle is that rhythm and harmony are regulated by the words, and not
+the words by them.
+
+Just so, he said, they should follow the words.
+
+And will not the words and the character of the style depend on the
+temper of the soul?
+
+Yes.
+
+And everything else on the style?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on
+simplicity,--I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered
+mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism
+for folly?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And if our youth are to do their work in life, must they not make these
+graces and harmonies their perpetual aim?
+
+They must.
+
+And surely the art of the painter and every other creative and
+constructive art are full of them,--weaving, embroidery, architecture,
+and every kind of manufacture; also nature, animal and vegetable,--in
+all of them there is grace or the absence of grace. And ugliness and
+discord and inharmonious motion are nearly allied to ill words and ill
+nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue
+and bear their likeness.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to
+be required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on
+pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our State? Or is the
+same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be
+prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance
+and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other
+creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be
+prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our
+citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our guardians grow up
+amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there
+browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little
+by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption
+in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to
+discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our
+youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and
+receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works,
+shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a
+purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into
+likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.
+
+There can be no nobler training than that, he replied.
+
+And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent
+instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way
+into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten,
+imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated
+graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because
+he who has received this true education of the inner being will most
+shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true
+taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the
+good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad,
+now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason
+why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with
+whom his education has made him long familiar.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite agree with you in thinking that our youth should
+be trained in music and on the grounds which you mention.
+
+Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew
+the letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring
+sizes and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they
+occupy a space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out;
+and not thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we
+recognise them wherever they are found:
+
+True--
+
+Or, as we recognise the reflection of letters in the water, or in a
+mirror, only when we know the letters themselves; the same art and study
+giving us the knowledge of both:
+
+Exactly--
+
+Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor our guardians, whom we have to
+educate, can ever become musical until we and they know the essential
+forms of temperance, courage, liberality, magnificence, and their
+kindred, as well as the contrary forms, in all their combinations,
+and can recognise them and their images wherever they are found, not
+slighting them either in small things or great, but believing them all
+to be within the sphere of one art and study.
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+And when a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two
+are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has
+an eye to see it?
+
+The fairest indeed.
+
+And the fairest is also the loveliest?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+And the man who has the spirit of harmony will be most in love with the
+loveliest; but he will not love him who is of an inharmonious soul?
+
+That is true, he replied, if the deficiency be in his soul; but if there
+be any merely bodily defect in another he will be patient of it, and
+will love all the same.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you have or have had experiences of this sort,
+and I agree. But let me ask you another question: Has excess of pleasure
+any affinity to temperance?
+
+How can that be? he replied; pleasure deprives a man of the use of his
+faculties quite as much as pain.
+
+Or any affinity to virtue in general?
+
+None whatever.
+
+Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?
+
+Yes, the greatest.
+
+And is there any greater or keener pleasure than that of sensual love?
+
+No, nor a madder.
+
+Whereas true love is a love of beauty and order--temperate and
+harmonious?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to approach true love?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then mad or intemperate pleasure must never be allowed to come near the
+lover and his beloved; neither of them can have any part in it if their
+love is of the right sort?
+
+No, indeed, Socrates, it must never come near them.
+
+Then I suppose that in the city which we are founding you would make a
+law to the effect that a friend should use no other familiarity to
+his love than a father would use to his son, and then only for a noble
+purpose, and he must first have the other's consent; and this rule is
+to limit him in all his intercourse, and he is never to be seen going
+further, or, if he exceeds, he is to be deemed guilty of coarseness and
+bad taste.
+
+I quite agree, he said.
+
+Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the
+end of music if not the love of beauty?
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+After music comes gymnastic, in which our youth are next to be trained.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Gymnastic as well as music should begin in early years; the training
+in it should be careful and should continue through life. Now my belief
+is,--and this is a matter upon which I should like to have your opinion
+in confirmation of my own, but my own belief is,--not that the good body
+by any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the contrary, that
+the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this
+may be possible. What do you say?
+
+Yes, I agree.
+
+Then, to the mind when adequately trained, we shall be right in handing
+over the more particular care of the body; and in order to avoid
+prolixity we will now only give the general outlines of the subject.
+
+Very good.
+
+That they must abstain from intoxication has been already remarked by
+us; for of all persons a guardian should be the last to get drunk and
+not know where in the world he is.
+
+Yes, he said; that a guardian should require another guardian to take
+care of him is ridiculous indeed.
+
+But next, what shall we say of their food; for the men are in training
+for the great contest of all--are they not?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And will the habit of body of our ordinary athletes be suited to them?
+
+Why not?
+
+I am afraid, I said, that a habit of body such as they have is but a
+sleepy sort of thing, and rather perilous to health. Do you not observe
+that these athletes sleep away their lives, and are liable to most
+dangerous illnesses if they depart, in ever so slight a degree, from
+their customary regimen?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+Then, I said, a finer sort of training will be required for our warrior
+athletes, who are to be like wakeful dogs, and to see and hear with the
+utmost keenness; amid the many changes of water and also of food, of
+summer heat and winter cold, which they will have to endure when on a
+campaign, they must not be liable to break down in health.
+
+That is my view.
+
+The really excellent gymnastic is twin sister of that simple music which
+we were just now describing.
+
+How so?
+
+Why, I conceive that there is a gymnastic which, like our music, is
+simple and good; and especially the military gymnastic.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+My meaning may be learned from Homer; he, you know, feeds his heroes at
+their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers' fare; they have
+no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they
+are not allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is the food most
+convenient for soldiers, requiring only that they should light a fire,
+and not involving the trouble of carrying about pots and pans.
+
+True.
+
+And I can hardly be mistaken in saying that sweet sauces are nowhere
+mentioned in Homer. In proscribing them, however, he is not singular;
+all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good
+condition should take nothing of the kind.
+
+Yes, he said; and knowing this, they are quite right in not taking them.
+
+Then you would not approve of Syracusan dinners, and the refinements of
+Sicilian cookery?
+
+I think not.
+
+Nor, if a man is to be in condition, would you allow him to have a
+Corinthian girl as his fair friend?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Neither would you approve of the delicacies, as they are thought, of
+Athenian confectionary?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+All such feeding and living may be rightly compared by us to melody and
+song composed in the panharmonic style, and in all the rhythms.
+
+Exactly.
+
+There complexity engendered licence, and here disease; whereas
+simplicity in music was the parent of temperance in the soul; and
+simplicity in gymnastic of health in the body.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+But when intemperance and diseases multiply in a State, halls of justice
+and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the doctor and the
+lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which not
+only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them.
+
+Of course.
+
+And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state
+of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of
+people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also
+those who would profess to have had a liberal education? Is it not
+disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man
+should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of
+his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of
+other men whom he makes lords and judges over him?
+
+Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.
+
+Would you say 'most,' I replied, when you consider that there is
+a further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long
+litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or
+defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his
+litigiousness; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to
+take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole,
+bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all
+for what?--in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not
+knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping
+judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing. Is not that still more
+disgraceful?
+
+Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful.
+
+Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when a wound
+has to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by
+indolence and a habit of life such as we have been describing, men
+fill themselves with waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh,
+compelling the ingenious sons of Asclepius to find more names for
+diseases, such as flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?
+
+Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names
+to diseases.
+
+Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such diseases in
+the days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that the
+hero Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of
+Pramnian wine well besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese, which
+are certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who were
+at the Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink, or
+rebuke Patroclus, who is treating his case.
+
+Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a
+person in his condition.
+
+Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that in former
+days, as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of
+Asclepius did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be
+said to educate diseases. But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself of
+a sickly constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring found
+out a way of torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly the rest
+of the world.
+
+How was that? he said.
+
+By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal disease which
+he perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question, he
+passed his entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but
+attend upon himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he departed
+in anything from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the help of
+science he struggled on to old age.
+
+A rare reward of his skill!
+
+Yes, I said; a reward which a man might fairly expect who never
+understood that, if Asclepius did not instruct his descendants
+in valetudinarian arts, the omission arose, not from ignorance or
+inexperience of such a branch of medicine, but because he knew that in
+all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he
+must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being
+ill. This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously enough,
+do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort.
+
+How do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough
+and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,--these
+are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of
+dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and
+all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be
+ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing
+his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore
+bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary
+habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his
+constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble.
+
+Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of
+medicine thus far only.
+
+Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his
+life if he were deprived of his occupation?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he
+has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would
+live.
+
+He is generally supposed to have nothing to do.
+
+Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man
+has a livelihood he should practise virtue?
+
+Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.
+
+Let us not have a dispute with him about this, I said; but rather ask
+ourselves: Is the practice of virtue obligatory on the rich man, or
+can he live without it? And if obligatory on him, then let us raise
+a further question, whether this dieting of disorders, which is an
+impediment to the application of the mind in carpentering and the
+mechanical arts, does not equally stand in the way of the sentiment of
+Phocylides?
+
+Of that, he replied, there can be no doubt; such excessive care of the
+body, when carried beyond the rules of gymnastic, is most inimical to
+the practice of virtue.
+
+Yes, indeed, I replied, and equally incompatible with the management of
+a house, an army, or an office of state; and, what is most important
+of all, irreconcileable with any kind of study or thought or
+self-reflection--there is a constant suspicion that headache and
+giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or
+making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for
+a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant
+anxiety about the state of his body.
+
+Yes, likely enough.
+
+And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited
+the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy
+constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these
+he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein
+consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had
+penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure
+by gradual processes of evacuation and infusion: he did not want to
+lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting
+weaker sons;--if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he
+had no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use
+either to himself, or to the State.
+
+Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a statesman.
+
+Clearly; and his character is further illustrated by his sons. Note that
+they were heroes in the days of old and practised the medicines of which
+I am speaking at the siege of Troy: You will remember how, when Pandarus
+wounded Menelaus, they
+
+'Sucked the blood out of the wound, and sprinkled soothing remedies,'
+
+but they never prescribed what the patient was afterwards to eat or
+drink in the case of Menelaus, any more than in the case of Eurypylus;
+the remedies, as they conceived, were enough to heal any man who before
+he was wounded was healthy and regular in his habits; and even though he
+did happen to drink a posset of Pramnian wine, he might get well all the
+same. But they would have nothing to do with unhealthy and intemperate
+subjects, whose lives were of no use either to themselves or others; the
+art of medicine was not designed for their good, and though they were as
+rich as Midas, the sons of Asclepius would have declined to attend them.
+
+They were very acute persons, those sons of Asclepius.
+
+Naturally so, I replied. Nevertheless, the tragedians and Pindar
+disobeying our behests, although they acknowledge that Asclepius was the
+son of Apollo, say also that he was bribed into healing a rich man
+who was at the point of death, and for this reason he was struck by
+lightning. But we, in accordance with the principle already affirmed by
+us, will not believe them when they tell us both;--if he was the son of
+a god, we maintain that he was not avaricious; or, if he was avaricious,
+he was not the son of a god.
+
+All that, Socrates, is excellent; but I should like to put a question to
+you: Ought there not to be good physicians in a State, and are not the
+best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions good
+and bad? and are not the best judges in like manner those who are
+acquainted with all sorts of moral natures?
+
+Yes, I said, I too would have good judges and good physicians. But do
+you know whom I think good?
+
+Will you tell me?
+
+I will, if I can. Let me however note that in the same question you join
+two things which are not the same.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+Why, I said, you join physicians and judges. Now the most skilful
+physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with
+the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they
+had better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of
+diseases in their own persons. For the body, as I conceive, is not the
+instrument with which they cure the body; in that case we could not
+allow them ever to be or to have been sickly; but they cure the body
+with the mind, and the mind which has become and is sick can cure
+nothing.
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+But with the judge it is otherwise; since he governs mind by mind; he
+ought not therefore to have been trained among vicious minds, and to
+have associated with them from youth upwards, and to have gone through
+the whole calendar of crime, only in order that he may quickly infer
+the crimes of others as he might their bodily diseases from his own
+self-consciousness; the honourable mind which is to form a healthy
+judgment should have had no experience or contamination of evil habits
+when young. And this is the reason why in youth good men often appear to
+be simple, and are easily practised upon by the dishonest, because they
+have no examples of what evil is in their own souls.
+
+Yes, he said, they are far too apt to be deceived.
+
+Therefore, I said, the judge should not be young; he should have learned
+to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation
+of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not
+personal experience.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the ideal of a judge.
+
+Yes, I replied, and he will be a good man (which is my answer to your
+question); for he is good who has a good soul. But the cunning and
+suspicious nature of which we spoke,--he who has committed many crimes,
+and fancies himself to be a master in wickedness, when he is amongst
+his fellows, is wonderful in the precautions which he takes, because he
+judges of them by himself: but when he gets into the company of men of
+virtue, who have the experience of age, he appears to be a fool again,
+owing to his unseasonable suspicions; he cannot recognise an honest man,
+because he has no pattern of honesty in himself; at the same time, as
+the bad are more numerous than the good, and he meets with them oftener,
+he thinks himself, and is by others thought to be, rather wise than
+foolish.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Then the good and wise judge whom we are seeking is not this man, but
+the other; for vice cannot know virtue too, but a virtuous nature,
+educated by time, will acquire a knowledge both of virtue and vice: the
+virtuous, and not the vicious, man has wisdom--in my opinion.
+
+And in mine also.
+
+This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law, which you
+will sanction in your state. They will minister to better natures,
+giving health both of soul and of body; but those who are diseased in
+their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls
+they will put an end to themselves.
+
+That is clearly the best thing both for the patients and for the State.
+
+And thus our youth, having been educated only in that simple music
+which, as we said, inspires temperance, will be reluctant to go to law.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content to practise
+the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine unless in
+some extreme case.
+
+That I quite believe.
+
+The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended to
+stimulate the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his
+strength; he will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen to
+develope his muscles.
+
+Very right, he said.
+
+Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is
+often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other for the
+training of the body.
+
+What then is the real object of them?
+
+I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the
+improvement of the soul.
+
+How can that be? he asked.
+
+Did you never observe, I said, the effect on the mind itself of
+exclusive devotion to gymnastic, or the opposite effect of an exclusive
+devotion to music?
+
+In what way shown? he said.
+
+The one producing a temper of hardness and ferocity, the other of
+softness and effeminacy, I replied.
+
+Yes, he said, I am quite aware that the mere athlete becomes too much of
+a savage, and that the mere musician is melted and softened beyond what
+is good for him.
+
+Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if
+rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is
+liable to become hard and brutal.
+
+That I quite think.
+
+On the other hand the philosopher will have the quality of gentleness.
+And this also, when too much indulged, will turn to softness, but, if
+educated rightly, will be gentle and moderate.
+
+True.
+
+And in our opinion the guardians ought to have both these qualities?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And both should be in harmony?
+
+Beyond question.
+
+And the harmonious soul is both temperate and courageous?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the inharmonious is cowardly and boorish?
+
+Very true.
+
+And, when a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul
+through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs
+of which we were just now speaking, and his whole life is passed in
+warbling and the delights of song; in the first stage of the process
+the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made
+useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the
+softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and
+waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his
+soul; and he becomes a feeble warrior.
+
+Very true.
+
+If the element of spirit is naturally weak in him the change is speedily
+accomplished, but if he have a good deal, then the power of music
+weakening the spirit renders him excitable;--on the least provocation
+he flames up at once, and is speedily extinguished; instead of having
+spirit he grows irritable and passionate and is quite impracticable.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And so in gymnastics, if a man takes violent exercise and is a great
+feeder, and the reverse of a great student of music and philosophy, at
+first the high condition of his body fills him with pride and spirit,
+and he becomes twice the man that he was.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And what happens? if he do nothing else, and holds no converse with the
+Muses, does not even that intelligence which there may be in him, having
+no taste of any sort of learning or enquiry or thought or culture,
+grow feeble and dull and blind, his mind never waking up or receiving
+nourishment, and his senses not being purged of their mists?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And he ends by becoming a hater of philosophy, uncivilized, never using
+the weapon of persuasion,--he is like a wild beast, all violence and
+fierceness, and knows no other way of dealing; and he lives in all
+ignorance and evil conditions, and has no sense of propriety and grace.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+And as there are two principles of human nature, one the spirited
+and the other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given
+mankind two arts answering to them (and only indirectly to the soul
+and body), in order that these two principles (like the strings of
+an instrument) may be relaxed or drawn tighter until they are duly
+harmonized.
+
+That appears to be the intention.
+
+And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and
+best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician
+and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings.
+
+You are quite right, Socrates.
+
+And such a presiding genius will be always required in our State if the
+government is to last.
+
+Yes, he will be absolutely necessary.
+
+Such, then, are our principles of nurture and education: Where would be
+the use of going into further details about the dances of our citizens,
+or about their hunting and coursing, their gymnastic and equestrian
+contests? For these all follow the general principle, and having found
+that, we shall have no difficulty in discovering them.
+
+I dare say that there will be no difficulty.
+
+Very good, I said; then what is the next question? Must we not ask who
+are to be rulers and who subjects?
+
+Certainly.
+
+There can be no doubt that the elder must rule the younger.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And that the best of these must rule.
+
+That is also clear.
+
+Now, are not the best husbandmen those who are most devoted to
+husbandry?
+
+Yes.
+
+And as we are to have the best of guardians for our city, must they not
+be those who have most the character of guardians?
+
+Yes.
+
+And to this end they ought to be wise and efficient, and to have a
+special care of the State?
+
+True.
+
+And a man will be most likely to care about that which he loves?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And he will be most likely to love that which he regards as having the
+same interests with himself, and that of which the good or evil fortune
+is supposed by him at any time most to affect his own?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Then there must be a selection. Let us note among the guardians those
+who in their whole life show the greatest eagerness to do what is for
+the good of their country, and the greatest repugnance to do what is
+against her interests.
+
+Those are the right men.
+
+And they will have to be watched at every age, in order that we may see
+whether they preserve their resolution, and never, under the influence
+either of force or enchantment, forget or cast off their sense of duty
+to the State.
+
+How cast off? he said.
+
+I will explain to you, I replied. A resolution may go out of a man's
+mind either with his will or against his will; with his will when he
+gets rid of a falsehood and learns better, against his will whenever he
+is deprived of a truth.
+
+I understand, he said, the willing loss of a resolution; the meaning of
+the unwilling I have yet to learn.
+
+Why, I said, do you not see that men are unwillingly deprived of good,
+and willingly of evil? Is not to have lost the truth an evil, and to
+possess the truth a good? and you would agree that to conceive things as
+they are is to possess the truth?
+
+Yes, he replied; I agree with you in thinking that mankind are deprived
+of truth against their will.
+
+And is not this involuntary deprivation caused either by theft, or
+force, or enchantment?
+
+Still, he replied, I do not understand you.
+
+I fear that I must have been talking darkly, like the tragedians. I only
+mean that some men are changed by persuasion and that others forget;
+argument steals away the hearts of one class, and time of the other; and
+this I call theft. Now you understand me?
+
+Yes.
+
+Those again who are forced, are those whom the violence of some pain or
+grief compels to change their opinion.
+
+I understand, he said, and you are quite right.
+
+And you would also acknowledge that the enchanted are those who change
+their minds either under the softer influence of pleasure, or the
+sterner influence of fear?
+
+Yes, he said; everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
+
+Therefore, as I was just now saying, we must enquire who are the best
+guardians of their own conviction that what they think the interest
+of the State is to be the rule of their lives. We must watch them from
+their youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which they are
+most likely to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is
+not deceived is to be selected, and he who fails in the trial is to be
+rejected. That will be the way?
+
+Yes.
+
+And there should also be toils and pains and conflicts prescribed for
+them, in which they will be made to give further proof of the same
+qualities.
+
+Very right, he replied.
+
+And then, I said, we must try them with enchantments--that is the third
+sort of test--and see what will be their behaviour: like those who take
+colts amid noise and tumult to see if they are of a timid nature, so
+must we take our youth amid terrors of some kind, and again pass them
+into pleasures, and prove them more thoroughly than gold is proved in
+the furnace, that we may discover whether they are armed against
+all enchantments, and of a noble bearing always, good guardians of
+themselves and of the music which they have learned, and retaining under
+all circumstances a rhythmical and harmonious nature, such as will be
+most serviceable to the individual and to the State. And he who at every
+age, as boy and youth and in mature life, has come out of the trial
+victorious and pure, shall be appointed a ruler and guardian of the
+State; he shall be honoured in life and death, and shall receive
+sepulture and other memorials of honour, the greatest that we have to
+give. But him who fails, we must reject. I am inclined to think that
+this is the sort of way in which our rulers and guardians should be
+chosen and appointed. I speak generally, and not with any pretension to
+exactness.
+
+And, speaking generally, I agree with you, he said.
+
+And perhaps the word 'guardian' in the fullest sense ought to be applied
+to this higher class only who preserve us against foreign enemies and
+maintain peace among our citizens at home, that the one may not have the
+will, or the others the power, to harm us. The young men whom we
+before called guardians may be more properly designated auxiliaries and
+supporters of the principles of the rulers.
+
+I agree with you, he said.
+
+How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we
+lately spoke--just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that
+be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?
+
+What sort of lie? he said.
+
+Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale (Laws) of what has
+often occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and have
+made the world believe,) though not in our time, and I do not know
+whether such an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made
+probable, if it did.
+
+How your words seem to hesitate on your lips!
+
+You will not wonder, I replied, at my hesitation when you have heard.
+
+Speak, he said, and fear not.
+
+Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you
+in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which
+I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the
+soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth
+was a dream, and the education and training which they received from
+us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being
+formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their
+arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the
+earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their
+mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and
+to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as
+children of the earth and their own brothers.
+
+You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were
+going to tell.
+
+True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half.
+Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God
+has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and
+in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also
+they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be
+auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has
+composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved
+in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden
+parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden
+son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all
+else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of
+which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race.
+They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the
+son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron,
+then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler
+must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the
+scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of
+artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised
+to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that
+when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed. Such
+is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in
+it?
+
+Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of
+accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale,
+and their sons' sons, and posterity after them.
+
+I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief will
+make them care more for the city and for one another. Enough, however,
+of the fiction, which may now fly abroad upon the wings of rumour, while
+we arm our earth-born heroes, and lead them forth under the command of
+their rulers. Let them look round and select a spot whence they can best
+suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory within, and also defend
+themselves against enemies, who like wolves may come down on the fold
+from without; there let them encamp, and when they have encamped, let
+them sacrifice to the proper Gods and prepare their dwellings.
+
+Just so, he said.
+
+And their dwellings must be such as will shield them against the cold of
+winter and the heat of summer.
+
+I suppose that you mean houses, he replied.
+
+Yes, I said; but they must be the houses of soldiers, and not of
+shop-keepers.
+
+What is the difference? he said.
+
+That I will endeavour to explain, I replied. To keep watch-dogs, who,
+from want of discipline or hunger, or some evil habit or other, would
+turn upon the sheep and worry them, and behave not like dogs but wolves,
+would be a foul and monstrous thing in a shepherd?
+
+Truly monstrous, he said.
+
+And therefore every care must be taken that our auxiliaries, being
+stronger than our citizens, may not grow to be too much for them and
+become savage tyrants instead of friends and allies?
+
+Yes, great care should be taken.
+
+And would not a really good education furnish the best safeguard?
+
+But they are well-educated already, he replied.
+
+I cannot be so confident, my dear Glaucon, I said; I am much more
+certain that they ought to be, and that true education, whatever that
+may be, will have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize them
+in their relations to one another, and to those who are under their
+protection.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And not only their education, but their habitations, and all that
+belongs to them, should be such as will neither impair their virtue as
+guardians, nor tempt them to prey upon the other citizens. Any man of
+sense must acknowledge that.
+
+He must.
+
+Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to
+realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have
+any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither
+should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has
+a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required
+by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should
+agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet
+the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live
+together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them
+that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have
+therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not
+to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner
+metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is
+undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle
+silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or
+drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the
+saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands
+or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen
+instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other
+citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against,
+they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than
+of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the
+rest of the State, will be at hand. For all which reasons may we not
+say that thus shall our State be ordered, and that these shall be the
+regulations appointed by us for guardians concerning their houses and
+all other matters?
+
+Yes, said Glaucon.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+Here Adeimantus interposed a question: How would you answer, Socrates,
+said he, if a person were to say that you are making these people
+miserable, and that they are the cause of their own unhappiness; the
+city in fact belongs to them, but they are none the better for it;
+whereas other men acquire lands, and build large and handsome houses,
+and have everything handsome about them, offering sacrifices to the gods
+on their own account, and practising hospitality; moreover, as you were
+saying just now, they have gold and silver, and all that is usual among
+the favourites of fortune; but our poor citizens are no better than
+mercenaries who are quartered in the city and are always mounting guard?
+
+Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in
+addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if
+they would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on
+a mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is
+thought to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature
+might be added.
+
+But, said he, let us suppose all this to be included in the charge.
+
+You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?
+
+Yes.
+
+If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall
+find the answer. And our answer will be that, even as they are, our
+guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in
+founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one
+class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a
+State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should
+be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice:
+and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the
+happier. At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State,
+not piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a
+whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of State.
+Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to us
+and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most
+beautiful parts of the body--the eyes ought to be purple, but you have
+made them black--to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not
+surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no
+longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other
+features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful. And so I say
+to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of happiness
+which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can clothe our
+husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their heads, and
+bid them till the ground as much as they like, and no more. Our potters
+also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside,
+passing round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand,
+and working at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might
+make every class happy--and then, as you imagine, the whole State would
+be happy. But do not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen
+to you, the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will
+cease to be a potter, and no one will have the character of any distinct
+class in the State. Now this is not of much consequence where the
+corruption of society, and pretension to be what you are not, is
+confined to cobblers; but when the guardians of the laws and of the
+government are only seeming and not real guardians, then see how they
+turn the State upside down; and on the other hand they alone have the
+power of giving order and happiness to the State. We mean our guardians
+to be true saviours and not the destroyers of the State, whereas our
+opponent is thinking of peasants at a festival, who are enjoying a life
+of revelry, not of citizens who are doing their duty to the State. But,
+if so, we mean different things, and he is speaking of something which
+is not a State. And therefore we must consider whether in appointing
+our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness individually, or
+whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State
+as a whole. But if the latter be the truth, then the guardians and
+auxiliaries, and all others equally with them, must be compelled or
+induced to do their own work in the best way. And thus the whole State
+will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will receive the
+proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them.
+
+I think that you are quite right.
+
+I wonder whether you will agree with another remark which occurs to me.
+
+What may that be?
+
+There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts.
+
+What are they?
+
+Wealth, I said, and poverty.
+
+How do they act?
+
+The process is as follows: When a potter becomes rich, will he, think
+you, any longer take the same pains with his art?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+He will grow more and more indolent and careless?
+
+Very true.
+
+And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter?
+
+Yes; he greatly deteriorates.
+
+But, on the other hand, if he has no money, and cannot provide himself
+with tools or instruments, he will not work equally well himself, nor
+will he teach his sons or apprentices to work equally well.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then, under the influence either of poverty or of wealth, workmen and
+their work are equally liable to degenerate?
+
+That is evident.
+
+Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which
+the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city
+unobserved.
+
+What evils?
+
+Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and
+indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of
+discontent.
+
+That is very true, he replied; but still I should like to know,
+Socrates, how our city will be able to go to war, especially against an
+enemy who is rich and powerful, if deprived of the sinews of war.
+
+There would certainly be a difficulty, I replied, in going to war with
+one such enemy; but there is no difficulty where there are two of them.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+In the first place, I said, if we have to fight, our side will be
+trained warriors fighting against an army of rich men.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was
+perfect in his art would easily be a match for two stout and well-to-do
+gentlemen who were not boxers?
+
+Hardly, if they came upon him at once.
+
+What, now, I said, if he were able to run away and then turn and strike
+at the one who first came up? And supposing he were to do this several
+times under the heat of a scorching sun, might he not, being an expert,
+overturn more than one stout personage?
+
+Certainly, he said, there would be nothing wonderful in that.
+
+And yet rich men probably have a greater superiority in the science and
+practise of boxing than they have in military qualities.
+
+Likely enough.
+
+Then we may assume that our athletes will be able to fight with two or
+three times their own number?
+
+I agree with you, for I think you right.
+
+And suppose that, before engaging, our citizens send an embassy to one
+of the two cities, telling them what is the truth: Silver and gold we
+neither have nor are permitted to have, but you may; do you therefore
+come and help us in war, and take the spoils of the other city: Who,
+on hearing these words, would choose to fight against lean wiry dogs,
+rather than, with the dogs on their side, against fat and tender sheep?
+
+That is not likely; and yet there might be a danger to the poor State if
+the wealth of many States were to be gathered into one.
+
+But how simple of you to use the term State at all of any but our own!
+
+Why so?
+
+You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of
+them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game. For indeed any
+city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the
+poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in
+either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether
+beside the mark if you treated them all as a single State. But if you
+deal with them as many, and give the wealth or power or persons of the
+one to the others, you will always have a great many friends and not
+many enemies. And your State, while the wise order which has now been
+prescribed continues to prevail in her, will be the greatest of States,
+I do not mean to say in reputation or appearance, but in deed and truth,
+though she number not more than a thousand defenders. A single State
+which is her equal you will hardly find, either among Hellenes or
+barbarians, though many that appear to be as great and many times
+greater.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they
+are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which
+they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?
+
+What limit would you propose?
+
+I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity;
+that, I think, is the proper limit.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to
+our guardians: Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but
+one and self-sufficing.
+
+And surely, said he, this is not a very severe order which we impose
+upon them.
+
+And the other, said I, of which we were speaking before is lighter
+still,--I mean the duty of degrading the offspring of the guardians when
+inferior, and of elevating into the rank of guardians the offspring of
+the lower classes, when naturally superior. The intention was, that, in
+the case of the citizens generally, each individual should be put to the
+use for which nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man
+would do his own business, and be one and not many; and so the whole
+city would be one and not many.
+
+Yes, he said; that is not so difficult.
+
+The regulations which we are prescribing, my good Adeimantus, are not,
+as might be supposed, a number of great principles, but trifles all,
+if care be taken, as the saying is, of the one great thing,--a thing,
+however, which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our
+purpose.
+
+What may that be? he asked.
+
+Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated,
+and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all
+these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as
+marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which
+will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in
+common, as the proverb says.
+
+That will be the best way of settling them.
+
+Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating
+force like a wheel. For good nurture and education implant good
+constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good
+education improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed
+in man as in other animals.
+
+Very possibly, he said.
+
+Then to sum up: This is the point to which, above all, the attention of
+our rulers should be directed,--that music and gymnastic be preserved in
+their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost
+to maintain them intact. And when any one says that mankind most regard
+
+'The newest song which the singers have,'
+
+they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new
+kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the
+meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the
+whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I
+can quite believe him;--he says that when modes of music change, the
+fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
+
+Yes, said Adeimantus; and you may add my suffrage to Damon's and your
+own.
+
+Then, I said, our guardians must lay the foundations of their fortress
+in music?
+
+Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.
+
+Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears
+harmless.
+
+Why, yes, he said, and there is no harm; were it not that little by
+little this spirit of licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates
+into manners and customs; whence, issuing with greater force, it invades
+contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to laws and
+constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last, Socrates, by an
+overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.
+
+Is that true? I said.
+
+That is my belief, he replied.
+
+Then, as I was saying, our youth should be trained from the first in
+a stricter system, for if amusements become lawless, and the youths
+themselves become lawless, they can never grow up into well-conducted
+and virtuous citizens.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And when they have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of
+music have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in
+a manner how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them
+in all their actions and be a principle of growth to them, and if there
+be any fallen places in the State will raise them up again.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Thus educated, they will invent for themselves any lesser rules which
+their predecessors have altogether neglected.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean such things as these:--when the young are to be silent before
+their elders; how they are to show respect to them by standing and
+making them sit; what honour is due to parents; what garments or shoes
+are to be worn; the mode of dressing the hair; deportment and manners in
+general. You would agree with me?
+
+Yes.
+
+But there is, I think, small wisdom in legislating about such
+matters,--I doubt if it is ever done; nor are any precise written
+enactments about them likely to be lasting.
+
+Impossible.
+
+It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts
+a man, will determine his future life. Does not like always attract
+like?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Until some one rare and grand result is reached which may be good, and
+may be the reverse of good?
+
+That is not to be denied.
+
+And for this reason, I said, I shall not attempt to legislate further
+about them.
+
+Naturally enough, he replied.
+
+Well, and about the business of the agora, and the ordinary dealings
+between man and man, or again about agreements with artisans; about
+insult and injury, or the commencement of actions, and the appointment
+of juries, what would you say? there may also arise questions about
+any impositions and exactions of market and harbour dues which may
+be required, and in general about the regulations of markets, police,
+harbours, and the like. But, oh heavens! shall we condescend to
+legislate on any of these particulars?
+
+I think, he said, that there is no need to impose laws about them on
+good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough
+for themselves.
+
+Yes, I said, my friend, if God will only preserve to them the laws which
+we have given them.
+
+And without divine help, said Adeimantus, they will go on for ever
+making and mending their laws and their lives in the hope of attaining
+perfection.
+
+You would compare them, I said, to those invalids who, having no
+self-restraint, will not leave off their habits of intemperance?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Yes, I said; and what a delightful life they lead! they are always
+doctoring and increasing and complicating their disorders, and always
+fancying that they will be cured by any nostrum which anybody advises
+them to try.
+
+Such cases are very common, he said, with invalids of this sort.
+
+Yes, I replied; and the charming thing is that they deem him their worst
+enemy who tells them the truth, which is simply that, unless they give
+up eating and drinking and wenching and idling, neither drug nor cautery
+nor spell nor amulet nor any other remedy will avail.
+
+Charming! he replied. I see nothing charming in going into a passion
+with a man who tells you what is right.
+
+These gentlemen, I said, do not seem to be in your good graces.
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+Nor would you praise the behaviour of States which act like the men whom
+I was just now describing. For are there not ill-ordered States in
+which the citizens are forbidden under pain of death to alter the
+constitution; and yet he who most sweetly courts those who live under
+this regime and indulges them and fawns upon them and is skilful in
+anticipating and gratifying their humours is held to be a great and
+good statesman--do not these States resemble the persons whom I was
+describing?
+
+Yes, he said; the States are as bad as the men; and I am very far from
+praising them.
+
+But do you not admire, I said, the coolness and dexterity of these ready
+ministers of political corruption?
+
+Yes, he said, I do; but not of all of them, for there are some whom
+the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are
+really statesmen, and these are not much to be admired.
+
+What do you mean? I said; you should have more feeling for them. When a
+man cannot measure, and a great many others who cannot measure declare
+that he is four cubits high, can he help believing what they say?
+
+Nay, he said, certainly not in that case.
+
+Well, then, do not be angry with them; for are they not as good as a
+play, trying their hand at paltry reforms such as I was describing; they
+are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds
+in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not
+knowing that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra?
+
+Yes, he said; that is just what they are doing.
+
+I conceive, I said, that the true legislator will not trouble
+himself with this class of enactments whether concerning laws or the
+constitution either in an ill-ordered or in a well-ordered State; for
+in the former they are quite useless, and in the latter there will be no
+difficulty in devising them; and many of them will naturally flow out of
+our previous regulations.
+
+What, then, he said, is still remaining to us of the work of
+legislation?
+
+Nothing to us, I replied; but to Apollo, the God of Delphi, there
+remains the ordering of the greatest and noblest and chiefest things of
+all.
+
+Which are they? he said.
+
+The institution of temples and sacrifices, and the entire service of
+gods, demigods, and heroes; also the ordering of the repositories of
+the dead, and the rites which have to be observed by him who would
+propitiate the inhabitants of the world below. These are matters of
+which we are ignorant ourselves, and as founders of a city we should be
+unwise in trusting them to any interpreter but our ancestral deity. He
+is the god who sits in the centre, on the navel of the earth, and he is
+the interpreter of religion to all mankind.
+
+You are right, and we will do as you propose.
+
+But where, amid all this, is justice? son of Ariston, tell me where. Now
+that our city has been made habitable, light a candle and search, and
+get your brother and Polemarchus and the rest of our friends to help,
+and let us see where in it we can discover justice and where injustice,
+and in what they differ from one another, and which of them the man who
+would be happy should have for his portion, whether seen or unseen by
+gods and men.
+
+Nonsense, said Glaucon: did you not promise to search yourself, saying
+that for you not to help justice in her need would be an impiety?
+
+I do not deny that I said so, and as you remind me, I will be as good as
+my word; but you must join.
+
+We will, he replied.
+
+Well, then, I hope to make the discovery in this way: I mean to begin
+with the assumption that our State, if rightly ordered, is perfect.
+
+That is most certain.
+
+And being perfect, is therefore wise and valiant and temperate and just.
+
+That is likewise clear.
+
+And whichever of these qualities we find in the State, the one which is
+not found will be the residue?
+
+Very good.
+
+If there were four things, and we were searching for one of them,
+wherever it might be, the one sought for might be known to us from the
+first, and there would be no further trouble; or we might know the other
+three first, and then the fourth would clearly be the one left.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And is not a similar method to be pursued about the virtues, which are
+also four in number?
+
+Clearly.
+
+First among the virtues found in the State, wisdom comes into view, and
+in this I detect a certain peculiarity.
+
+What is that?
+
+The State which we have been describing is said to be wise as being good
+in counsel?
+
+Very true.
+
+And good counsel is clearly a kind of knowledge, for not by ignorance,
+but by knowledge, do men counsel well?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the kinds of knowledge in a State are many and diverse?
+
+Of course.
+
+There is the knowledge of the carpenter; but is that the sort of
+knowledge which gives a city the title of wise and good in counsel?
+
+Certainly not; that would only give a city the reputation of skill in
+carpentering.
+
+Then a city is not to be called wise because possessing a knowledge
+which counsels for the best about wooden implements?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Nor by reason of a knowledge which advises about brazen pots, I said,
+nor as possessing any other similar knowledge?
+
+Not by reason of any of them, he said.
+
+Nor yet by reason of a knowledge which cultivates the earth; that would
+give the city the name of agricultural?
+
+Yes.
+
+Well, I said, and is there any knowledge in our recently-founded State
+among any of the citizens which advises, not about any particular thing
+in the State, but about the whole, and considers how a State can best
+deal with itself and with other States?
+
+There certainly is.
+
+And what is this knowledge, and among whom is it found? I asked.
+
+It is the knowledge of the guardians, he replied, and is found among
+those whom we were just now describing as perfect guardians.
+
+And what is the name which the city derives from the possession of this
+sort of knowledge?
+
+The name of good in counsel and truly wise.
+
+And will there be in our city more of these true guardians or more
+smiths?
+
+The smiths, he replied, will be far more numerous.
+
+Will not the guardians be the smallest of all the classes who receive a
+name from the profession of some kind of knowledge?
+
+Much the smallest.
+
+And so by reason of the smallest part or class, and of the knowledge
+which resides in this presiding and ruling part of itself, the whole
+State, being thus constituted according to nature, will be wise; and
+this, which has the only knowledge worthy to be called wisdom, has been
+ordained by nature to be of all classes the least.
+
+Most true.
+
+Thus, then, I said, the nature and place in the State of one of the four
+virtues has somehow or other been discovered.
+
+And, in my humble opinion, very satisfactorily discovered, he replied.
+
+Again, I said, there is no difficulty in seeing the nature of courage,
+and in what part that quality resides which gives the name of courageous
+to the State.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+Why, I said, every one who calls any State courageous or cowardly, will
+be thinking of the part which fights and goes out to war on the State's
+behalf.
+
+No one, he replied, would ever think of any other.
+
+The rest of the citizens may be courageous or may be cowardly, but their
+courage or cowardice will not, as I conceive, have the effect of making
+the city either the one or the other.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+The city will be courageous in virtue of a portion of herself which
+preserves under all circumstances that opinion about the nature of
+things to be feared and not to be feared in which our legislator
+educated them; and this is what you term courage.
+
+I should like to hear what you are saying once more, for I do not think
+that I perfectly understand you.
+
+I mean that courage is a kind of salvation.
+
+Salvation of what?
+
+Of the opinion respecting things to be feared, what they are and of
+what nature, which the law implants through education; and I mean by the
+words 'under all circumstances' to intimate that in pleasure or in pain,
+or under the influence of desire or fear, a man preserves, and does not
+lose this opinion. Shall I give you an illustration?
+
+If you please.
+
+You know, I said, that dyers, when they want to dye wool for making the
+true sea-purple, begin by selecting their white colour first; this they
+prepare and dress with much care and pains, in order that the white
+ground may take the purple hue in full perfection. The dyeing then
+proceeds; and whatever is dyed in this manner becomes a fast colour,
+and no washing either with lyes or without them can take away the bloom.
+But, when the ground has not been duly prepared, you will have noticed
+how poor is the look either of purple or of any other colour.
+
+Yes, he said; I know that they have a washed-out and ridiculous
+appearance.
+
+Then now, I said, you will understand what our object was in selecting
+our soldiers, and educating them in music and gymnastic; we were
+contriving influences which would prepare them to take the dye of the
+laws in perfection, and the colour of their opinion about dangers and
+of every other opinion was to be indelibly fixed by their nurture
+and training, not to be washed away by such potent lyes as
+pleasure--mightier agent far in washing the soul than any soda or lye;
+or by sorrow, fear, and desire, the mightiest of all other solvents. And
+this sort of universal saving power of true opinion in conformity with
+law about real and false dangers I call and maintain to be courage,
+unless you disagree.
+
+But I agree, he replied; for I suppose that you mean to exclude mere
+uninstructed courage, such as that of a wild beast or of a slave--this,
+in your opinion, is not the courage which the law ordains, and ought to
+have another name.
+
+Most certainly.
+
+Then I may infer courage to be such as you describe?
+
+Why, yes, said I, you may, and if you add the words 'of a citizen,'
+you will not be far wrong;--hereafter, if you like, we will carry the
+examination further, but at present we are seeking not for courage but
+justice; and for the purpose of our enquiry we have said enough.
+
+You are right, he replied.
+
+Two virtues remain to be discovered in the State--first, temperance, and
+then justice which is the end of our search.
+
+Very true.
+
+Now, can we find justice without troubling ourselves about temperance?
+
+I do not know how that can be accomplished, he said, nor do I desire
+that justice should be brought to light and temperance lost sight of;
+and therefore I wish that you would do me the favour of considering
+temperance first.
+
+Certainly, I replied, I should not be justified in refusing your
+request.
+
+Then consider, he said.
+
+Yes, I replied; I will; and as far as I can at present see, the virtue
+of temperance has more of the nature of harmony and symphony than the
+preceding.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+Temperance, I replied, is the ordering or controlling of certain
+pleasures and desires; this is curiously enough implied in the saying of
+'a man being his own master;' and other traces of the same notion may be
+found in language.
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+There is something ridiculous in the expression 'master of himself;' for
+the master is also the servant and the servant the master; and in all
+these modes of speaking the same person is denoted.
+
+Certainly.
+
+The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and
+also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control,
+then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of
+praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better
+principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass
+of the worse--in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self
+and unprincipled.
+
+Yes, there is reason in that.
+
+And now, I said, look at our newly-created State, and there you will
+find one of these two conditions realized; for the State, as you
+will acknowledge, may be justly called master of itself, if the words
+'temperance' and 'self-mastery' truly express the rule of the better
+part over the worse.
+
+Yes, he said, I see that what you say is true.
+
+Let me further note that the manifold and complex pleasures and desires
+and pains are generally found in children and women and servants, and in
+the freemen so called who are of the lowest and more numerous class.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Whereas the simple and moderate desires which follow reason, and are
+under the guidance of mind and true opinion, are to be found only in a
+few, and those the best born and best educated.
+
+Very true.
+
+These two, as you may perceive, have a place in our State; and the
+meaner desires of the many are held down by the virtuous desires and
+wisdom of the few.
+
+That I perceive, he said.
+
+Then if there be any city which may be described as master of its own
+pleasures and desires, and master of itself, ours may claim such a
+designation?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+It may also be called temperate, and for the same reasons?
+
+Yes.
+
+And if there be any State in which rulers and subjects will be agreed as
+to the question who are to rule, that again will be our State?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And the citizens being thus agreed among themselves, in which class will
+temperance be found--in the rulers or in the subjects?
+
+In both, as I should imagine, he replied.
+
+Do you observe that we were not far wrong in our guess that temperance
+was a sort of harmony?
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, because temperance is unlike courage and wisdom, each of which
+resides in a part only, the one making the State wise and the other
+valiant; not so temperance, which extends to the whole, and runs through
+all the notes of the scale, and produces a harmony of the weaker and the
+stronger and the middle class, whether you suppose them to be stronger
+or weaker in wisdom or power or numbers or wealth, or anything else.
+Most truly then may we deem temperance to be the agreement of the
+naturally superior and inferior, as to the right to rule of either, both
+in states and individuals.
+
+I entirely agree with you.
+
+And so, I said, we may consider three out of the four virtues to have
+been discovered in our State. The last of those qualities which make a
+state virtuous must be justice, if we only knew what that was.
+
+The inference is obvious.
+
+The time then has arrived, Glaucon, when, like huntsmen, we should
+surround the cover, and look sharp that justice does not steal away, and
+pass out of sight and escape us; for beyond a doubt she is somewhere in
+this country: watch therefore and strive to catch a sight of her, and if
+you see her first, let me know.
+
+Would that I could! but you should regard me rather as a follower who
+has just eyes enough to see what you show him--that is about as much as
+I am good for.
+
+Offer up a prayer with me and follow.
+
+I will, but you must show me the way.
+
+Here is no path, I said, and the wood is dark and perplexing; still we
+must push on.
+
+Let us push on.
+
+Here I saw something: Halloo! I said, I begin to perceive a track, and I
+believe that the quarry will not escape.
+
+Good news, he said.
+
+Truly, I said, we are stupid fellows.
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, my good sir, at the beginning of our enquiry, ages ago, there was
+justice tumbling out at our feet, and we never saw her; nothing could be
+more ridiculous. Like people who go about looking for what they have
+in their hands--that was the way with us--we looked not at what we
+were seeking, but at what was far off in the distance; and therefore, I
+suppose, we missed her.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean to say that in reality for a long time past we have been talking
+of justice, and have failed to recognise her.
+
+I grow impatient at the length of your exordium.
+
+Well then, tell me, I said, whether I am right or not: You remember the
+original principle which we were always laying down at the foundation
+of the State, that one man should practise one thing only, the thing to
+which his nature was best adapted;--now justice is this principle or a
+part of it.
+
+Yes, we often said that one man should do one thing only.
+
+Further, we affirmed that justice was doing one's own business, and not
+being a busybody; we said so again and again, and many others have said
+the same to us.
+
+Yes, we said so.
+
+Then to do one's own business in a certain way may be assumed to be
+justice. Can you tell me whence I derive this inference?
+
+I cannot, but I should like to be told.
+
+Because I think that this is the only virtue which remains in the
+State when the other virtues of temperance and courage and wisdom are
+abstracted; and, that this is the ultimate cause and condition of the
+existence of all of them, and while remaining in them is also their
+preservative; and we were saying that if the three were discovered by
+us, justice would be the fourth or remaining one.
+
+That follows of necessity.
+
+If we are asked to determine which of these four qualities by its
+presence contributes most to the excellence of the State, whether the
+agreement of rulers and subjects, or the preservation in the soldiers of
+the opinion which the law ordains about the true nature of dangers, or
+wisdom and watchfulness in the rulers, or whether this other which I am
+mentioning, and which is found in children and women, slave and freeman,
+artisan, ruler, subject,--the quality, I mean, of every one doing his
+own work, and not being a busybody, would claim the palm--the question
+is not so easily answered.
+
+Certainly, he replied, there would be a difficulty in saying which.
+
+Then the power of each individual in the State to do his own work
+appears to compete with the other political virtues, wisdom, temperance,
+courage.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And the virtue which enters into this competition is justice?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Let us look at the question from another point of view: Are not
+the rulers in a State those to whom you would entrust the office of
+determining suits at law?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And are suits decided on any other ground but that a man may neither
+take what is another's, nor be deprived of what is his own?
+
+Yes; that is their principle.
+
+Which is a just principle?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then on this view also justice will be admitted to be the having and
+doing what is a man's own, and belongs to him?
+
+Very true.
+
+Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not. Suppose a
+carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a
+carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their
+duties, or the same person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be
+the change; do you think that any great harm would result to the State?
+
+Not much.
+
+But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a
+trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number
+of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way
+into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and
+guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements
+or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and
+warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that
+this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of
+the State.
+
+Most true.
+
+Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any meddling
+of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest
+harm to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing?
+
+Precisely.
+
+And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed
+by you injustice?
+
+Certainly.
+
+This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the
+auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice,
+and will make the city just.
+
+I agree with you.
+
+We will not, I said, be over-positive as yet; but if, on trial, this
+conception of justice be verified in the individual as well as in
+the State, there will be no longer any room for doubt; if it be not
+verified, we must have a fresh enquiry. First let us complete the old
+investigation, which we began, as you remember, under the impression
+that, if we could previously examine justice on the larger scale, there
+would be less difficulty in discerning her in the individual. That
+larger example appeared to be the State, and accordingly we constructed
+as good a one as we could, knowing well that in the good State justice
+would be found. Let the discovery which we made be now applied to the
+individual--if they agree, we shall be satisfied; or, if there be a
+difference in the individual, we will come back to the State and
+have another trial of the theory. The friction of the two when rubbed
+together may possibly strike a light in which justice will shine forth,
+and the vision which is then revealed we will fix in our souls.
+
+That will be in regular course; let us do as you say.
+
+I proceeded to ask: When two things, a greater and less, are called by
+the same name, are they like or unlike in so far as they are called the
+same?
+
+Like, he replied.
+
+The just man then, if we regard the idea of justice only, will be like
+the just State?
+
+He will.
+
+And a State was thought by us to be just when the three classes in the
+State severally did their own business; and also thought to be temperate
+and valiant and wise by reason of certain other affections and qualities
+of these same classes?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And so of the individual; we may assume that he has the same three
+principles in his own soul which are found in the State; and he may be
+rightly described in the same terms, because he is affected in the same
+manner?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Once more then, O my friend, we have alighted upon an easy
+question--whether the soul has these three principles or not?
+
+An easy question! Nay, rather, Socrates, the proverb holds that hard is
+the good.
+
+Very true, I said; and I do not think that the method which we are
+employing is at all adequate to the accurate solution of this question;
+the true method is another and a longer one. Still we may arrive at a
+solution not below the level of the previous enquiry.
+
+May we not be satisfied with that? he said;--under the circumstances, I
+am quite content.
+
+I too, I replied, shall be extremely well satisfied.
+
+Then faint not in pursuing the speculation, he said.
+
+Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same
+principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the
+individual they pass into the State?--how else can they come there? Take
+the quality of passion or spirit;--it would be ridiculous to imagine
+that this quality, when found in States, is not derived from the
+individuals who are supposed to possess it, e.g. the Thracians,
+Scythians, and in general the northern nations; and the same may be said
+of the love of knowledge, which is the special characteristic of our
+part of the world, or of the love of money, which may, with equal truth,
+be attributed to the Phoenicians and Egyptians.
+
+Exactly so, he said.
+
+There is no difficulty in understanding this.
+
+None whatever.
+
+But the question is not quite so easy when we proceed to ask whether
+these principles are three or one; whether, that is to say, we learn
+with one part of our nature, are angry with another, and with a third
+part desire the satisfaction of our natural appetites; or whether the
+whole soul comes into play in each sort of action--to determine that is
+the difficulty.
+
+Yes, he said; there lies the difficulty.
+
+Then let us now try and determine whether they are the same or
+different.
+
+How can we? he asked.
+
+I replied as follows: The same thing clearly cannot act or be acted upon
+in the same part or in relation to the same thing at the same time,
+in contrary ways; and therefore whenever this contradiction occurs in
+things apparently the same, we know that they are really not the same,
+but different.
+
+Good.
+
+For example, I said, can the same thing be at rest and in motion at the
+same time in the same part?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Still, I said, let us have a more precise statement of terms, lest we
+should hereafter fall out by the way. Imagine the case of a man who is
+standing and also moving his hands and his head, and suppose a person
+to say that one and the same person is in motion and at rest at the same
+moment--to such a mode of speech we should object, and should rather say
+that one part of him is in motion while another is at rest.
+
+Very true.
+
+And suppose the objector to refine still further, and to draw the nice
+distinction that not only parts of tops, but whole tops, when they spin
+round with their pegs fixed on the spot, are at rest and in motion at
+the same time (and he may say the same of anything which revolves in the
+same spot), his objection would not be admitted by us, because in
+such cases things are not at rest and in motion in the same parts of
+themselves; we should rather say that they have both an axis and a
+circumference, and that the axis stands still, for there is no deviation
+from the perpendicular; and that the circumference goes round. But if,
+while revolving, the axis inclines either to the right or left, forwards
+or backwards, then in no point of view can they be at rest.
+
+That is the correct mode of describing them, he replied.
+
+Then none of these objections will confuse us, or incline us to believe
+that the same thing at the same time, in the same part or in relation to
+the same thing, can act or be acted upon in contrary ways.
+
+Certainly not, according to my way of thinking.
+
+Yet, I said, that we may not be compelled to examine all such
+objections, and prove at length that they are untrue, let us assume
+their absurdity, and go forward on the understanding that hereafter, if
+this assumption turn out to be untrue, all the consequences which follow
+shall be withdrawn.
+
+Yes, he said, that will be the best way.
+
+Well, I said, would you not allow that assent and dissent, desire and
+aversion, attraction and repulsion, are all of them opposites, whether
+they are regarded as active or passive (for that makes no difference in
+the fact of their opposition)?
+
+Yes, he said, they are opposites.
+
+Well, I said, and hunger and thirst, and the desires in general, and
+again willing and wishing,--all these you would refer to the classes
+already mentioned. You would say--would you not?--that the soul of him
+who desires is seeking after the object of his desire; or that he is
+drawing to himself the thing which he wishes to possess: or again,
+when a person wants anything to be given him, his mind, longing for the
+realization of his desire, intimates his wish to have it by a nod of
+assent, as if he had been asked a question?
+
+Very true.
+
+And what would you say of unwillingness and dislike and the absence of
+desire; should not these be referred to the opposite class of repulsion
+and rejection?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Admitting this to be true of desire generally, let us suppose a
+particular class of desires, and out of these we will select hunger and
+thirst, as they are termed, which are the most obvious of them?
+
+Let us take that class, he said.
+
+The object of one is food, and of the other drink?
+
+Yes.
+
+And here comes the point: is not thirst the desire which the soul has of
+drink, and of drink only; not of drink qualified by anything else; for
+example, warm or cold, or much or little, or, in a word, drink of any
+particular sort: but if the thirst be accompanied by heat, then the
+desire is of cold drink; or, if accompanied by cold, then of warm drink;
+or, if the thirst be excessive, then the drink which is desired will be
+excessive; or, if not great, the quantity of drink will also be small:
+but thirst pure and simple will desire drink pure and simple, which is
+the natural satisfaction of thirst, as food is of hunger?
+
+Yes, he said; the simple desire is, as you say, in every case of the
+simple object, and the qualified desire of the qualified object.
+
+But here a confusion may arise; and I should wish to guard against an
+opponent starting up and saying that no man desires drink only, but good
+drink, or food only, but good food; for good is the universal object of
+desire, and thirst being a desire, will necessarily be thirst after good
+drink; and the same is true of every other desire.
+
+Yes, he replied, the opponent might have something to say.
+
+Nevertheless I should still maintain, that of relatives some have a
+quality attached to either term of the relation; others are simple and
+have their correlatives simple.
+
+I do not know what you mean.
+
+Well, you know of course that the greater is relative to the less?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the much greater to the much less?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the sometime greater to the sometime less, and the greater that is
+to be to the less that is to be?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And so of more and less, and of other correlative terms, such as the
+double and the half, or again, the heavier and the lighter, the swifter
+and the slower; and of hot and cold, and of any other relatives;--is not
+this true of all of them?
+
+Yes.
+
+And does not the same principle hold in the sciences? The object of
+science is knowledge (assuming that to be the true definition), but
+the object of a particular science is a particular kind of knowledge;
+I mean, for example, that the science of house-building is a kind of
+knowledge which is defined and distinguished from other kinds and is
+therefore termed architecture.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Because it has a particular quality which no other has?
+
+Yes.
+
+And it has this particular quality because it has an object of a
+particular kind; and this is true of the other arts and sciences?
+
+Yes.
+
+Now, then, if I have made myself clear, you will understand my original
+meaning in what I said about relatives. My meaning was, that if one term
+of a relation is taken alone, the other is taken alone; if one term
+is qualified, the other is also qualified. I do not mean to say that
+relatives may not be disparate, or that the science of health is
+healthy, or of disease necessarily diseased, or that the sciences of
+good and evil are therefore good and evil; but only that, when the term
+science is no longer used absolutely, but has a qualified object which
+in this case is the nature of health and disease, it becomes defined,
+and is hence called not merely science, but the science of medicine.
+
+I quite understand, and I think as you do.
+
+Would you not say that thirst is one of these essentially relative
+terms, having clearly a relation--
+
+Yes, thirst is relative to drink.
+
+And a certain kind of thirst is relative to a certain kind of drink; but
+thirst taken alone is neither of much nor little, nor of good nor bad,
+nor of any particular kind of drink, but of drink only?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the soul of the thirsty one, in so far as he is thirsty, desires
+only drink; for this he yearns and tries to obtain it?
+
+That is plain.
+
+And if you suppose something which pulls a thirsty soul away from drink,
+that must be different from the thirsty principle which draws him like
+a beast to drink; for, as we were saying, the same thing cannot at the
+same time with the same part of itself act in contrary ways about the
+same.
+
+Impossible.
+
+No more than you can say that the hands of the archer push and pull the
+bow at the same time, but what you say is that one hand pushes and the
+other pulls.
+
+Exactly so, he replied.
+
+And might a man be thirsty, and yet unwilling to drink?
+
+Yes, he said, it constantly happens.
+
+And in such a case what is one to say? Would you not say that there
+was something in the soul bidding a man to drink, and something else
+forbidding him, which is other and stronger than the principle which
+bids him?
+
+I should say so.
+
+And the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which bids
+and attracts proceeds from passion and disease?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Then we may fairly assume that they are two, and that they differ from
+one another; the one with which a man reasons, we may call the rational
+principle of the soul, the other, with which he loves and hungers and
+thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed
+the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and
+satisfactions?
+
+Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.
+
+Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in
+the soul. And what of passion, or spirit? Is it a third, or akin to one
+of the preceding?
+
+I should be inclined to say--akin to desire.
+
+Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in
+which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion,
+coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside,
+observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution.
+He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them;
+for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire
+got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead
+bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.
+
+I have heard the story myself, he said.
+
+The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire,
+as though they were two distinct things.
+
+Yes; that is the meaning, he said.
+
+And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a man's
+desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is
+angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is
+like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of
+his reason;--but for the passionate or spirited element to take part
+with the desires when reason decides that she should not be opposed,
+is a sort of thing which I believe that you never observed occurring in
+yourself, nor, as I should imagine, in any one else?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Suppose that a man thinks he has done a wrong to another, the nobler
+he is the less able is he to feel indignant at any suffering, such as
+hunger, or cold, or any other pain which the injured person may inflict
+upon him--these he deems to be just, and, as I say, his anger refuses to
+be excited by them.
+
+True, he said.
+
+But when he thinks that he is the sufferer of the wrong, then he boils
+and chafes, and is on the side of what he believes to be justice; and
+because he suffers hunger or cold or other pain he is only the more
+determined to persevere and conquer. His noble spirit will not be
+quelled until he either slays or is slain; or until he hears the voice
+of the shepherd, that is, reason, bidding his dog bark no more.
+
+The illustration is perfect, he replied; and in our State, as we were
+saying, the auxiliaries were to be dogs, and to hear the voice of the
+rulers, who are their shepherds.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you quite understand me; there is, however, a
+further point which I wish you to consider.
+
+What point?
+
+You remember that passion or spirit appeared at first sight to be a kind
+of desire, but now we should say quite the contrary; for in the conflict
+of the soul spirit is arrayed on the side of the rational principle.
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+But a further question arises: Is passion different from reason also, or
+only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three principles
+in the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the concupiscent;
+or rather, as the State was composed of three classes, traders,
+auxiliaries, counsellors, so may there not be in the individual soul a
+third element which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad
+education is the natural auxiliary of reason?
+
+Yes, he said, there must be a third.
+
+Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be different
+from desire, turn out also to be different from reason.
+
+But that is easily proved:--We may observe even in young children that
+they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some
+of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late
+enough.
+
+Excellent, I said, and you may see passion equally in brute animals,
+which is a further proof of the truth of what you are saying. And we may
+once more appeal to the words of Homer, which have been already quoted
+by us,
+
+'He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul,'
+
+for in this verse Homer has clearly supposed the power which reasons
+about the better and worse to be different from the unreasoning anger
+which is rebuked by it.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And so, after much tossing, we have reached land, and are fairly agreed
+that the same principles which exist in the State exist also in the
+individual, and that they are three in number.
+
+Exactly.
+
+Must we not then infer that the individual is wise in the same way, and
+in virtue of the same quality which makes the State wise?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Also that the same quality which constitutes courage in the State
+constitutes courage in the individual, and that both the State and the
+individual bear the same relation to all the other virtues?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And the individual will be acknowledged by us to be just in the same way
+in which the State is just?
+
+That follows, of course.
+
+We cannot but remember that the justice of the State consisted in each
+of the three classes doing the work of its own class?
+
+We are not very likely to have forgotten, he said.
+
+We must recollect that the individual in whom the several qualities of
+his nature do their own work will be just, and will do his own work?
+
+Yes, he said, we must remember that too.
+
+And ought not the rational principle, which is wise, and has the care of
+the whole soul, to rule, and the passionate or spirited principle to be
+the subject and ally?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And, as we were saying, the united influence of music and gymnastic will
+bring them into accord, nerving and sustaining the reason with noble
+words and lessons, and moderating and soothing and civilizing the
+wildness of passion by harmony and rhythm?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+And these two, thus nurtured and educated, and having learned truly to
+know their own functions, will rule over the concupiscent, which in each
+of us is the largest part of the soul and by nature most insatiable of
+gain; over this they will keep guard, lest, waxing great and strong with
+the fulness of bodily pleasures, as they are termed, the concupiscent
+soul, no longer confined to her own sphere, should attempt to enslave
+and rule those who are not her natural-born subjects, and overturn the
+whole life of man?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Both together will they not be the best defenders of the whole soul and
+the whole body against attacks from without; the one counselling, and
+the other fighting under his leader, and courageously executing his
+commands and counsels?
+
+True.
+
+And he is to be deemed courageous whose spirit retains in pleasure and
+in pain the commands of reason about what he ought or ought not to fear?
+
+Right, he replied.
+
+And him we call wise who has in him that little part which rules, and
+which proclaims these commands; that part too being supposed to have a
+knowledge of what is for the interest of each of the three parts and of
+the whole?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And would you not say that he is temperate who has these same elements
+in friendly harmony, in whom the one ruling principle of reason, and
+the two subject ones of spirit and desire are equally agreed that reason
+ought to rule, and do not rebel?
+
+Certainly, he said, that is the true account of temperance whether in
+the State or individual.
+
+And surely, I said, we have explained again and again how and by virtue
+of what quality a man will be just.
+
+That is very certain.
+
+And is justice dimmer in the individual, and is her form different, or
+is she the same which we found her to be in the State?
+
+There is no difference in my opinion, he said.
+
+Because, if any doubt is still lingering in our minds, a few commonplace
+instances will satisfy us of the truth of what I am saying.
+
+What sort of instances do you mean?
+
+If the case is put to us, must we not admit that the just State, or
+the man who is trained in the principles of such a State, will be less
+likely than the unjust to make away with a deposit of gold or silver?
+Would any one deny this?
+
+No one, he replied.
+
+Will the just man or citizen ever be guilty of sacrilege or theft, or
+treachery either to his friends or to his country?
+
+Never.
+
+Neither will he ever break faith where there have been oaths or
+agreements?
+
+Impossible.
+
+No one will be less likely to commit adultery, or to dishonour his
+father and mother, or to fail in his religious duties?
+
+No one.
+
+And the reason is that each part of him is doing its own business,
+whether in ruling or being ruled?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+Are you satisfied then that the quality which makes such men and such
+states is justice, or do you hope to discover some other?
+
+Not I, indeed.
+
+Then our dream has been realized; and the suspicion which we entertained
+at the beginning of our work of construction, that some divine power
+must have conducted us to a primary form of justice, has now been
+verified?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And the division of labour which required the carpenter and the
+shoemaker and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own
+business, and not another's, was a shadow of justice, and for that
+reason it was of use?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned
+however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the
+true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the
+several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of
+them to do the work of others,--he sets in order his own inner life, and
+is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when
+he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be
+compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the
+intermediate intervals--when he has bound all these together, and is
+no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly
+adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in
+a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair
+of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which
+preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, just and good
+action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which
+at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the
+opinion which presides over it ignorance.
+
+You have said the exact truth, Socrates.
+
+Very good; and if we were to affirm that we had discovered the just man
+and the just State, and the nature of justice in each of them, we should
+not be telling a falsehood?
+
+Most certainly not.
+
+May we say so, then?
+
+Let us say so.
+
+And now, I said, injustice has to be considered.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Must not injustice be a strife which arises among the three
+principles--a meddlesomeness, and interference, and rising up of a part
+of the soul against the whole, an assertion of unlawful authority, which
+is made by a rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he is the
+natural vassal,--what is all this confusion and delusion but injustice,
+and intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form of vice?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And if the nature of justice and injustice be known, then the meaning of
+acting unjustly and being unjust, or, again, of acting justly, will also
+be perfectly clear?
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+Why, I said, they are like disease and health; being in the soul just
+what disease and health are in the body.
+
+How so? he said.
+
+Why, I said, that which is healthy causes health, and that which is
+unhealthy causes disease.
+
+Yes.
+
+And just actions cause justice, and unjust actions cause injustice?
+
+That is certain.
+
+And the creation of health is the institution of a natural order and
+government of one by another in the parts of the body; and the creation
+of disease is the production of a state of things at variance with this
+natural order?
+
+True.
+
+And is not the creation of justice the institution of a natural order
+and government of one by another in the parts of the soul, and the
+creation of injustice the production of a state of things at variance
+with the natural order?
+
+Exactly so, he said.
+
+Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and
+vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the same?
+
+True.
+
+And do not good practices lead to virtue, and evil practices to vice?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Still our old question of the comparative advantage of justice and
+injustice has not been answered: Which is the more profitable, to be
+just and act justly and practise virtue, whether seen or unseen of
+gods and men, or to be unjust and act unjustly, if only unpunished and
+unreformed?
+
+In my judgment, Socrates, the question has now become ridiculous. We
+know that, when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer
+endurable, though pampered with all kinds of meats and drinks, and
+having all wealth and all power; and shall we be told that when the
+very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, life
+is still worth having to a man, if only he be allowed to do whatever he
+likes with the single exception that he is not to acquire justice and
+virtue, or to escape from injustice and vice; assuming them both to be
+such as we have described?
+
+Yes, I said, the question is, as you say, ridiculous. Still, as we are
+near the spot at which we may see the truth in the clearest manner with
+our own eyes, let us not faint by the way.
+
+Certainly not, he replied.
+
+Come up hither, I said, and behold the various forms of vice, those of
+them, I mean, which are worth looking at.
+
+I am following you, he replied: proceed.
+
+I said, The argument seems to have reached a height from which, as from
+some tower of speculation, a man may look down and see that virtue
+is one, but that the forms of vice are innumerable; there being four
+special ones which are deserving of note.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean, I replied, that there appear to be as many forms of the soul as
+there are distinct forms of the State.
+
+How many?
+
+There are five of the State, and five of the soul, I said.
+
+What are they?
+
+The first, I said, is that which we have been describing, and which may
+be said to have two names, monarchy and aristocracy, accordingly as rule
+is exercised by one distinguished man or by many.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+But I regard the two names as describing one form only; for whether the
+government is in the hands of one or many, if the governors have been
+trained in the manner which we have supposed, the fundamental laws of
+the State will be maintained.
+
+That is true, he replied.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+Such is the good and true City or State, and the good and true man is
+of the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the
+evil is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also
+the regulation of the individual soul, and is exhibited in four forms.
+
+What are they? he said.
+
+I was proceeding to tell the order in which the four evil forms appeared
+to me to succeed one another, when Polemarchus, who was sitting a little
+way off, just beyond Adeimantus, began to whisper to him: stretching
+forth his hand, he took hold of the upper part of his coat by the
+shoulder, and drew him towards him, leaning forward himself so as to be
+quite close and saying something in his ear, of which I only caught the
+words, 'Shall we let him off, or what shall we do?'
+
+Certainly not, said Adeimantus, raising his voice.
+
+Who is it, I said, whom you are refusing to let off?
+
+You, he said.
+
+I repeated, Why am I especially not to be let off?
+
+Why, he said, we think that you are lazy, and mean to cheat us out of a
+whole chapter which is a very important part of the story; and you fancy
+that we shall not notice your airy way of proceeding; as if it were
+self-evident to everybody, that in the matter of women and children
+'friends have all things in common.'
+
+And was I not right, Adeimantus?
+
+Yes, he said; but what is right in this particular case, like everything
+else, requires to be explained; for community may be of many kinds.
+Please, therefore, to say what sort of community you mean. We have been
+long expecting that you would tell us something about the family life
+of your citizens--how they will bring children into the world, and rear
+them when they have arrived, and, in general, what is the nature of this
+community of women and children--for we are of opinion that the right
+or wrong management of such matters will have a great and paramount
+influence on the State for good or for evil. And now, since the question
+is still undetermined, and you are taking in hand another State, we have
+resolved, as you heard, not to let you go until you give an account of
+all this.
+
+To that resolution, said Glaucon, you may regard me as saying Agreed.
+
+And without more ado, said Thrasymachus, you may consider us all to be
+equally agreed.
+
+I said, You know not what you are doing in thus assailing me: What an
+argument are you raising about the State! Just as I thought that I had
+finished, and was only too glad that I had laid this question to sleep,
+and was reflecting how fortunate I was in your acceptance of what I then
+said, you ask me to begin again at the very foundation, ignorant of what
+a hornet's nest of words you are stirring. Now I foresaw this gathering
+trouble, and avoided it.
+
+For what purpose do you conceive that we have come here, said
+Thrasymachus,--to look for gold, or to hear discourse?
+
+Yes, but discourse should have a limit.
+
+Yes, Socrates, said Glaucon, and the whole of life is the only limit
+which wise men assign to the hearing of such discourses. But never mind
+about us; take heart yourself and answer the question in your own way:
+What sort of community of women and children is this which is to prevail
+among our guardians? and how shall we manage the period between birth
+and education, which seems to require the greatest care? Tell us how
+these things will be.
+
+Yes, my simple friend, but the answer is the reverse of easy; many more
+doubts arise about this than about our previous conclusions. For the
+practicability of what is said may be doubted; and looked at in another
+point of view, whether the scheme, if ever so practicable, would be for
+the best, is also doubtful. Hence I feel a reluctance to approach the
+subject, lest our aspiration, my dear friend, should turn out to be a
+dream only.
+
+Fear not, he replied, for your audience will not be hard upon you; they
+are not sceptical or hostile.
+
+I said: My good friend, I suppose that you mean to encourage me by these
+words.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+Then let me tell you that you are doing just the reverse; the
+encouragement which you offer would have been all very well had I myself
+believed that I knew what I was talking about: to declare the truth
+about matters of high interest which a man honours and loves among wise
+men who love him need occasion no fear or faltering in his mind; but to
+carry on an argument when you are yourself only a hesitating enquirer,
+which is my condition, is a dangerous and slippery thing; and the danger
+is not that I shall be laughed at (of which the fear would be childish),
+but that I shall miss the truth where I have most need to be sure of my
+footing, and drag my friends after me in my fall. And I pray Nemesis not
+to visit upon me the words which I am going to utter. For I do indeed
+believe that to be an involuntary homicide is a less crime than to be a
+deceiver about beauty or goodness or justice in the matter of laws.
+And that is a risk which I would rather run among enemies than among
+friends, and therefore you do well to encourage me.
+
+Glaucon laughed and said: Well then, Socrates, in case you and your
+argument do us any serious injury you shall be acquitted beforehand of
+the homicide, and shall not be held to be a deceiver; take courage then
+and speak.
+
+Well, I said, the law says that when a man is acquitted he is free from
+guilt, and what holds at law may hold in argument.
+
+Then why should you mind?
+
+Well, I replied, I suppose that I must retrace my steps and say what I
+perhaps ought to have said before in the proper place. The part of the
+men has been played out, and now properly enough comes the turn of the
+women. Of them I will proceed to speak, and the more readily since I am
+invited by you.
+
+For men born and educated like our citizens, the only way, in my
+opinion, of arriving at a right conclusion about the possession and
+use of women and children is to follow the path on which we originally
+started, when we said that the men were to be the guardians and
+watchdogs of the herd.
+
+True.
+
+Let us further suppose the birth and education of our women to be
+subject to similar or nearly similar regulations; then we shall see
+whether the result accords with our design.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+What I mean may be put into the form of a question, I said: Are dogs
+divided into hes and shes, or do they both share equally in hunting and
+in keeping watch and in the other duties of dogs? or do we entrust to
+the males the entire and exclusive care of the flocks, while we leave
+the females at home, under the idea that the bearing and suckling their
+puppies is labour enough for them?
+
+No, he said, they share alike; the only difference between them is that
+the males are stronger and the females weaker.
+
+But can you use different animals for the same purpose, unless they are
+bred and fed in the same way?
+
+You cannot.
+
+Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the
+same nurture and education?
+
+Yes.
+
+The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic.
+
+Yes.
+
+Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war,
+which they must practise like the men?
+
+That is the inference, I suppose.
+
+I should rather expect, I said, that several of our proposals, if they
+are carried out, being unusual, may appear ridiculous.
+
+No doubt of it.
+
+Yes, and the most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women
+naked in the palaestra, exercising with the men, especially when they
+are no longer young; they certainly will not be a vision of beauty, any
+more than the enthusiastic old men who in spite of wrinkles and ugliness
+continue to frequent the gymnasia.
+
+Yes, indeed, he said: according to present notions the proposal would be
+thought ridiculous.
+
+But then, I said, as we have determined to speak our minds, we must not
+fear the jests of the wits which will be directed against this sort of
+innovation; how they will talk of women's attainments both in music
+and gymnastic, and above all about their wearing armour and riding upon
+horseback!
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Yet having begun we must go forward to the rough places of the law; at
+the same time begging of these gentlemen for once in their life to be
+serious. Not long ago, as we shall remind them, the Hellenes were of the
+opinion, which is still generally received among the barbarians, that
+the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and improper; and when first the
+Cretans and then the Lacedaemonians introduced the custom, the wits of
+that day might equally have ridiculed the innovation.
+
+No doubt.
+
+But when experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far
+better than to cover them up, and the ludicrous effect to the outward
+eye vanished before the better principle which reason asserted, then the
+man was perceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of his ridicule
+at any other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously inclines to
+weigh the beautiful by any other standard but that of the good.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+First, then, whether the question is to be put in jest or in earnest,
+let us come to an understanding about the nature of woman: Is she
+capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or
+not at all? And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or
+can not share? That will be the best way of commencing the enquiry, and
+will probably lead to the fairest conclusion.
+
+That will be much the best way.
+
+Shall we take the other side first and begin by arguing against
+ourselves; in this manner the adversary's position will not be
+undefended.
+
+Why not? he said.
+
+Then let us put a speech into the mouths of our opponents. They will
+say: 'Socrates and Glaucon, no adversary need convict you, for you
+yourselves, at the first foundation of the State, admitted the principle
+that everybody was to do the one work suited to his own nature.' And
+certainly, if I am not mistaken, such an admission was made by us. 'And
+do not the natures of men and women differ very much indeed?' And we
+shall reply: Of course they do. Then we shall be asked, 'Whether the
+tasks assigned to men and to women should not be different, and such as
+are agreeable to their different natures?' Certainly they should. 'But
+if so, have you not fallen into a serious inconsistency in saying that
+men and women, whose natures are so entirely different, ought to perform
+the same actions?'--What defence will you make for us, my good Sir,
+against any one who offers these objections?
+
+That is not an easy question to answer when asked suddenly; and I shall
+and I do beg of you to draw out the case on our side.
+
+These are the objections, Glaucon, and there are many others of a like
+kind, which I foresaw long ago; they made me afraid and reluctant to
+take in hand any law about the possession and nurture of women and
+children.
+
+By Zeus, he said, the problem to be solved is anything but easy.
+
+Why yes, I said, but the fact is that when a man is out of his depth,
+whether he has fallen into a little swimming bath or into mid ocean, he
+has to swim all the same.
+
+Very true.
+
+And must not we swim and try to reach the shore: we will hope that
+Arion's dolphin or some other miraculous help may save us?
+
+I suppose so, he said.
+
+Well then, let us see if any way of escape can be found. We
+acknowledged--did we not? that different natures ought to have different
+pursuits, and that men's and women's natures are different. And now
+what are we saying?--that different natures ought to have the same
+pursuits,--this is the inconsistency which is charged upon us.
+
+Precisely.
+
+Verily, Glaucon, I said, glorious is the power of the art of
+contradiction!
+
+Why do you say so?
+
+Because I think that many a man falls into the practice against his
+will. When he thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just
+because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is
+speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of
+contention and not of fair discussion.
+
+Yes, he replied, such is very often the case; but what has that to do
+with us and our argument?
+
+A great deal; for there is certainly a danger of our getting
+unintentionally into a verbal opposition.
+
+In what way?
+
+Why we valiantly and pugnaciously insist upon the verbal truth, that
+different natures ought to have different pursuits, but we never
+considered at all what was the meaning of sameness or difference of
+nature, or why we distinguished them when we assigned different pursuits
+to different natures and the same to the same natures.
+
+Why, no, he said, that was never considered by us.
+
+I said: Suppose that by way of illustration we were to ask the question
+whether there is not an opposition in nature between bald men and hairy
+men; and if this is admitted by us, then, if bald men are cobblers, we
+should forbid the hairy men to be cobblers, and conversely?
+
+That would be a jest, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, a jest; and why? because we never meant when we constructed
+the State, that the opposition of natures should extend to every
+difference, but only to those differences which affected the pursuit
+in which the individual is engaged; we should have argued, for example,
+that a physician and one who is in mind a physician may be said to have
+the same nature.
+
+True.
+
+Whereas the physician and the carpenter have different natures?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if, I said, the male and female sex appear to differ in their
+fitness for any art or pursuit, we should say that such pursuit or art
+ought to be assigned to one or the other of them; but if the difference
+consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not
+amount to a proof that a woman differs from a man in respect of the
+sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue
+to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same
+pursuits.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Next, we shall ask our opponent how, in reference to any of the pursuits
+or arts of civic life, the nature of a woman differs from that of a man?
+
+That will be quite fair.
+
+And perhaps he, like yourself, will reply that to give a sufficient
+answer on the instant is not easy; but after a little reflection there
+is no difficulty.
+
+Yes, perhaps.
+
+Suppose then that we invite him to accompany us in the argument, and
+then we may hope to show him that there is nothing peculiar in the
+constitution of women which would affect them in the administration of
+the State.
+
+By all means.
+
+Let us say to him: Come now, and we will ask you a question:--when you
+spoke of a nature gifted or not gifted in any respect, did you mean to
+say that one man will acquire a thing easily, another with difficulty; a
+little learning will lead the one to discover a great deal; whereas
+the other, after much study and application, no sooner learns than he
+forgets; or again, did you mean, that the one has a body which is a
+good servant to his mind, while the body of the other is a hindrance to
+him?--would not these be the sort of differences which distinguish the
+man gifted by nature from the one who is ungifted?
+
+No one will deny that.
+
+And can you mention any pursuit of mankind in which the male sex has not
+all these gifts and qualities in a higher degree than the female? Need
+I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the management of
+pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be
+great, and in which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the
+most absurd?
+
+You are quite right, he replied, in maintaining the general inferiority
+of the female sex: although many women are in many things superior to
+many men, yet on the whole what you say is true.
+
+And if so, my friend, I said, there is no special faculty of
+administration in a state which a woman has because she is a woman, or
+which a man has by virtue of his sex, but the gifts of nature are alike
+diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women
+also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then are we to impose all our enactments on men and none of them on
+women?
+
+That will never do.
+
+One woman has a gift of healing, another not; one is a musician, and
+another has no music in her nature?
+
+Very true.
+
+And one woman has a turn for gymnastic and military exercises, and
+another is unwarlike and hates gymnastics?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy of philosophy;
+one has spirit, and another is without spirit?
+
+That is also true.
+
+Then one woman will have the temper of a guardian, and another not. Was
+not the selection of the male guardians determined by differences of
+this sort?
+
+Yes.
+
+Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they
+differ only in their comparative strength or weakness.
+
+Obviously.
+
+And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the
+companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom
+they resemble in capacity and in character?
+
+Very true.
+
+And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits?
+
+They ought.
+
+Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning
+music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians--to that point we come
+round again.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore not
+an impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice, which
+prevails at present, is in reality a violation of nature.
+
+That appears to be true.
+
+We had to consider, first, whether our proposals were possible, and
+secondly whether they were the most beneficial?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the possibility has been acknowledged?
+
+Yes.
+
+The very great benefit has next to be established?
+
+Quite so.
+
+You will admit that the same education which makes a man a good guardian
+will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature is the
+same?
+
+Yes.
+
+I should like to ask you a question.
+
+What is it?
+
+Would you say that all men are equal in excellence, or is one man better
+than another?
+
+The latter.
+
+And in the commonwealth which we were founding do you conceive the
+guardians who have been brought up on our model system to be more
+perfect men, or the cobblers whose education has been cobbling?
+
+What a ridiculous question!
+
+You have answered me, I replied: Well, and may we not further say that
+our guardians are the best of our citizens?
+
+By far the best.
+
+And will not their wives be the best women?
+
+Yes, by far the best.
+
+And can there be anything better for the interests of the State than
+that the men and women of a State should be as good as possible?
+
+There can be nothing better.
+
+And this is what the arts of music and gymnastic, when present in such
+manner as we have described, will accomplish?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest
+degree beneficial to the State?
+
+True.
+
+Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be
+their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of
+their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be
+assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects
+their duties are to be the same. And as for the man who laughs at naked
+women exercising their bodies from the best of motives, in his laughter
+he is plucking
+
+'A fruit of unripe wisdom,'
+
+and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is
+about;--for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the
+useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base.
+
+Very true.
+
+Here, then, is one difficulty in our law about women, which we may say
+that we have now escaped; the wave has not swallowed us up alive for
+enacting that the guardians of either sex should have all their
+pursuits in common; to the utility and also to the possibility of this
+arrangement the consistency of the argument with itself bears witness.
+
+Yes, that was a mighty wave which you have escaped.
+
+Yes, I said, but a greater is coming; you will not think much of this
+when you see the next.
+
+Go on; let me see.
+
+The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has
+preceded, is to the following effect,--'that the wives of our guardians
+are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is
+to know his own child, nor any child his parent.'
+
+Yes, he said, that is a much greater wave than the other; and
+the possibility as well as the utility of such a law are far more
+questionable.
+
+I do not think, I said, that there can be any dispute about the very
+great utility of having wives and children in common; the possibility is
+quite another matter, and will be very much disputed.
+
+I think that a good many doubts may be raised about both.
+
+You imply that the two questions must be combined, I replied. Now I
+meant that you should admit the utility; and in this way, as I thought,
+I should escape from one of them, and then there would remain only the
+possibility.
+
+But that little attempt is detected, and therefore you will please to
+give a defence of both.
+
+Well, I said, I submit to my fate. Yet grant me a little favour: let
+me feast my mind with the dream as day dreamers are in the habit of
+feasting themselves when they are walking alone; for before they have
+discovered any means of effecting their wishes--that is a matter which
+never troubles them--they would rather not tire themselves by thinking
+about possibilities; but assuming that what they desire is already
+granted to them, they proceed with their plan, and delight in detailing
+what they mean to do when their wish has come true--that is a way which
+they have of not doing much good to a capacity which was never good for
+much. Now I myself am beginning to lose heart, and I should like, with
+your permission, to pass over the question of possibility at present.
+Assuming therefore the possibility of the proposal, I shall now proceed
+to enquire how the rulers will carry out these arrangements, and I shall
+demonstrate that our plan, if executed, will be of the greatest benefit
+to the State and to the guardians. First of all, then, if you have no
+objection, I will endeavour with your help to consider the advantages of
+the measure; and hereafter the question of possibility.
+
+I have no objection; proceed.
+
+First, I think that if our rulers and their auxiliaries are to be worthy
+of the name which they bear, there must be willingness to obey in the
+one and the power of command in the other; the guardians must themselves
+obey the laws, and they must also imitate the spirit of them in any
+details which are entrusted to their care.
+
+That is right, he said.
+
+You, I said, who are their legislator, having selected the men, will now
+select the women and give them to them;--they must be as far as possible
+of like natures with them; and they must live in common houses and meet
+at common meals. None of them will have anything specially his or her
+own; they will be together, and will be brought up together, and
+will associate at gymnastic exercises. And so they will be drawn by
+a necessity of their natures to have intercourse with each
+other--necessity is not too strong a word, I think?
+
+Yes, he said;--necessity, not geometrical, but another sort of necessity
+which lovers know, and which is far more convincing and constraining to
+the mass of mankind.
+
+True, I said; and this, Glaucon, like all the rest, must proceed after
+an orderly fashion; in a city of the blessed, licentiousness is an
+unholy thing which the rulers will forbid.
+
+Yes, he said, and it ought not to be permitted.
+
+Then clearly the next thing will be to make matrimony sacred in the
+highest degree, and what is most beneficial will be deemed sacred?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And how can marriages be made most beneficial?--that is a question which
+I put to you, because I see in your house dogs for hunting, and of the
+nobler sort of birds not a few. Now, I beseech you, do tell me, have you
+ever attended to their pairing and breeding?
+
+In what particulars?
+
+Why, in the first place, although they are all of a good sort, are not
+some better than others?
+
+True.
+
+And do you breed from them all indifferently, or do you take care to
+breed from the best only?
+
+From the best.
+
+And do you take the oldest or the youngest, or only those of ripe age?
+
+I choose only those of ripe age.
+
+And if care was not taken in the breeding, your dogs and birds would
+greatly deteriorate?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the same of horses and animals in general?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Good heavens! my dear friend, I said, what consummate skill will our
+rulers need if the same principle holds of the human species!
+
+Certainly, the same principle holds; but why does this involve any
+particular skill?
+
+Because, I said, our rulers will often have to practise upon the body
+corporate with medicines. Now you know that when patients do not require
+medicines, but have only to be put under a regimen, the inferior sort
+of practitioner is deemed to be good enough; but when medicine has to be
+given, then the doctor should be more of a man.
+
+That is quite true, he said; but to what are you alluding?
+
+I mean, I replied, that our rulers will find a considerable dose of
+falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects: we were
+saying that the use of all these things regarded as medicines might be
+of advantage.
+
+And we were very right.
+
+And this lawful use of them seems likely to be often needed in the
+regulations of marriages and births.
+
+How so?
+
+Why, I said, the principle has been already laid down that the best of
+either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior
+with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the
+offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock
+is to be maintained in first-rate condition. Now these goings on must be
+a secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further
+danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into
+rebellion.
+
+Very true.
+
+Had we not better appoint certain festivals at which we will bring
+together the brides and bridegrooms, and sacrifices will be offered and
+suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets: the number of weddings is
+a matter which must be left to the discretion of the rulers, whose aim
+will be to preserve the average of population? There are many other
+things which they will have to consider, such as the effects of wars and
+diseases and any similar agencies, in order as far as this is possible
+to prevent the State from becoming either too large or too small.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+We shall have to invent some ingenious kind of lots which the less
+worthy may draw on each occasion of our bringing them together, and then
+they will accuse their own ill-luck and not the rulers.
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And I think that our braver and better youth, besides their other
+honours and rewards, might have greater facilities of intercourse with
+women given them; their bravery will be a reason, and such fathers ought
+to have as many sons as possible.
+
+True.
+
+And the proper officers, whether male or female or both, for offices are
+to be held by women as well as by men--
+
+Yes--
+
+The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the
+pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who
+dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of
+the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some
+mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.
+
+Yes, he said, that must be done if the breed of the guardians is to be
+kept pure.
+
+They will provide for their nurture, and will bring the mothers to the
+fold when they are full of milk, taking the greatest possible care that
+no mother recognises her own child; and other wet-nurses may be engaged
+if more are required. Care will also be taken that the process of
+suckling shall not be protracted too long; and the mothers will have no
+getting up at night or other trouble, but will hand over all this sort
+of thing to the nurses and attendants.
+
+You suppose the wives of our guardians to have a fine easy time of it
+when they are having children.
+
+Why, said I, and so they ought. Let us, however, proceed with our
+scheme. We were saying that the parents should be in the prime of life?
+
+Very true.
+
+And what is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of
+about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?
+
+Which years do you mean to include?
+
+A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to
+the State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at
+five-and-twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of life
+beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five.
+
+Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of
+physical as well as of intellectual vigour.
+
+Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public
+hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing;
+the child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have
+been conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers,
+which at each hymeneal priestesses and priest and the whole city will
+offer, that the new generation may be better and more useful than their
+good and useful parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of
+darkness and strange lust.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed
+age who forms a connection with any woman in the prime of life without
+the sanction of the rulers; for we shall say that he is raising up a
+bastard to the State, uncertified and unconsecrated.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age:
+after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not
+marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his
+mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from
+marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and
+so on in either direction. And we grant all this, accompanying the
+permission with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into
+being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the
+parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be
+maintained, and arrange accordingly.
+
+That also, he said, is a reasonable proposition. But how will they know
+who are fathers and daughters, and so on?
+
+They will never know. The way will be this:--dating from the day of the
+hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the male
+children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards his
+sons, and the female children his daughters, and they will call him
+father, and he will call their children his grandchildren, and they will
+call the elder generation grandfathers and grandmothers. All who were
+begotten at the time when their fathers and mothers came together will
+be called their brothers and sisters, and these, as I was saying, will
+be forbidden to inter-marry. This, however, is not to be understood as
+an absolute prohibition of the marriage of brothers and sisters; if the
+lot favours them, and they receive the sanction of the Pythian oracle,
+the law will allow them.
+
+Quite right, he replied.
+
+Such is the scheme, Glaucon, according to which the guardians of our
+State are to have their wives and families in common. And now you would
+have the argument show that this community is consistent with the rest
+of our polity, and also that nothing can be better--would you not?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+Shall we try to find a common basis by asking of ourselves what ought
+to be the chief aim of the legislator in making laws and in the
+organization of a State,--what is the greatest good, and what is the
+greatest evil, and then consider whether our previous description has
+the stamp of the good or of the evil?
+
+By all means.
+
+Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality
+where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity?
+
+There cannot.
+
+And there is unity where there is community of pleasures and
+pains--where all the citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions
+of joy and sorrow?
+
+No doubt.
+
+Yes; and where there is no common but only private feeling a State is
+disorganized--when you have one half of the world triumphing and the
+other plunged in grief at the same events happening to the city or the
+citizens?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of
+the terms 'mine' and 'not mine,' 'his' and 'not his.'
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of
+persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the
+same thing?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the
+individual--as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the
+whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a centre and forming one kingdom
+under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all
+together with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in
+his finger; and the same expression is used about any other part of the
+body, which has a sensation of pain at suffering or of pleasure at the
+alleviation of suffering.
+
+Very true, he replied; and I agree with you that in the best-ordered
+State there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you
+describe.
+
+Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the
+whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or
+sorrow with him?
+
+Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.
+
+It will now be time, I said, for us to return to our State and see
+whether this or some other form is most in accordance with these
+fundamental principles.
+
+Very good.
+
+Our State like every other has rulers and subjects?
+
+True.
+
+All of whom will call one another citizens?
+
+Of course.
+
+But is there not another name which people give to their rulers in other
+States?
+
+Generally they call them masters, but in democratic States they simply
+call them rulers.
+
+And in our State what other name besides that of citizens do the people
+give the rulers?
+
+They are called saviours and helpers, he replied.
+
+And what do the rulers call the people?
+
+Their maintainers and foster-fathers.
+
+And what do they call them in other States?
+
+Slaves.
+
+And what do the rulers call one another in other States?
+
+Fellow-rulers.
+
+And what in ours?
+
+Fellow-guardians.
+
+Did you ever know an example in any other State of a ruler who would
+speak of one of his colleagues as his friend and of another as not being
+his friend?
+
+Yes, very often.
+
+And the friend he regards and describes as one in whom he has an
+interest, and the other as a stranger in whom he has no interest?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But would any of your guardians think or speak of any other guardian as
+a stranger?
+
+Certainly he would not; for every one whom they meet will be regarded
+by them either as a brother or sister, or father or mother, or son or
+daughter, or as the child or parent of those who are thus connected with
+him.
+
+Capital, I said; but let me ask you once more: Shall they be a family in
+name only; or shall they in all their actions be true to the name? For
+example, in the use of the word 'father,' would the care of a father be
+implied and the filial reverence and duty and obedience to him which the
+law commands; and is the violator of these duties to be regarded as an
+impious and unrighteous person who is not likely to receive much good
+either at the hands of God or of man? Are these to be or not to be the
+strains which the children will hear repeated in their ears by all the
+citizens about those who are intimated to them to be their parents and
+the rest of their kinsfolk?
+
+These, he said, and none other; for what can be more ridiculous than for
+them to utter the names of family ties with the lips only and not to act
+in the spirit of them?
+
+Then in our city the language of harmony and concord will be more often
+heard than in any other. As I was describing before, when any one is
+well or ill, the universal word will be 'with me it is well' or 'it is
+ill.'
+
+Most true.
+
+And agreeably to this mode of thinking and speaking, were we not saying
+that they will have their pleasures and pains in common?
+
+Yes, and so they will.
+
+And they will have a common interest in the same thing which they will
+alike call 'my own,' and having this common interest they will have a
+common feeling of pleasure and pain?
+
+Yes, far more so than in other States.
+
+And the reason of this, over and above the general constitution of the
+State, will be that the guardians will have a community of women and
+children?
+
+That will be the chief reason.
+
+And this unity of feeling we admitted to be the greatest good, as was
+implied in our own comparison of a well-ordered State to the relation of
+the body and the members, when affected by pleasure or pain?
+
+That we acknowledged, and very rightly.
+
+Then the community of wives and children among our citizens is clearly
+the source of the greatest good to the State?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this agrees with the other principle which we were affirming,--that
+the guardians were not to have houses or lands or any other property;
+their pay was to be their food, which they were to receive from the
+other citizens, and they were to have no private expenses; for we
+intended them to preserve their true character of guardians.
+
+Right, he replied.
+
+Both the community of property and the community of families, as I am
+saying, tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear
+the city in pieces by differing about 'mine' and 'not mine;' each man
+dragging any acquisition which he has made into a separate house of his
+own, where he has a separate wife and children and private pleasures and
+pains; but all will be affected as far as may be by the same pleasures
+and pains because they are all of one opinion about what is near and
+dear to them, and therefore they all tend towards a common end.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And as they have nothing but their persons which they can call their
+own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will
+be delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or
+relations are the occasion.
+
+Of course they will.
+
+Neither will trials for assault or insult ever be likely to occur among
+them. For that equals should defend themselves against equals we shall
+maintain to be honourable and right; we shall make the protection of the
+person a matter of necessity.
+
+That is good, he said.
+
+Yes; and there is a further good in the law; viz. that if a man has a
+quarrel with another he will satisfy his resentment then and there, and
+not proceed to more dangerous lengths.
+
+Certainly.
+
+To the elder shall be assigned the duty of ruling and chastising the
+younger.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Nor can there be a doubt that the younger will not strike or do any
+other violence to an elder, unless the magistrates command him; nor will
+he slight him in any way. For there are two guardians, shame and fear,
+mighty to prevent him: shame, which makes men refrain from laying hands
+on those who are to them in the relation of parents; fear, that the
+injured one will be succoured by the others who are his brothers, sons,
+fathers.
+
+That is true, he replied.
+
+Then in every way the laws will help the citizens to keep the peace with
+one another?
+
+Yes, there will be no want of peace.
+
+And as the guardians will never quarrel among themselves there will be
+no danger of the rest of the city being divided either against them or
+against one another.
+
+None whatever.
+
+I hardly like even to mention the little meannesses of which they will
+be rid, for they are beneath notice: such, for example, as the
+flattery of the rich by the poor, and all the pains and pangs which
+men experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy
+necessaries for their household, borrowing and then repudiating, getting
+how they can, and giving the money into the hands of women and slaves
+to keep--the many evils of so many kinds which people suffer in this way
+are mean enough and obvious enough, and not worth speaking of.
+
+Yes, he said, a man has no need of eyes in order to perceive that.
+
+And from all these evils they will be delivered, and their life will be
+blessed as the life of Olympic victors and yet more blessed.
+
+How so?
+
+The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of
+the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more
+glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public
+cost. For the victory which they have won is the salvation of the whole
+State; and the crown with which they and their children are crowned is
+the fulness of all that life needs; they receive rewards from the
+hands of their country while living, and after death have an honourable
+burial.
+
+Yes, he said, and glorious rewards they are.
+
+Do you remember, I said, how in the course of the previous discussion
+some one who shall be nameless accused us of making our guardians
+unhappy--they had nothing and might have possessed all things--to whom
+we replied that, if an occasion offered, we might perhaps hereafter
+consider this question, but that, as at present advised, we would make
+our guardians truly guardians, and that we were fashioning the State
+with a view to the greatest happiness, not of any particular class, but
+of the whole?
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+And what do you say, now that the life of our protectors is made out to
+be far better and nobler than that of Olympic victors--is the life of
+shoemakers, or any other artisans, or of husbandmen, to be compared with
+it?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+At the same time I ought here to repeat what I have said elsewhere, that
+if any of our guardians shall try to be happy in such a manner that
+he will cease to be a guardian, and is not content with this safe and
+harmonious life, which, in our judgment, is of all lives the best, but
+infatuated by some youthful conceit of happiness which gets up into his
+head shall seek to appropriate the whole state to himself, then he will
+have to learn how wisely Hesiod spoke, when he said, 'half is more than
+the whole.'
+
+If he were to consult me, I should say to him: Stay where you are, when
+you have the offer of such a life.
+
+You agree then, I said, that men and women are to have a common way of
+life such as we have described--common education, common children; and
+they are to watch over the citizens in common whether abiding in the
+city or going out to war; they are to keep watch together, and to hunt
+together like dogs; and always and in all things, as far as they are
+able, women are to share with the men? And in so doing they will do what
+is best, and will not violate, but preserve the natural relation of the
+sexes.
+
+I agree with you, he replied.
+
+The enquiry, I said, has yet to be made, whether such a community
+be found possible--as among other animals, so also among men--and if
+possible, in what way possible?
+
+You have anticipated the question which I was about to suggest.
+
+There is no difficulty, I said, in seeing how war will be carried on by
+them.
+
+How?
+
+Why, of course they will go on expeditions together; and will take with
+them any of their children who are strong enough, that, after the manner
+of the artisan's child, they may look on at the work which they will
+have to do when they are grown up; and besides looking on they will
+have to help and be of use in war, and to wait upon their fathers and
+mothers. Did you never observe in the arts how the potters' boys look on
+and help, long before they touch the wheel?
+
+Yes, I have.
+
+And shall potters be more careful in educating their children and in
+giving them the opportunity of seeing and practising their duties than
+our guardians will be?
+
+The idea is ridiculous, he said.
+
+There is also the effect on the parents, with whom, as with other
+animals, the presence of their young ones will be the greatest incentive
+to valour.
+
+That is quite true, Socrates; and yet if they are defeated, which may
+often happen in war, how great the danger is! the children will be lost
+as well as their parents, and the State will never recover.
+
+True, I said; but would you never allow them to run any risk?
+
+I am far from saying that.
+
+Well, but if they are ever to run a risk should they not do so on some
+occasion when, if they escape disaster, they will be the better for it?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Whether the future soldiers do or do not see war in the days of their
+youth is a very important matter, for the sake of which some risk may
+fairly be incurred.
+
+Yes, very important.
+
+This then must be our first step,--to make our children spectators
+of war; but we must also contrive that they shall be secured against
+danger; then all will be well.
+
+True.
+
+Their parents may be supposed not to be blind to the risks of war, but
+to know, as far as human foresight can, what expeditions are safe and
+what dangerous?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+And they will take them on the safe expeditions and be cautious about
+the dangerous ones?
+
+True.
+
+And they will place them under the command of experienced veterans who
+will be their leaders and teachers?
+
+Very properly.
+
+Still, the dangers of war cannot be always foreseen; there is a good
+deal of chance about them?
+
+True.
+
+Then against such chances the children must be at once furnished with
+wings, in order that in the hour of need they may fly away and escape.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean that we must mount them on horses in their earliest youth, and
+when they have learnt to ride, take them on horseback to see war: the
+horses must not be spirited and warlike, but the most tractable and yet
+the swiftest that can be had. In this way they will get an excellent
+view of what is hereafter to be their own business; and if there is
+danger they have only to follow their elder leaders and escape.
+
+I believe that you are right, he said.
+
+Next, as to war; what are to be the relations of your soldiers to one
+another and to their enemies? I should be inclined to propose that the
+soldier who leaves his rank or throws away his arms, or is guilty of any
+other act of cowardice, should be degraded into the rank of a husbandman
+or artisan. What do you think?
+
+By all means, I should say.
+
+And he who allows himself to be taken prisoner may as well be made a
+present of to his enemies; he is their lawful prey, and let them do what
+they like with him.
+
+Certainly.
+
+But the hero who has distinguished himself, what shall be done to
+him? In the first place, he shall receive honour in the army from his
+youthful comrades; every one of them in succession shall crown him. What
+do you say?
+
+I approve.
+
+And what do you say to his receiving the right hand of fellowship?
+
+To that too, I agree.
+
+But you will hardly agree to my next proposal.
+
+What is your proposal?
+
+That he should kiss and be kissed by them.
+
+Most certainly, and I should be disposed to go further, and say: Let
+no one whom he has a mind to kiss refuse to be kissed by him while the
+expedition lasts. So that if there be a lover in the army, whether
+his love be youth or maiden, he may be more eager to win the prize of
+valour.
+
+Capital, I said. That the brave man is to have more wives than others
+has been already determined: and he is to have first choices in such
+matters more than others, in order that he may have as many children as
+possible?
+
+Agreed.
+
+Again, there is another manner in which, according to Homer, brave
+youths should be honoured; for he tells how Ajax, after he had
+distinguished himself in battle, was rewarded with long chines, which
+seems to be a compliment appropriate to a hero in the flower of his age,
+being not only a tribute of honour but also a very strengthening thing.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Then in this, I said, Homer shall be our teacher; and we too, at
+sacrifices and on the like occasions, will honour the brave according to
+the measure of their valour, whether men or women, with hymns and those
+other distinctions which we were mentioning; also with
+
+'seats of precedence, and meats and full cups;'
+
+and in honouring them, we shall be at the same time training them.
+
+That, he replied, is excellent.
+
+Yes, I said; and when a man dies gloriously in war shall we not say, in
+the first place, that he is of the golden race?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Nay, have we not the authority of Hesiod for affirming that when they
+are dead
+
+'They are holy angels upon the earth, authors of good, averters of evil,
+the guardians of speech-gifted men'?
+
+Yes; and we accept his authority.
+
+We must learn of the god how we are to order the sepulture of divine and
+heroic personages, and what is to be their special distinction; and we
+must do as he bids?
+
+By all means.
+
+And in ages to come we will reverence them and kneel before their
+sepulchres as at the graves of heroes. And not only they but any who are
+deemed pre-eminently good, whether they die from age, or in any other
+way, shall be admitted to the same honours.
+
+That is very right, he said.
+
+Next, how shall our soldiers treat their enemies? What about this?
+
+In what respect do you mean?
+
+First of all, in regard to slavery? Do you think it right that Hellenes
+should enslave Hellenic States, or allow others to enslave them, if
+they can help? Should not their custom be to spare them, considering
+the danger which there is that the whole race may one day fall under the
+yoke of the barbarians?
+
+To spare them is infinitely better.
+
+Then no Hellene should be owned by them as a slave; that is a rule which
+they will observe and advise the other Hellenes to observe.
+
+Certainly, he said; they will in this way be united against the
+barbarians and will keep their hands off one another.
+
+Next as to the slain; ought the conquerors, I said, to take anything
+but their armour? Does not the practice of despoiling an enemy afford
+an excuse for not facing the battle? Cowards skulk about the dead,
+pretending that they are fulfilling a duty, and many an army before now
+has been lost from this love of plunder.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is there not illiberality and avarice in robbing a corpse, and also
+a degree of meanness and womanishness in making an enemy of the dead
+body when the real enemy has flown away and left only his fighting
+gear behind him,--is not this rather like a dog who cannot get at his
+assailant, quarrelling with the stones which strike him instead?
+
+Very like a dog, he said.
+
+Then we must abstain from spoiling the dead or hindering their burial?
+
+Yes, he replied, we most certainly must.
+
+Neither shall we offer up arms at the temples of the gods, least of all
+the arms of Hellenes, if we care to maintain good feeling with other
+Hellenes; and, indeed, we have reason to fear that the offering of
+spoils taken from kinsmen may be a pollution unless commanded by the god
+himself?
+
+Very true.
+
+Again, as to the devastation of Hellenic territory or the burning of
+houses, what is to be the practice?
+
+May I have the pleasure, he said, of hearing your opinion?
+
+Both should be forbidden, in my judgment; I would take the annual
+produce and no more. Shall I tell you why?
+
+Pray do.
+
+Why, you see, there is a difference in the names 'discord' and 'war,'
+and I imagine that there is also a difference in their natures; the one
+is expressive of what is internal and domestic, the other of what is
+external and foreign; and the first of the two is termed discord, and
+only the second, war.
+
+That is a very proper distinction, he replied.
+
+And may I not observe with equal propriety that the Hellenic race is all
+united together by ties of blood and friendship, and alien and strange
+to the barbarians?
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+And therefore when Hellenes fight with barbarians and barbarians with
+Hellenes, they will be described by us as being at war when they fight,
+and by nature enemies, and this kind of antagonism should be called war;
+but when Hellenes fight with one another we shall say that Hellas is
+then in a state of disorder and discord, they being by nature friends;
+and such enmity is to be called discord.
+
+I agree.
+
+Consider then, I said, when that which we have acknowledged to be
+discord occurs, and a city is divided, if both parties destroy the lands
+and burn the houses of one another, how wicked does the strife appear!
+No true lover of his country would bring himself to tear in pieces his
+own nurse and mother: There might be reason in the conqueror depriving
+the conquered of their harvest, but still they would have the idea of
+peace in their hearts and would not mean to go on fighting for ever.
+
+Yes, he said, that is a better temper than the other.
+
+And will not the city, which you are founding, be an Hellenic city?
+
+It ought to be, he replied.
+
+Then will not the citizens be good and civilized?
+
+Yes, very civilized.
+
+And will they not be lovers of Hellas, and think of Hellas as their own
+land, and share in the common temples?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+And any difference which arises among them will be regarded by them as
+discord only--a quarrel among friends, which is not to be called a war?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then they will quarrel as those who intend some day to be reconciled?
+
+Certainly.
+
+They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy their
+opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?
+
+Just so.
+
+And as they are Hellenes themselves they will not devastate Hellas, nor
+will they burn houses, nor ever suppose that the whole population of a
+city--men, women, and children--are equally their enemies, for they know
+that the guilt of war is always confined to a few persons and that the
+many are their friends. And for all these reasons they will be unwilling
+to waste their lands and rase their houses; their enmity to them will
+only last until the many innocent sufferers have compelled the guilty
+few to give satisfaction?
+
+I agree, he said, that our citizens should thus deal with their Hellenic
+enemies; and with barbarians as the Hellenes now deal with one another.
+
+Then let us enact this law also for our guardians:--that they are
+neither to devastate the lands of Hellenes nor to burn their houses.
+
+Agreed; and we may agree also in thinking that these, like all our
+previous enactments, are very good.
+
+But still I must say, Socrates, that if you are allowed to go on in
+this way you will entirely forget the other question which at the
+commencement of this discussion you thrust aside:--Is such an order of
+things possible, and how, if at all? For I am quite ready to acknowledge
+that the plan which you propose, if only feasible, would do all sorts of
+good to the State. I will add, what you have omitted, that your citizens
+will be the bravest of warriors, and will never leave their ranks, for
+they will all know one another, and each will call the other father,
+brother, son; and if you suppose the women to join their armies, whether
+in the same rank or in the rear, either as a terror to the enemy, or as
+auxiliaries in case of need, I know that they will then be absolutely
+invincible; and there are many domestic advantages which might also be
+mentioned and which I also fully acknowledge: but, as I admit all these
+advantages and as many more as you please, if only this State of yours
+were to come into existence, we need say no more about them; assuming
+then the existence of the State, let us now turn to the question of
+possibility and ways and means--the rest may be left.
+
+If I loiter for a moment, you instantly make a raid upon me, I said, and
+have no mercy; I have hardly escaped the first and second waves, and you
+seem not to be aware that you are now bringing upon me the third, which
+is the greatest and heaviest. When you have seen and heard the third
+wave, I think you will be more considerate and will acknowledge
+that some fear and hesitation was natural respecting a proposal so
+extraordinary as that which I have now to state and investigate.
+
+The more appeals of this sort which you make, he said, the more
+determined are we that you shall tell us how such a State is possible:
+speak out and at once.
+
+Let me begin by reminding you that we found our way hither in the search
+after justice and injustice.
+
+True, he replied; but what of that?
+
+I was only going to ask whether, if we have discovered them, we are to
+require that the just man should in nothing fail of absolute justice; or
+may we be satisfied with an approximation, and the attainment in him of
+a higher degree of justice than is to be found in other men?
+
+The approximation will be enough.
+
+We were enquiring into the nature of absolute justice and into the
+character of the perfectly just, and into injustice and the perfectly
+unjust, that we might have an ideal. We were to look at these in order
+that we might judge of our own happiness and unhappiness according to
+the standard which they exhibited and the degree in which we resembled
+them, but not with any view of showing that they could exist in fact.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Would a painter be any the worse because, after having delineated with
+consummate art an ideal of a perfectly beautiful man, he was unable to
+show that any such man could ever have existed?
+
+He would be none the worse.
+
+Well, and were we not creating an ideal of a perfect State?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And is our theory a worse theory because we are unable to prove the
+possibility of a city being ordered in the manner described?
+
+Surely not, he replied.
+
+That is the truth, I said. But if, at your request, I am to try and show
+how and under what conditions the possibility is highest, I must ask
+you, having this in view, to repeat your former admissions.
+
+What admissions?
+
+I want to know whether ideals are ever fully realized in language?
+Does not the word express more than the fact, and must not the actual,
+whatever a man may think, always, in the nature of things, fall short of
+the truth? What do you say?
+
+I agree.
+
+Then you must not insist on my proving that the actual State will in
+every respect coincide with the ideal: if we are only able to discover
+how a city may be governed nearly as we proposed, you will admit that we
+have discovered the possibility which you demand; and will be contented.
+I am sure that I should be contented--will not you?
+
+Yes, I will.
+
+Let me next endeavour to show what is that fault in States which is the
+cause of their present maladministration, and what is the least change
+which will enable a State to pass into the truer form; and let the
+change, if possible, be of one thing only, or, if not, of two; at any
+rate, let the changes be as few and slight as possible.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+I think, I said, that there might be a reform of the State if only one
+change were made, which is not a slight or easy though still a possible
+one.
+
+What is it? he said.
+
+Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I liken to the greatest of
+the waves; yet shall the word be spoken, even though the wave break and
+drown me in laughter and dishonour; and do you mark my words.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I said: 'Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this
+world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness
+and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either
+to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities
+will never have rest from their evils,--nor the human race, as I
+believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life
+and behold the light of day.' Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon,
+which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant;
+for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness
+private or public is indeed a hard thing.
+
+Socrates, what do you mean? I would have you consider that the word
+which you have uttered is one at which numerous persons, and very
+respectable persons too, in a figure pulling off their coats all in a
+moment, and seizing any weapon that comes to hand, will run at you might
+and main, before you know where you are, intending to do heaven knows
+what; and if you don't prepare an answer, and put yourself in motion,
+you will be 'pared by their fine wits,' and no mistake.
+
+You got me into the scrape, I said.
+
+And I was quite right; however, I will do all I can to get you out of
+it; but I can only give you good-will and good advice, and, perhaps, I
+may be able to fit answers to your questions better than another--that
+is all. And now, having such an auxiliary, you must do your best to show
+the unbelievers that you are right.
+
+I ought to try, I said, since you offer me such invaluable assistance.
+And I think that, if there is to be a chance of our escaping, we must
+explain to them whom we mean when we say that philosophers are to rule
+in the State; then we shall be able to defend ourselves: There will be
+discovered to be some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be
+leaders in the State; and others who are not born to be philosophers,
+and are meant to be followers rather than leaders.
+
+Then now for a definition, he said.
+
+Follow me, I said, and I hope that I may in some way or other be able to
+give you a satisfactory explanation.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I dare say that you remember, and therefore I need not remind you, that
+a lover, if he is worthy of the name, ought to show his love, not to
+some one part of that which he loves, but to the whole.
+
+I really do not understand, and therefore beg of you to assist my
+memory.
+
+Another person, I said, might fairly reply as you do; but a man of
+pleasure like yourself ought to know that all who are in the flower of
+youth do somehow or other raise a pang or emotion in a lover's breast,
+and are thought by him to be worthy of his affectionate regards. Is not
+this a way which you have with the fair: one has a snub nose, and you
+praise his charming face; the hook-nose of another has, you say, a
+royal look; while he who is neither snub nor hooked has the grace of
+regularity: the dark visage is manly, the fair are children of the gods;
+and as to the sweet 'honey pale,' as they are called, what is the very
+name but the invention of a lover who talks in diminutives, and is not
+averse to paleness if appearing on the cheek of youth? In a word, there
+is no excuse which you will not make, and nothing which you will not
+say, in order not to lose a single flower that blooms in the spring-time
+of youth.
+
+If you make me an authority in matters of love, for the sake of the
+argument, I assent.
+
+And what do you say of lovers of wine? Do you not see them doing the
+same? They are glad of any pretext of drinking any wine.
+
+Very good.
+
+And the same is true of ambitious men; if they cannot command an army,
+they are willing to command a file; and if they cannot be honoured by
+really great and important persons, they are glad to be honoured by
+lesser and meaner people,--but honour of some kind they must have.
+
+Exactly.
+
+Once more let me ask: Does he who desires any class of goods, desire the
+whole class or a part only?
+
+The whole.
+
+And may we not say of the philosopher that he is a lover, not of a part
+of wisdom only, but of the whole?
+
+Yes, of the whole.
+
+And he who dislikes learning, especially in youth, when he has no power
+of judging what is good and what is not, such an one we maintain not
+to be a philosopher or a lover of knowledge, just as he who refuses his
+food is not hungry, and may be said to have a bad appetite and not a
+good one?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Whereas he who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and who is
+curious to learn and is never satisfied, may be justly termed a
+philosopher? Am I not right?
+
+Glaucon said: If curiosity makes a philosopher, you will find many a
+strange being will have a title to the name. All the lovers of sights
+have a delight in learning, and must therefore be included. Musical
+amateurs, too, are a folk strangely out of place among philosophers, for
+they are the last persons in the world who would come to anything like
+a philosophical discussion, if they could help, while they run about at
+the Dionysiac festivals as if they had let out their ears to hear every
+chorus; whether the performance is in town or country--that makes no
+difference--they are there. Now are we to maintain that all these and
+any who have similar tastes, as well as the professors of quite minor
+arts, are philosophers?
+
+Certainly not, I replied; they are only an imitation.
+
+He said: Who then are the true philosophers?
+
+Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth.
+
+That is also good, he said; but I should like to know what you mean?
+
+To another, I replied, I might have a difficulty in explaining; but I am
+sure that you will admit a proposition which I am about to make.
+
+What is the proposition?
+
+That since beauty is the opposite of ugliness, they are two?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And inasmuch as they are two, each of them is one?
+
+True again.
+
+And of just and unjust, good and evil, and of every other class, the
+same remark holds: taken singly, each of them is one; but from the
+various combinations of them with actions and things and with one
+another, they are seen in all sorts of lights and appear many?
+
+Very true.
+
+And this is the distinction which I draw between the sight-loving,
+art-loving, practical class and those of whom I am speaking, and who are
+alone worthy of the name of philosophers.
+
+How do you distinguish them? he said.
+
+The lovers of sounds and sights, I replied, are, as I conceive, fond of
+fine tones and colours and forms and all the artificial products that
+are made out of them, but their mind is incapable of seeing or loving
+absolute beauty.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+Few are they who are able to attain to the sight of this.
+
+Very true.
+
+And he who, having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute
+beauty, or who, if another lead him to a knowledge of that beauty is
+unable to follow--of such an one I ask, Is he awake or in a dream
+only? Reflect: is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens
+dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place of the real object?
+
+I should certainly say that such an one was dreaming.
+
+But take the case of the other, who recognises the existence of absolute
+beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which
+participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the
+idea nor the idea in the place of the objects--is he a dreamer, or is he
+awake?
+
+He is wide awake.
+
+And may we not say that the mind of the one who knows has knowledge, and
+that the mind of the other, who opines only, has opinion?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But suppose that the latter should quarrel with us and dispute our
+statement, can we administer any soothing cordial or advice to him,
+without revealing to him that there is sad disorder in his wits?
+
+We must certainly offer him some good advice, he replied.
+
+Come, then, and let us think of something to say to him. Shall we begin
+by assuring him that he is welcome to any knowledge which he may have,
+and that we are rejoiced at his having it? But we should like to ask him
+a question: Does he who has knowledge know something or nothing? (You
+must answer for him.)
+
+I answer that he knows something.
+
+Something that is or is not?
+
+Something that is; for how can that which is not ever be known?
+
+And are we assured, after looking at the matter from many points of
+view, that absolute being is or may be absolutely known, but that the
+utterly non-existent is utterly unknown?
+
+Nothing can be more certain.
+
+Good. But if there be anything which is of such a nature as to be and
+not to be, that will have a place intermediate between pure being and
+the absolute negation of being?
+
+Yes, between them.
+
+And, as knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to
+not-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has
+to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and
+knowledge, if there be such?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Do we admit the existence of opinion?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+As being the same with knowledge, or another faculty?
+
+Another faculty.
+
+Then opinion and knowledge have to do with different kinds of matter
+corresponding to this difference of faculties?
+
+Yes.
+
+And knowledge is relative to being and knows being. But before I proceed
+further I will make a division.
+
+What division?
+
+I will begin by placing faculties in a class by themselves: they are
+powers in us, and in all other things, by which we do as we do. Sight
+and hearing, for example, I should call faculties. Have I clearly
+explained the class which I mean?
+
+Yes, I quite understand.
+
+Then let me tell you my view about them. I do not see them, and
+therefore the distinctions of figure, colour, and the like, which enable
+me to discern the differences of some things, do not apply to them. In
+speaking of a faculty I think only of its sphere and its result; and
+that which has the same sphere and the same result I call the same
+faculty, but that which has another sphere and another result I call
+different. Would that be your way of speaking?
+
+Yes.
+
+And will you be so very good as to answer one more question? Would you
+say that knowledge is a faculty, or in what class would you place it?
+
+Certainly knowledge is a faculty, and the mightiest of all faculties.
+
+And is opinion also a faculty?
+
+Certainly, he said; for opinion is that with which we are able to form
+an opinion.
+
+And yet you were acknowledging a little while ago that knowledge is not
+the same as opinion?
+
+Why, yes, he said: how can any reasonable being ever identify that which
+is infallible with that which errs?
+
+An excellent answer, proving, I said, that we are quite conscious of a
+distinction between them.
+
+Yes.
+
+Then knowledge and opinion having distinct powers have also distinct
+spheres or subject-matters?
+
+That is certain.
+
+Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge, and knowledge is to
+know the nature of being?
+
+Yes.
+
+And opinion is to have an opinion?
+
+Yes.
+
+And do we know what we opine? or is the subject-matter of opinion the
+same as the subject-matter of knowledge?
+
+Nay, he replied, that has been already disproven; if difference in
+faculty implies difference in the sphere or subject-matter, and if, as
+we were saying, opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties, then the
+sphere of knowledge and of opinion cannot be the same.
+
+Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must be
+the subject-matter of opinion?
+
+Yes, something else.
+
+Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how
+can there be an opinion at all about not-being? Reflect: when a man
+has an opinion, has he not an opinion about something? Can he have an
+opinion which is an opinion about nothing?
+
+Impossible.
+
+He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one thing?
+
+Yes.
+
+And not-being is not one thing but, properly speaking, nothing?
+
+True.
+
+Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative; of
+being, knowledge?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being?
+
+Not with either.
+
+And can therefore neither be ignorance nor knowledge?
+
+That seems to be true.
+
+But is opinion to be sought without and beyond either of them, in
+a greater clearness than knowledge, or in a greater darkness than
+ignorance?
+
+In neither.
+
+Then I suppose that opinion appears to you to be darker than knowledge,
+but lighter than ignorance?
+
+Both; and in no small degree.
+
+And also to be within and between them?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then you would infer that opinion is intermediate?
+
+No question.
+
+But were we not saying before, that if anything appeared to be of a sort
+which is and is not at the same time, that sort of thing would appear
+also to lie in the interval between pure being and absolute not-being;
+and that the corresponding faculty is neither knowledge nor ignorance,
+but will be found in the interval between them?
+
+True.
+
+And in that interval there has now been discovered something which we
+call opinion?
+
+There has.
+
+Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally
+of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed
+either, pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we may
+truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper
+faculty,--the extremes to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to
+the faculty of the mean.
+
+True.
+
+This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that
+there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty--in whose opinion
+the beautiful is the manifold--he, I say, your lover of beautiful
+sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the
+just is one, or that anything is one--to him I would appeal, saying,
+Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these
+beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the
+just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not
+also be unholy?
+
+No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly;
+and the same is true of the rest.
+
+And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?--doubles, that
+is, of one thing, and halves of another?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will
+not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?
+
+True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of
+them.
+
+And can any one of those many things which are called by particular
+names be said to be this rather than not to be this?
+
+He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts
+or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with
+what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat
+was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also
+a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind,
+either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.
+
+Then what will you do with them? I said. Can they have a better place
+than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in greater
+darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and existence
+than being.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the
+multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are
+tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and
+pure not-being?
+
+We have.
+
+Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we might
+find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter of
+knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained by
+the intermediate faculty.
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see absolute
+beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither; who see the
+many just, and not absolute justice, and the like,--such persons may be
+said to have opinion but not knowledge?
+
+That is certain.
+
+But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to
+know, and not to have opinion only?
+
+Neither can that be denied.
+
+The one love and embrace the subjects of knowledge, the other those of
+opinion? The latter are the same, as I dare say you will remember, who
+listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colours, but would not
+tolerate the existence of absolute beauty.
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of
+opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with
+us for thus describing them?
+
+I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is
+true.
+
+But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of
+wisdom and not lovers of opinion.
+
+Assuredly.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI.
+
+And thus, Glaucon, after the argument has gone a weary way, the true and
+the false philosophers have at length appeared in view.
+
+I do not think, he said, that the way could have been shortened.
+
+I suppose not, I said; and yet I believe that we might have had a better
+view of both of them if the discussion could have been confined to this
+one subject and if there were not many other questions awaiting us,
+which he who desires to see in what respect the life of the just differs
+from that of the unjust must consider.
+
+And what is the next question? he asked.
+
+Surely, I said, the one which follows next in order. Inasmuch as
+philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable,
+and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not
+philosophers, I must ask you which of the two classes should be the
+rulers of our State?
+
+And how can we rightly answer that question?
+
+Whichever of the two are best able to guard the laws and institutions of
+our State--let them be our guardians.
+
+Very good.
+
+Neither, I said, can there be any question that the guardian who is to
+keep anything should have eyes rather than no eyes?
+
+There can be no question of that.
+
+And are not those who are verily and indeed wanting in the knowledge
+of the true being of each thing, and who have in their souls no clear
+pattern, and are unable as with a painter's eye to look at the absolute
+truth and to that original to repair, and having perfect vision of the
+other world to order the laws about beauty, goodness, justice in this,
+if not already ordered, and to guard and preserve the order of them--are
+not such persons, I ask, simply blind?
+
+Truly, he replied, they are much in that condition.
+
+And shall they be our guardians when there are others who, besides being
+their equals in experience and falling short of them in no particular of
+virtue, also know the very truth of each thing?
+
+There can be no reason, he said, for rejecting those who have this
+greatest of all great qualities; they must always have the first place
+unless they fail in some other respect.
+
+Suppose then, I said, that we determine how far they can unite this and
+the other excellences.
+
+By all means.
+
+In the first place, as we began by observing, the nature of the
+philosopher has to be ascertained. We must come to an understanding
+about him, and, when we have done so, then, if I am not mistaken, we
+shall also acknowledge that such an union of qualities is possible, and
+that those in whom they are united, and those only, should be rulers in
+the State.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+Let us suppose that philosophical minds always love knowledge of a sort
+which shows them the eternal nature not varying from generation and
+corruption.
+
+Agreed.
+
+And further, I said, let us agree that they are lovers of all true
+being; there is no part whether greater or less, or more or less
+honourable, which they are willing to renounce; as we said before of the
+lover and the man of ambition.
+
+True.
+
+And if they are to be what we were describing, is there not another
+quality which they should also possess?
+
+What quality?
+
+Truthfulness: they will never intentionally receive into their mind
+falsehood, which is their detestation, and they will love the truth.
+
+Yes, that may be safely affirmed of them.
+
+'May be,' my friend, I replied, is not the word; say rather 'must be
+affirmed:' for he whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving
+all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.
+
+Right, he said.
+
+And is there anything more akin to wisdom than truth?
+
+How can there be?
+
+Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood?
+
+Never.
+
+The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as
+in him lies, desire all truth?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+But then again, as we know by experience, he whose desires are strong
+in one direction will have them weaker in others; they will be like a
+stream which has been drawn off into another channel.
+
+True.
+
+He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be
+absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily
+pleasure--I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one.
+
+That is most certain.
+
+Such an one is sure to be temperate and the reverse of covetous; for the
+motives which make another man desirous of having and spending, have no
+place in his character.
+
+Very true.
+
+Another criterion of the philosophical nature has also to be considered.
+
+What is that?
+
+There should be no secret corner of illiberality; nothing can be more
+antagonistic than meanness to a soul which is ever longing after the
+whole of things both divine and human.
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+Then how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all
+time and all existence, think much of human life?
+
+He cannot.
+
+Or can such an one account death fearful?
+
+No indeed.
+
+Then the cowardly and mean nature has no part in true philosophy?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or again: can he who is harmoniously constituted, who is not covetous or
+mean, or a boaster, or a coward--can he, I say, ever be unjust or hard
+in his dealings?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then you will soon observe whether a man is just and gentle, or rude
+and unsociable; these are the signs which distinguish even in youth the
+philosophical nature from the unphilosophical.
+
+True.
+
+There is another point which should be remarked.
+
+What point?
+
+Whether he has or has not a pleasure in learning; for no one will love
+that which gives him pain, and in which after much toil he makes little
+progress.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And again, if he is forgetful and retains nothing of what he learns,
+will he not be an empty vessel?
+
+That is certain.
+
+Labouring in vain, he must end in hating himself and his fruitless
+occupation? Yes.
+
+Then a soul which forgets cannot be ranked among genuine philosophic
+natures; we must insist that the philosopher should have a good memory?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And once more, the inharmonious and unseemly nature can only tend to
+disproportion?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And do you consider truth to be akin to proportion or to disproportion?
+
+To proportion.
+
+Then, besides other qualities, we must try to find a naturally
+well-proportioned and gracious mind, which will move spontaneously
+towards the true being of everything.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating, go
+together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which is
+to have a full and perfect participation of being?
+
+They are absolutely necessary, he replied.
+
+And must not that be a blameless study which he only can pursue who has
+the gift of a good memory, and is quick to learn,--noble, gracious, the
+friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance, who are his kindred?
+
+The god of jealousy himself, he said, could find no fault with such a
+study.
+
+And to men like him, I said, when perfected by years and education, and
+to these only you will entrust the State.
+
+Here Adeimantus interposed and said: To these statements, Socrates, no
+one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling
+passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led
+astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of
+skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and
+at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty
+overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down.
+And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their
+more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find
+themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new
+game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in
+the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring.
+For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able
+to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the
+votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth
+as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most
+of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those
+who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by
+the very study which you extol.
+
+Well, and do you think that those who say so are wrong?
+
+I cannot tell, he replied; but I should like to know what is your
+opinion.
+
+Hear my answer; I am of opinion that they are quite right.
+
+Then how can you be justified in saying that cities will not cease from
+evil until philosophers rule in them, when philosophers are acknowledged
+by us to be of no use to them?
+
+You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a
+parable.
+
+Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all
+accustomed, I suppose.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you are vastly amused at having plunged me into
+such a hopeless discussion; but now hear the parable, and then you will
+be still more amused at the meagreness of my imagination: for the manner
+in which the best men are treated in their own States is so grievous
+that no single thing on earth is comparable to it; and therefore, if
+I am to plead their cause, I must have recourse to fiction, and put
+together a figure made up of many things, like the fabulous unions of
+goats and stags which are found in pictures. Imagine then a fleet or a
+ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of
+the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight,
+and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are
+quarrelling with one another about the steering--every one is of opinion
+that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of
+navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will
+further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in
+pieces any one who says the contrary. They throng about the captain,
+begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time
+they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the
+others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble
+captain's senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take
+possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating
+and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such manner as might be
+expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in
+their plot for getting the ship out of the captain's hands into their
+own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of
+sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they
+call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention
+to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else
+belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command
+of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other
+people like or not--the possibility of this union of authority with the
+steerer's art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been
+made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of
+mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be
+regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a
+good-for-nothing?
+
+Of course, said Adeimantus.
+
+Then you will hardly need, I said, to hear the interpretation of the
+figure, which describes the true philosopher in his relation to the
+State; for you understand already.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then suppose you now take this parable to the gentleman who is surprised
+at finding that philosophers have no honour in their cities; explain
+it to him and try to convince him that their having honour would be far
+more extraordinary.
+
+I will.
+
+Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be
+useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to
+attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them,
+and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be
+commanded by him--that is not the order of nature; neither are 'the wise
+to go to the doors of the rich'--the ingenious author of this saying
+told a lie--but the truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he
+be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to
+be governed, to him who is able to govern. The ruler who is good for
+anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although
+the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp; they may be
+justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those
+who are called by them good-for-nothings and star-gazers.
+
+Precisely so, he said.
+
+For these reasons, and among men like these, philosophy, the noblest
+pursuit of all, is not likely to be much esteemed by those of the
+opposite faction; not that the greatest and most lasting injury is done
+to her by her opponents, but by her own professing followers, the same
+of whom you suppose the accuser to say, that the greater number of them
+are arrant rogues, and the best are useless; in which opinion I agreed.
+
+Yes.
+
+And the reason why the good are useless has now been explained?
+
+True.
+
+Then shall we proceed to show that the corruption of the majority is
+also unavoidable, and that this is not to be laid to the charge of
+philosophy any more than the other?
+
+By all means.
+
+And let us ask and answer in turn, first going back to the description
+of the gentle and noble nature. Truth, as you will remember, was his
+leader, whom he followed always and in all things; failing in this, he
+was an impostor, and had no part or lot in true philosophy.
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Well, and is not this one quality, to mention no others, greatly at
+variance with present notions of him?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And have we not a right to say in his defence, that the true lover of
+knowledge is always striving after being--that is his nature; he will
+not rest in the multiplicity of individuals which is an appearance only,
+but will go on--the keen edge will not be blunted, nor the force of his
+desire abate until he have attained the knowledge of the true nature
+of every essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul, and by
+that power drawing near and mingling and becoming incorporate with very
+being, having begotten mind and truth, he will have knowledge and will
+live and grow truly, and then, and not till then, will he cease from his
+travail.
+
+Nothing, he said, can be more just than such a description of him.
+
+And will the love of a lie be any part of a philosopher's nature? Will
+he not utterly hate a lie?
+
+He will.
+
+And when truth is the captain, we cannot suspect any evil of the band
+which he leads?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Justice and health of mind will be of the company, and temperance will
+follow after?
+
+True, he replied.
+
+Neither is there any reason why I should again set in array the
+philosopher's virtues, as you will doubtless remember that courage,
+magnificence, apprehension, memory, were his natural gifts. And you
+objected that, although no one could deny what I then said, still, if
+you leave words and look at facts, the persons who are thus described
+are some of them manifestly useless, and the greater number utterly
+depraved; we were then led to enquire into the grounds of these
+accusations, and have now arrived at the point of asking why are
+the majority bad, which question of necessity brought us back to the
+examination and definition of the true philosopher.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And we have next to consider the corruptions of the philosophic nature,
+why so many are spoiled and so few escape spoiling--I am speaking of
+those who were said to be useless but not wicked--and, when we have done
+with them, we will speak of the imitators of philosophy, what manner of
+men are they who aspire after a profession which is above them and of
+which they are unworthy, and then, by their manifold inconsistencies,
+bring upon philosophy, and upon all philosophers, that universal
+reprobation of which we speak.
+
+What are these corruptions? he said.
+
+I will see if I can explain them to you. Every one will admit that a
+nature having in perfection all the qualities which we required in a
+philosopher, is a rare plant which is seldom seen among men.
+
+Rare indeed.
+
+And what numberless and powerful causes tend to destroy these rare
+natures!
+
+What causes?
+
+In the first place there are their own virtues, their courage,
+temperance, and the rest of them, every one of which praiseworthy
+qualities (and this is a most singular circumstance) destroys and
+distracts from philosophy the soul which is the possessor of them.
+
+That is very singular, he replied.
+
+Then there are all the ordinary goods of life--beauty, wealth, strength,
+rank, and great connections in the State--you understand the sort of
+things--these also have a corrupting and distracting effect.
+
+I understand; but I should like to know more precisely what you mean
+about them.
+
+Grasp the truth as a whole, I said, and in the right way; you will then
+have no difficulty in apprehending the preceding remarks, and they will
+no longer appear strange to you.
+
+And how am I to do so? he asked.
+
+Why, I said, we know that all germs or seeds, whether vegetable or
+animal, when they fail to meet with proper nutriment or climate or soil,
+in proportion to their vigour, are all the more sensitive to the want of
+a suitable environment, for evil is a greater enemy to what is good than
+to what is not.
+
+Very true.
+
+There is reason in supposing that the finest natures, when under alien
+conditions, receive more injury than the inferior, because the contrast
+is greater.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they
+are ill-educated, become pre-eminently bad? Do not great crimes and
+the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by
+education rather than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are
+scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?
+
+There I think that you are right.
+
+And our philosopher follows the same analogy--he is like a plant which,
+having proper nurture, must necessarily grow and mature into all virtue,
+but, if sown and planted in an alien soil, becomes the most noxious of
+all weeds, unless he be preserved by some divine power. Do you really
+think, as people so often say, that our youth are corrupted by Sophists,
+or that private teachers of the art corrupt them in any degree worth
+speaking of? Are not the public who say these things the greatest of all
+Sophists? And do they not educate to perfection young and old, men and
+women alike, and fashion them after their own hearts?
+
+When is this accomplished? he said.
+
+When they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in
+a court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular resort,
+and there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which are
+being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both,
+shouting and clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the
+place in which they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise or
+blame--at such a time will not a young man's heart, as they say, leap
+within him? Will any private training enable him to stand firm against
+the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be carried away
+by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the
+public in general have--he will do as they do, and as they are, such
+will he be?
+
+Yes, Socrates; necessity will compel him.
+
+And yet, I said, there is a still greater necessity, which has not been
+mentioned.
+
+What is that?
+
+The gentle force of attainder or confiscation or death, which, as you
+are aware, these new Sophists and educators, who are the public, apply
+when their words are powerless.
+
+Indeed they do; and in right good earnest.
+
+Now what opinion of any other Sophist, or of any private person, can be
+expected to overcome in such an unequal contest?
+
+None, he replied.
+
+No, indeed, I said, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly;
+there neither is, nor has been, nor is ever likely to be, any different
+type of character which has had no other training in virtue but that
+which is supplied by public opinion--I speak, my friend, of human virtue
+only; what is more than human, as the proverb says, is not included:
+for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of
+governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power
+of God, as we may truly say.
+
+I quite assent, he replied.
+
+Then let me crave your assent also to a further observation.
+
+What are you going to say?
+
+Why, that all those mercenary individuals, whom the many call Sophists
+and whom they deem to be their adversaries, do, in fact, teach nothing
+but the opinion of the many, that is to say, the opinions of their
+assemblies; and this is their wisdom. I might compare them to a man who
+should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is
+fed by him--he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what
+times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what
+is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another
+utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further,
+that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become perfect in
+all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or
+art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what
+he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but
+calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just
+or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great
+brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights and
+evil to be that which he dislikes; and he can give no other account
+of them except that the just and noble are the necessary, having never
+himself seen, and having no power of explaining to others the nature
+of either, or the difference between them, which is immense. By heaven,
+would not such an one be a rare educator?
+
+Indeed he would.
+
+And in what way does he who thinks that wisdom is the discernment of
+the tempers and tastes of the motley multitude, whether in painting
+or music, or, finally, in politics, differ from him whom I have been
+describing? For when a man consorts with the many, and exhibits to
+them his poem or other work of art or the service which he has done
+the State, making them his judges when he is not obliged, the so-called
+necessity of Diomede will oblige him to produce whatever they
+praise. And yet the reasons are utterly ludicrous which they give in
+confirmation of their own notions about the honourable and good. Did you
+ever hear any of them which were not?
+
+No, nor am I likely to hear.
+
+You recognise the truth of what I have been saying? Then let me ask you
+to consider further whether the world will ever be induced to believe in
+the existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many beautiful, or
+of the absolute in each kind rather than of the many in each kind?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of the
+world?
+
+They must.
+
+And of individuals who consort with the mob and seek to please them?
+
+That is evident.
+
+Then, do you see any way in which the philosopher can be preserved in
+his calling to the end? and remember what we were saying of him, that
+he was to have quickness and memory and courage and magnificence--these
+were admitted by us to be the true philosopher's gifts.
+
+Yes.
+
+Will not such an one from his early childhood be in all things first
+among all, especially if his bodily endowments are like his mental ones?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And his friends and fellow-citizens will want to use him as he gets
+older for their own purposes?
+
+No question.
+
+Falling at his feet, they will make requests to him and do him honour
+and flatter him, because they want to get into their hands now, the
+power which he will one day possess.
+
+That often happens, he said.
+
+And what will a man such as he is be likely to do under such
+circumstances, especially if he be a citizen of a great city, rich
+and noble, and a tall proper youth? Will he not be full of boundless
+aspirations, and fancy himself able to manage the affairs of Hellenes
+and of barbarians, and having got such notions into his head will he
+not dilate and elevate himself in the fulness of vain pomp and senseless
+pride?
+
+To be sure he will.
+
+Now, when he is in this state of mind, if some one gently comes to him
+and tells him that he is a fool and must get understanding, which can
+only be got by slaving for it, do you think that, under such adverse
+circumstances, he will be easily induced to listen?
+
+Far otherwise.
+
+And even if there be some one who through inherent goodness or natural
+reasonableness has had his eyes opened a little and is humbled and taken
+captive by philosophy, how will his friends behave when they think that
+they are likely to lose the advantage which they were hoping to reap
+from his companionship? Will they not do and say anything to prevent him
+from yielding to his better nature and to render his teacher powerless,
+using to this end private intrigues as well as public prosecutions?
+
+There can be no doubt of it.
+
+And how can one who is thus circumstanced ever become a philosopher?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then were we not right in saying that even the very qualities which
+make a man a philosopher may, if he be ill-educated, divert him from
+philosophy, no less than riches and their accompaniments and the other
+so-called goods of life?
+
+We were quite right.
+
+Thus, my excellent friend, is brought about all that ruin and failure
+which I have been describing of the natures best adapted to the best of
+all pursuits; they are natures which we maintain to be rare at any time;
+this being the class out of which come the men who are the authors of
+the greatest evil to States and individuals; and also of the greatest
+good when the tide carries them in that direction; but a small man never
+was the doer of any great thing either to individuals or to States.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And so philosophy is left desolate, with her marriage rite incomplete:
+for her own have fallen away and forsaken her, and while they are
+leading a false and unbecoming life, other unworthy persons, seeing that
+she has no kinsmen to be her protectors, enter in and dishonour her; and
+fasten upon her the reproaches which, as you say, her reprovers utter,
+who affirm of her votaries that some are good for nothing, and that the
+greater number deserve the severest punishment.
+
+That is certainly what people say.
+
+Yes; and what else would you expect, I said, when you think of the puny
+creatures who, seeing this land open to them--a land well stocked with
+fair names and showy titles--like prisoners running out of prison into a
+sanctuary, take a leap out of their trades into philosophy; those who
+do so being probably the cleverest hands at their own miserable crafts?
+For, although philosophy be in this evil case, still there remains a
+dignity about her which is not to be found in the arts. And many are
+thus attracted by her whose natures are imperfect and whose souls are
+maimed and disfigured by their meannesses, as their bodies are by their
+trades and crafts. Is not this unavoidable?
+
+Yes.
+
+Are they not exactly like a bald little tinker who has just got out of
+durance and come into a fortune; he takes a bath and puts on a new coat,
+and is decked out as a bridegroom going to marry his master's daughter,
+who is left poor and desolate?
+
+A most exact parallel.
+
+What will be the issue of such marriages? Will they not be vile and
+bastard?
+
+There can be no question of it.
+
+And when persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and
+make an alliance with her who is in a rank above them what sort of
+ideas and opinions are likely to be generated? Will they not be sophisms
+captivating to the ear, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or
+akin to true wisdom?
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disciples of philosophy will be but
+a small remnant: perchance some noble and well-educated person, detained
+by exile in her service, who in the absence of corrupting influences
+remains devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the
+politics of which he contemns and neglects; and there may be a gifted
+few who leave the arts, which they justly despise, and come to her;--or
+peradventure there are some who are restrained by our friend Theages'
+bridle; for everything in the life of Theages conspired to divert him
+from philosophy; but ill-health kept him away from politics. My own case
+of the internal sign is hardly worth mentioning, for rarely, if ever,
+has such a monitor been given to any other man. Those who belong to this
+small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy
+is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they
+know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice
+at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such an one may be compared
+to a man who has fallen among wild beasts--he will not join in the
+wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all
+their fierce natures, and therefore seeing that he would be of no use to
+the State or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw
+away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he
+holds his peace, and goes his own way. He is like one who, in the storm
+of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along, retires
+under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind full of
+wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure
+from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good-will, with
+bright hopes.
+
+Yes, he said, and he will have done a great work before he departs.
+
+A great work--yes; but not the greatest, unless he find a State suitable
+to him; for in a State which is suitable to him, he will have a larger
+growth and be the saviour of his country, as well as of himself.
+
+The causes why philosophy is in such an evil name have now been
+sufficiently explained: the injustice of the charges against her has
+been shown--is there anything more which you wish to say?
+
+Nothing more on that subject, he replied; but I should like to know
+which of the governments now existing is in your opinion the one adapted
+to her.
+
+Not any of them, I said; and that is precisely the accusation which I
+bring against them--not one of them is worthy of the philosophic nature,
+and hence that nature is warped and estranged;--as the exotic seed
+which is sown in a foreign land becomes denaturalized, and is wont to be
+overpowered and to lose itself in the new soil, even so this growth
+of philosophy, instead of persisting, degenerates and receives another
+character. But if philosophy ever finds in the State that perfection
+which she herself is, then will be seen that she is in truth divine, and
+that all other things, whether natures of men or institutions, are but
+human;--and now, I know, that you are going to ask, What that State is:
+
+No, he said; there you are wrong, for I was going to ask another
+question--whether it is the State of which we are the founders and
+inventors, or some other?
+
+Yes, I replied, ours in most respects; but you may remember my saying
+before, that some living authority would always be required in the
+State having the same idea of the constitution which guided you when as
+legislator you were laying down the laws.
+
+That was said, he replied.
+
+Yes, but not in a satisfactory manner; you frightened us by interposing
+objections, which certainly showed that the discussion would be long and
+difficult; and what still remains is the reverse of easy.
+
+What is there remaining?
+
+The question how the study of philosophy may be so ordered as not to be
+the ruin of the State: All great attempts are attended with risk; 'hard
+is the good,' as men say.
+
+Still, he said, let the point be cleared up, and the enquiry will then
+be complete.
+
+I shall not be hindered, I said, by any want of will, but, if at all,
+by a want of power: my zeal you may see for yourselves; and please to
+remark in what I am about to say how boldly and unhesitatingly I declare
+that States should pursue philosophy, not as they do now, but in a
+different spirit.
+
+In what manner?
+
+At present, I said, the students of philosophy are quite young;
+beginning when they are hardly past childhood, they devote only the time
+saved from moneymaking and housekeeping to such pursuits; and even those
+of them who are reputed to have most of the philosophic spirit, when
+they come within sight of the great difficulty of the subject, I mean
+dialectic, take themselves off. In after life when invited by some one
+else, they may, perhaps, go and hear a lecture, and about this they make
+much ado, for philosophy is not considered by them to be their
+proper business: at last, when they grow old, in most cases they are
+extinguished more truly than Heracleitus' sun, inasmuch as they never
+light up again. (Heraclitus said that the sun was extinguished every
+evening and relighted every morning.)
+
+But what ought to be their course?
+
+Just the opposite. In childhood and youth their study, and what
+philosophy they learn, should be suited to their tender years: during
+this period while they are growing up towards manhood, the chief and
+special care should be given to their bodies that they may have them
+to use in the service of philosophy; as life advances and the intellect
+begins to mature, let them increase the gymnastics of the soul; but
+when the strength of our citizens fails and is past civil and military
+duties, then let them range at will and engage in no serious labour,
+as we intend them to live happily here, and to crown this life with a
+similar happiness in another.
+
+How truly in earnest you are, Socrates! he said; I am sure of that; and
+yet most of your hearers, if I am not mistaken, are likely to be still
+more earnest in their opposition to you, and will never be convinced;
+Thrasymachus least of all.
+
+Do not make a quarrel, I said, between Thrasymachus and me, who have
+recently become friends, although, indeed, we were never enemies; for I
+shall go on striving to the utmost until I either convert him and other
+men, or do something which may profit them against the day when they
+live again, and hold the like discourse in another state of existence.
+
+You are speaking of a time which is not very near.
+
+Rather, I replied, of a time which is as nothing in comparison with
+eternity. Nevertheless, I do not wonder that the many refuse to believe;
+for they have never seen that of which we are now speaking realized;
+they have seen only a conventional imitation of philosophy, consisting
+of words artificially brought together, not like these of ours having
+a natural unity. But a human being who in word and work is perfectly
+moulded, as far as he can be, into the proportion and likeness of
+virtue--such a man ruling in a city which bears the same image, they
+have never yet seen, neither one nor many of them--do you think that
+they ever did?
+
+No indeed.
+
+No, my friend, and they have seldom, if ever, heard free and noble
+sentiments; such as men utter when they are earnestly and by every means
+in their power seeking after truth for the sake of knowledge, while
+they look coldly on the subtleties of controversy, of which the end is
+opinion and strife, whether they meet with them in the courts of law or
+in society.
+
+They are strangers, he said, to the words of which you speak.
+
+And this was what we foresaw, and this was the reason why truth forced
+us to admit, not without fear and hesitation, that neither cities nor
+States nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small
+class of philosophers whom we termed useless but not corrupt are
+providentially compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the
+State, and until a like necessity be laid on the State to obey them; or
+until kings, or if not kings, the sons of kings or princes, are divinely
+inspired with a true love of true philosophy. That either or both of
+these alternatives are impossible, I see no reason to affirm: if
+they were so, we might indeed be justly ridiculed as dreamers and
+visionaries. Am I not right?
+
+Quite right.
+
+If then, in the countless ages of the past, or at the present hour in
+some foreign clime which is far away and beyond our ken, the perfected
+philosopher is or has been or hereafter shall be compelled by a superior
+power to have the charge of the State, we are ready to assert to the
+death, that this our constitution has been, and is--yea, and will be
+whenever the Muse of Philosophy is queen. There is no impossibility in
+all this; that there is a difficulty, we acknowledge ourselves.
+
+My opinion agrees with yours, he said.
+
+But do you mean to say that this is not the opinion of the multitude?
+
+I should imagine not, he replied.
+
+O my friend, I said, do not attack the multitude: they will change their
+minds, if, not in an aggressive spirit, but gently and with the view
+of soothing them and removing their dislike of over-education, you show
+them your philosophers as they really are and describe as you were just
+now doing their character and profession, and then mankind will see that
+he of whom you are speaking is not such as they supposed--if they view
+him in this new light, they will surely change their notion of him, and
+answer in another strain. Who can be at enmity with one who loves them,
+who that is himself gentle and free from envy will be jealous of one
+in whom there is no jealousy? Nay, let me answer for you, that in a few
+this harsh temper may be found but not in the majority of mankind.
+
+I quite agree with you, he said.
+
+And do you not also think, as I do, that the harsh feeling which the
+many entertain towards philosophy originates in the pretenders, who rush
+in uninvited, and are always abusing them, and finding fault with them,
+who make persons instead of things the theme of their conversation? and
+nothing can be more unbecoming in philosophers than this.
+
+It is most unbecoming.
+
+For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no
+time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice
+and envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed towards
+things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured
+by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he
+imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform himself. Can a
+man help imitating that with which he holds reverential converse?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the philosopher holding converse with the divine order, becomes
+orderly and divine, as far as the nature of man allows; but like every
+one else, he will suffer from detraction.
+
+Of course.
+
+And if a necessity be laid upon him of fashioning, not only himself,
+but human nature generally, whether in States or individuals, into
+that which he beholds elsewhere, will he, think you, be an unskilful
+artificer of justice, temperance, and every civil virtue?
+
+Anything but unskilful.
+
+And if the world perceives that what we are saying about him is the
+truth, will they be angry with philosophy? Will they disbelieve us, when
+we tell them that no State can be happy which is not designed by artists
+who imitate the heavenly pattern?
+
+They will not be angry if they understand, he said. But how will they
+draw out the plan of which you are speaking?
+
+They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which,
+as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean
+surface. This is no easy task. But whether easy or not, herein will lie
+the difference between them and every other legislator,--they will have
+nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no
+laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface.
+
+They will be very right, he said.
+
+Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the
+constitution?
+
+No doubt.
+
+And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often
+turn their eyes upwards and downwards: I mean that they will first look
+at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human
+copy; and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the
+image of a man; and this they will conceive according to that other
+image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness
+of God.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until
+they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the
+ways of God?
+
+Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture.
+
+And now, I said, are we beginning to persuade those whom you described
+as rushing at us with might and main, that the painter of constitutions
+is such an one as we are praising; at whom they were so very indignant
+because to his hands we committed the State; and are they growing a
+little calmer at what they have just heard?
+
+Much calmer, if there is any sense in them.
+
+Why, where can they still find any ground for objection? Will they doubt
+that the philosopher is a lover of truth and being?
+
+They would not be so unreasonable.
+
+Or that his nature, being such as we have delineated, is akin to the
+highest good?
+
+Neither can they doubt this.
+
+But again, will they tell us that such a nature, placed under favourable
+circumstances, will not be perfectly good and wise if any ever was? Or
+will they prefer those whom we have rejected?
+
+Surely not.
+
+Then will they still be angry at our saying, that, until philosophers
+bear rule, States and individuals will have no rest from evil, nor will
+this our imaginary State ever be realized?
+
+I think that they will be less angry.
+
+Shall we assume that they are not only less angry but quite gentle,
+and that they have been converted and for very shame, if for no other
+reason, cannot refuse to come to terms?
+
+By all means, he said.
+
+Then let us suppose that the reconciliation has been effected. Will any
+one deny the other point, that there may be sons of kings or princes who
+are by nature philosophers?
+
+Surely no man, he said.
+
+And when they have come into being will any one say that they must of
+necessity be destroyed; that they can hardly be saved is not denied even
+by us; but that in the whole course of ages no single one of them can
+escape--who will venture to affirm this?
+
+Who indeed!
+
+But, said I, one is enough; let there be one man who has a city obedient
+to his will, and he might bring into existence the ideal polity about
+which the world is so incredulous.
+
+Yes, one is enough.
+
+The ruler may impose the laws and institutions which we have been
+describing, and the citizens may possibly be willing to obey them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that others should approve, of what we approve, is no miracle or
+impossibility?
+
+I think not.
+
+But we have sufficiently shown, in what has preceded, that all this, if
+only possible, is assuredly for the best.
+
+We have.
+
+And now we say not only that our laws, if they could be enacted, would
+be for the best, but also that the enactment of them, though difficult,
+is not impossible.
+
+Very good.
+
+And so with pain and toil we have reached the end of one subject, but
+more remains to be discussed;--how and by what studies and pursuits will
+the saviours of the constitution be created, and at what ages are they
+to apply themselves to their several studies?
+
+Certainly.
+
+I omitted the troublesome business of the possession of women, and the
+procreation of children, and the appointment of the rulers, because
+I knew that the perfect State would be eyed with jealousy and was
+difficult of attainment; but that piece of cleverness was not of much
+service to me, for I had to discuss them all the same. The women and
+children are now disposed of, but the other question of the rulers must
+be investigated from the very beginning. We were saying, as you will
+remember, that they were to be lovers of their country, tried by the
+test of pleasures and pains, and neither in hardships, nor in dangers,
+nor at any other critical moment were to lose their patriotism--he was
+to be rejected who failed, but he who always came forth pure, like gold
+tried in the refiner's fire, was to be made a ruler, and to receive
+honours and rewards in life and after death. This was the sort of thing
+which was being said, and then the argument turned aside and veiled her
+face; not liking to stir the question which has now arisen.
+
+I perfectly remember, he said.
+
+Yes, my friend, I said, and I then shrank from hazarding the bold
+word; but now let me dare to say--that the perfect guardian must be a
+philosopher.
+
+Yes, he said, let that be affirmed.
+
+And do not suppose that there will be many of them; for the gifts which
+were deemed by us to be essential rarely grow together; they are mostly
+found in shreds and patches.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+You are aware, I replied, that quick intelligence, memory, sagacity,
+cleverness, and similar qualities, do not often grow together, and that
+persons who possess them and are at the same time high-spirited and
+magnanimous are not so constituted by nature as to live orderly and in a
+peaceful and settled manner; they are driven any way by their impulses,
+and all solid principle goes out of them.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+On the other hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended
+upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are
+equally immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are
+always in a torpid state, and are apt to yawn and go to sleep over any
+intellectual toil.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And yet we were saying that both qualities were necessary in those to
+whom the higher education is to be imparted, and who are to share in any
+office or command.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And will they be a class which is rarely found?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+Then the aspirant must not only be tested in those labours and dangers
+and pleasures which we mentioned before, but there is another kind of
+probation which we did not mention--he must be exercised also in many
+kinds of knowledge, to see whether the soul will be able to endure the
+highest of all, or will faint under them, as in any other studies and
+exercises.
+
+Yes, he said, you are quite right in testing him. But what do you mean
+by the highest of all knowledge?
+
+You may remember, I said, that we divided the soul into three parts; and
+distinguished the several natures of justice, temperance, courage, and
+wisdom?
+
+Indeed, he said, if I had forgotten, I should not deserve to hear more.
+
+And do you remember the word of caution which preceded the discussion of
+them?
+
+To what do you refer?
+
+We were saying, if I am not mistaken, that he who wanted to see them in
+their perfect beauty must take a longer and more circuitous way, at
+the end of which they would appear; but that we could add on a popular
+exposition of them on a level with the discussion which had preceded.
+And you replied that such an exposition would be enough for you, and so
+the enquiry was continued in what to me seemed to be a very inaccurate
+manner; whether you were satisfied or not, it is for you to say.
+
+Yes, he said, I thought and the others thought that you gave us a fair
+measure of truth.
+
+But, my friend, I said, a measure of such things which in any degree
+falls short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing
+imperfect is the measure of anything, although persons are too apt to be
+contented and think that they need search no further.
+
+Not an uncommon case when people are indolent.
+
+Yes, I said; and there cannot be any worse fault in a guardian of the
+State and of the laws.
+
+True.
+
+The guardian then, I said, must be required to take the longer circuit,
+and toil at learning as well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach
+the highest knowledge of all which, as we were just now saying, is his
+proper calling.
+
+What, he said, is there a knowledge still higher than this--higher than
+justice and the other virtues?
+
+Yes, I said, there is. And of the virtues too we must behold not the
+outline merely, as at present--nothing short of the most finished
+picture should satisfy us. When little things are elaborated with an
+infinity of pains, in order that they may appear in their full beauty
+and utmost clearness, how ridiculous that we should not think the
+highest truths worthy of attaining the highest accuracy!
+
+A right noble thought; but do you suppose that we shall refrain from
+asking you what is this highest knowledge?
+
+Nay, I said, ask if you will; but I am certain that you have heard the
+answer many times, and now you either do not understand me or, as I
+rather think, you are disposed to be troublesome; for you have often
+been told that the idea of good is the highest knowledge, and that all
+other things become useful and advantageous only by their use of this.
+You can hardly be ignorant that of this I was about to speak, concerning
+which, as you have often heard me say, we know so little; and, without
+which, any other knowledge or possession of any kind will profit us
+nothing. Do you think that the possession of all other things is of
+any value if we do not possess the good? or the knowledge of all other
+things if we have no knowledge of beauty and goodness?
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+You are further aware that most people affirm pleasure to be the good,
+but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you are aware too that the latter cannot explain what they mean by
+knowledge, but are obliged after all to say knowledge of the good?
+
+How ridiculous!
+
+Yes, I said, that they should begin by reproaching us with our ignorance
+of the good, and then presume our knowledge of it--for the good they
+define to be knowledge of the good, just as if we understood them when
+they use the term 'good'--this is of course ridiculous.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+And those who make pleasure their good are in equal perplexity; for they
+are compelled to admit that there are bad pleasures as well as good.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And therefore to acknowledge that bad and good are the same?
+
+True.
+
+There can be no doubt about the numerous difficulties in which this
+question is involved.
+
+There can be none.
+
+Further, do we not see that many are willing to do or to have or to seem
+to be what is just and honourable without the reality; but no one is
+satisfied with the appearance of good--the reality is what they seek; in
+the case of the good, appearance is despised by every one.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Of this then, which every soul of man pursues and makes the end of all
+his actions, having a presentiment that there is such an end, and
+yet hesitating because neither knowing the nature nor having the same
+assurance of this as of other things, and therefore losing whatever
+good there is in other things,--of a principle such and so great as this
+ought the best men in our State, to whom everything is entrusted, to be
+in the darkness of ignorance?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+I am sure, I said, that he who does not know how the beautiful and
+the just are likewise good will be but a sorry guardian of them; and
+I suspect that no one who is ignorant of the good will have a true
+knowledge of them.
+
+That, he said, is a shrewd suspicion of yours.
+
+And if we only have a guardian who has this knowledge our State will be
+perfectly ordered?
+
+Of course, he replied; but I wish that you would tell me whether you
+conceive this supreme principle of the good to be knowledge or pleasure,
+or different from either?
+
+Aye, I said, I knew all along that a fastidious gentleman like you would
+not be contented with the thoughts of other people about these matters.
+
+True, Socrates; but I must say that one who like you has passed a
+lifetime in the study of philosophy should not be always repeating the
+opinions of others, and never telling his own.
+
+Well, but has any one a right to say positively what he does not know?
+
+Not, he said, with the assurance of positive certainty; he has no right
+to do that: but he may say what he thinks, as a matter of opinion.
+
+And do you not know, I said, that all mere opinions are bad, and the
+best of them blind? You would not deny that those who have any true
+notion without intelligence are only like blind men who feel their way
+along the road?
+
+Very true.
+
+And do you wish to behold what is blind and crooked and base, when
+others will tell you of brightness and beauty?
+
+Still, I must implore you, Socrates, said Glaucon, not to turn away just
+as you are reaching the goal; if you will only give such an explanation
+of the good as you have already given of justice and temperance and the
+other virtues, we shall be satisfied.
+
+Yes, my friend, and I shall be at least equally satisfied, but I cannot
+help fearing that I shall fail, and that my indiscreet zeal will bring
+ridicule upon me. No, sweet sirs, let us not at present ask what is the
+actual nature of the good, for to reach what is now in my thoughts
+would be an effort too great for me. But of the child of the good who
+is likest him, I would fain speak, if I could be sure that you wished to
+hear--otherwise, not.
+
+By all means, he said, tell us about the child, and you shall remain in
+our debt for the account of the parent.
+
+I do indeed wish, I replied, that I could pay, and you receive, the
+account of the parent, and not, as now, of the offspring only; take,
+however, this latter by way of interest, and at the same time have a
+care that I do not render a false account, although I have no intention
+of deceiving you.
+
+Yes, we will take all the care that we can: proceed.
+
+Yes, I said, but I must first come to an understanding with you, and
+remind you of what I have mentioned in the course of this discussion,
+and at many other times.
+
+What?
+
+The old story, that there is a many beautiful and a many good, and so
+of other things which we describe and define; to all of them the term
+'many' is applied.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, and of other
+things to which the term 'many' is applied there is an absolute; for
+they may be brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of
+each.
+
+Very true.
+
+The many, as we say, are seen but not known, and the ideas are known but
+not seen.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And what is the organ with which we see the visible things?
+
+The sight, he said.
+
+And with the hearing, I said, we hear, and with the other senses
+perceive the other objects of sense?
+
+True.
+
+But have you remarked that sight is by far the most costly and complex
+piece of workmanship which the artificer of the senses ever contrived?
+
+No, I never have, he said.
+
+Then reflect; has the ear or voice need of any third or additional
+nature in order that the one may be able to hear and the other to be
+heard?
+
+Nothing of the sort.
+
+No, indeed, I replied; and the same is true of most, if not all, the
+other senses--you would not say that any of them requires such an
+addition?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+But you see that without the addition of some other nature there is no
+seeing or being seen?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+Sight being, as I conceive, in the eyes, and he who has eyes wanting to
+see; colour being also present in them, still unless there be a third
+nature specially adapted to the purpose, the owner of the eyes will see
+nothing and the colours will be invisible.
+
+Of what nature are you speaking?
+
+Of that which you term light, I replied.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight and visibility, and
+great beyond other bonds by no small difference of nature; for light is
+their bond, and light is no ignoble thing?
+
+Nay, he said, the reverse of ignoble.
+
+And which, I said, of the gods in heaven would you say was the lord of
+this element? Whose is that light which makes the eye to see perfectly
+and the visible to appear?
+
+You mean the sun, as you and all mankind say.
+
+May not the relation of sight to this deity be described as follows?
+
+How?
+
+Neither sight nor the eye in which sight resides is the sun?
+
+No.
+
+Yet of all the organs of sense the eye is the most like the sun?
+
+By far the most like.
+
+And the power which the eye possesses is a sort of effluence which is
+dispensed from the sun?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Then the sun is not sight, but the author of sight who is recognised by
+sight?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And this is he whom I call the child of the good, whom the good begat in
+his own likeness, to be in the visible world, in relation to sight
+and the things of sight, what the good is in the intellectual world in
+relation to mind and the things of mind:
+
+Will you be a little more explicit? he said.
+
+Why, you know, I said, that the eyes, when a person directs them towards
+objects on which the light of day is no longer shining, but the moon
+and stars only, see dimly, and are nearly blind; they seem to have no
+clearness of vision in them?
+
+Very true.
+
+But when they are directed towards objects on which the sun shines, they
+see clearly and there is sight in them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and
+being shine, the soul perceives and understands, and is radiant with
+intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and
+perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and
+is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no
+intelligence?
+
+Just so.
+
+Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to
+the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this
+you will deem to be the cause of science, and of truth in so far as
+the latter becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both
+truth and knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature as
+more beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light and
+sight may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun,
+so in this other sphere, science and truth may be deemed to be like the
+good, but not the good; the good has a place of honour yet higher.
+
+What a wonder of beauty that must be, he said, which is the author of
+science and truth, and yet surpasses them in beauty; for you surely
+cannot mean to say that pleasure is the good?
+
+God forbid, I replied; but may I ask you to consider the image in
+another point of view?
+
+In what point of view?
+
+You would say, would you not, that the sun is not only the author of
+visibility in all visible things, but of generation and nourishment and
+growth, though he himself is not generation?
+
+Certainly.
+
+In like manner the good may be said to be not only the author of
+knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet
+the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.
+
+Glaucon said, with a ludicrous earnestness: By the light of heaven, how
+amazing!
+
+Yes, I said, and the exaggeration may be set down to you; for you made
+me utter my fancies.
+
+And pray continue to utter them; at any rate let us hear if there is
+anything more to be said about the similitude of the sun.
+
+Yes, I said, there is a great deal more.
+
+Then omit nothing, however slight.
+
+I will do my best, I said; but I should think that a great deal will
+have to be omitted.
+
+I hope not, he said.
+
+You have to imagine, then, that there are two ruling powers, and that
+one of them is set over the intellectual world, the other over the
+visible. I do not say heaven, lest you should fancy that I am playing
+upon the name ('ourhanoz, orhatoz'). May I suppose that you have this
+distinction of the visible and intelligible fixed in your mind?
+
+I have.
+
+Now take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide
+each of them again in the same proportion, and suppose the two
+main divisions to answer, one to the visible and the other to the
+intelligible, and then compare the subdivisions in respect of their
+clearness and want of clearness, and you will find that the first
+section in the sphere of the visible consists of images. And by images I
+mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections
+in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like: Do you
+understand?
+
+Yes, I understand.
+
+Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance,
+to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is
+made.
+
+Very good.
+
+Would you not admit that both the sections of this division have
+different degrees of truth, and that the copy is to the original as the
+sphere of opinion is to the sphere of knowledge?
+
+Most undoubtedly.
+
+Next proceed to consider the manner in which the sphere of the
+intellectual is to be divided.
+
+In what manner?
+
+Thus:--There are two subdivisions, in the lower of which the soul uses
+the figures given by the former division as images; the enquiry can only
+be hypothetical, and instead of going upwards to a principle descends
+to the other end; in the higher of the two, the soul passes out of
+hypotheses, and goes up to a principle which is above hypotheses, making
+no use of images as in the former case, but proceeding only in and
+through the ideas themselves.
+
+I do not quite understand your meaning, he said.
+
+Then I will try again; you will understand me better when I have made
+some preliminary remarks. You are aware that students of geometry,
+arithmetic, and the kindred sciences assume the odd and the even and the
+figures and three kinds of angles and the like in their several branches
+of science; these are their hypotheses, which they and every body are
+supposed to know, and therefore they do not deign to give any account of
+them either to themselves or others; but they begin with them, and go
+on until they arrive at last, and in a consistent manner, at their
+conclusion?
+
+Yes, he said, I know.
+
+And do you not know also that although they make use of the visible
+forms and reason about them, they are thinking not of these, but of the
+ideals which they resemble; not of the figures which they draw, but
+of the absolute square and the absolute diameter, and so on--the forms
+which they draw or make, and which have shadows and reflections in water
+of their own, are converted by them into images, but they are really
+seeking to behold the things themselves, which can only be seen with the
+eye of the mind?
+
+That is true.
+
+And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible, although in the search
+after it the soul is compelled to use hypotheses; not ascending to
+a first principle, because she is unable to rise above the region of
+hypothesis, but employing the objects of which the shadows below are
+resemblances in their turn as images, they having in relation to the
+shadows and reflections of them a greater distinctness, and therefore a
+higher value.
+
+I understand, he said, that you are speaking of the province of geometry
+and the sister arts.
+
+And when I speak of the other division of the intelligible, you will
+understand me to speak of that other sort of knowledge which reason
+herself attains by the power of dialectic, using the hypotheses not as
+first principles, but only as hypotheses--that is to say, as steps and
+points of departure into a world which is above hypotheses, in order
+that she may soar beyond them to the first principle of the whole; and
+clinging to this and then to that which depends on this, by successive
+steps she descends again without the aid of any sensible object, from
+ideas, through ideas, and in ideas she ends.
+
+I understand you, he replied; not perfectly, for you seem to me to
+be describing a task which is really tremendous; but, at any rate, I
+understand you to say that knowledge and being, which the science of
+dialectic contemplates, are clearer than the notions of the arts, as
+they are termed, which proceed from hypotheses only: these are also
+contemplated by the understanding, and not by the senses: yet, because
+they start from hypotheses and do not ascend to a principle, those who
+contemplate them appear to you not to exercise the higher reason
+upon them, although when a first principle is added to them they are
+cognizable by the higher reason. And the habit which is concerned
+with geometry and the cognate sciences I suppose that you would term
+understanding and not reason, as being intermediate between opinion and
+reason.
+
+You have quite conceived my meaning, I said; and now, corresponding to
+these four divisions, let there be four faculties in the soul--reason
+answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith (or
+conviction) to the third, and perception of shadows to the last--and let
+there be a scale of them, and let us suppose that the several faculties
+have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth.
+
+I understand, he replied, and give my assent, and accept your
+arrangement.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII.
+
+And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is
+enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a
+underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching
+all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have
+their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only
+see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round
+their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and
+between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will
+see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which
+marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the
+puppets.
+
+I see.
+
+And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of
+vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and
+various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking,
+others silent.
+
+You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
+
+Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the
+shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of
+the cave?
+
+True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were
+never allowed to move their heads?
+
+And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would
+only see the shadows?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not
+suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
+
+Very true.
+
+And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the
+other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by
+spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
+
+No question, he replied.
+
+To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of
+the images.
+
+That is certain.
+
+And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners
+are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is
+liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and
+walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare
+will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which
+in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one
+saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now,
+when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards
+more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply?
+And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the
+objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be
+perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are
+truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
+
+Far truer.
+
+And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have
+a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the
+objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in
+reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and
+rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of
+the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he
+approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able
+to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
+
+Not all in a moment, he said.
+
+He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world.
+And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and
+other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he
+will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled
+heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the
+sun or the light of the sun by day?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of
+him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not
+in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
+
+Certainly.
+
+He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and
+the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and
+in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have
+been accustomed to behold?
+
+Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
+
+And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den
+and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate
+himself on the change, and pity them?
+
+Certainly, he would.
+
+And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves
+on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark
+which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were
+together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the
+future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or
+envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
+
+'Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,'
+
+and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after
+their manner?
+
+Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than
+entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
+
+Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun
+to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his
+eyes full of darkness?
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the
+shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while
+his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the
+time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be
+very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him
+that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was
+better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose
+another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender,
+and they would put him to death.
+
+No question, he said.
+
+This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the
+previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of
+the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret
+the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual
+world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have
+expressed--whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or
+false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good
+appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen,
+is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and
+right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world,
+and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and
+that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in
+public or private life must have his eye fixed.
+
+I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
+
+Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this
+beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their
+souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to
+dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be
+trusted.
+
+Yes, very natural.
+
+And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine
+contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a
+ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has
+become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight
+in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of
+images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of those
+who have never yet seen absolute justice?
+
+Anything but surprising, he replied.
+
+Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the
+eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out
+of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's
+eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when
+he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too
+ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out
+of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the
+dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess
+of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of
+being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the
+soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason
+in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of
+the light into the den.
+
+That, he said, is a very just distinction.
+
+But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong
+when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not
+there before, like sight into blind eyes.
+
+They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
+
+Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning
+exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn
+from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of
+knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the
+world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure
+the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other
+words, of the good.
+
+Very true.
+
+And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the
+easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for
+that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is
+looking away from the truth?
+
+Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.
+
+And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to
+bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can
+be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than
+anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by
+this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other
+hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence
+flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue--how eager he is, how
+clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of
+blind, but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he
+is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days
+of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures,
+such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached
+to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision
+of their souls upon the things that are below--if, I say, they had been
+released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction,
+the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as
+they see what their eyes are turned to now.
+
+Very likely.
+
+Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or rather a
+necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated
+and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of
+their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former,
+because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their
+actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will
+not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already
+dwelling apart in the islands of the blest.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State
+will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have
+already shown to be the greatest of all--they must continue to ascend
+until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen
+enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be
+allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the
+den, and partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth
+having or not.
+
+But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life,
+when they might have a better?
+
+You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the
+legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy
+above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he
+held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them
+benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another;
+to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his
+instruments in binding up the State.
+
+True, he said, I had forgotten.
+
+Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our
+philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain
+to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to
+share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up
+at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them.
+Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a
+culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into
+the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other
+citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they
+have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty.
+Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general
+underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you
+have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the
+inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are,
+and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just
+and good in their truth. And thus our State, which is also yours, will
+be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit
+unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about
+shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in
+their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which
+the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most
+quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.
+
+Quite true, he replied.
+
+And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at
+the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of
+their time with one another in the heavenly light?
+
+Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which
+we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of
+them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of
+our present rulers of State.
+
+Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for
+your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and
+then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which
+offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold,
+but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas
+if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering
+after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to
+snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be
+fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus
+arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition
+is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?
+
+Indeed, I do not, he said.
+
+And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they
+are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.
+
+No question.
+
+Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they
+will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the
+State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honours
+and another and a better life than that of politics?
+
+They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied.
+
+And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced,
+and how they are to be brought from darkness to light,--as some are said
+to have ascended from the world below to the gods?
+
+By all means, he replied.
+
+The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell (In
+allusion to a game in which two parties fled or pursued according as an
+oyster-shell which was thrown into the air fell with the dark or light
+side uppermost.), but the turning round of a soul passing from a day
+which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the
+ascent from below, which we affirm to be true philosophy?
+
+Quite so.
+
+And should we not enquire what sort of knowledge has the power of
+effecting such a change?
+
+Certainly.
+
+What sort of knowledge is there which would draw the soul from becoming
+to being? And another consideration has just occurred to me: You will
+remember that our young men are to be warrior athletes?
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Then this new kind of knowledge must have an additional quality?
+
+What quality?
+
+Usefulness in war.
+
+Yes, if possible.
+
+There were two parts in our former scheme of education, were there not?
+
+Just so.
+
+There was gymnastic which presided over the growth and decay of the
+body, and may therefore be regarded as having to do with generation and
+corruption?
+
+True.
+
+Then that is not the knowledge which we are seeking to discover?
+
+No.
+
+But what do you say of music, which also entered to a certain extent
+into our former scheme?
+
+Music, he said, as you will remember, was the counterpart of gymnastic,
+and trained the guardians by the influences of habit, by harmony making
+them harmonious, by rhythm rhythmical, but not giving them science; and
+the words, whether fabulous or possibly true, had kindred elements of
+rhythm and harmony in them. But in music there was nothing which tended
+to that good which you are now seeking.
+
+You are most accurate, I said, in your recollection; in music there
+certainly was nothing of the kind. But what branch of knowledge is
+there, my dear Glaucon, which is of the desired nature; since all the
+useful arts were reckoned mean by us?
+
+Undoubtedly; and yet if music and gymnastic are excluded, and the arts
+are also excluded, what remains?
+
+Well, I said, there may be nothing left of our special subjects; and
+then we shall have to take something which is not special, but of
+universal application.
+
+What may that be?
+
+A something which all arts and sciences and intelligences use in common,
+and which every one first has to learn among the elements of education.
+
+What is that?
+
+The little matter of distinguishing one, two, and three--in a word,
+number and calculation:--do not all arts and sciences necessarily
+partake of them?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the art of war partakes of them?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then Palamedes, whenever he appears in tragedy, proves Agamemnon
+ridiculously unfit to be a general. Did you never remark how he declares
+that he had invented number, and had numbered the ships and set in array
+the ranks of the army at Troy; which implies that they had never been
+numbered before, and Agamemnon must be supposed literally to have been
+incapable of counting his own feet--how could he if he was ignorant of
+number? And if that is true, what sort of general must he have been?
+
+I should say a very strange one, if this was as you say.
+
+Can we deny that a warrior should have a knowledge of arithmetic?
+
+Certainly he should, if he is to have the smallest understanding of
+military tactics, or indeed, I should rather say, if he is to be a man
+at all.
+
+I should like to know whether you have the same notion which I have of
+this study?
+
+What is your notion?
+
+It appears to me to be a study of the kind which we are seeking, and
+which leads naturally to reflection, but never to have been rightly
+used; for the true use of it is simply to draw the soul towards being.
+
+Will you explain your meaning? he said.
+
+I will try, I said; and I wish you would share the enquiry with me,
+and say 'yes' or 'no' when I attempt to distinguish in my own mind what
+branches of knowledge have this attracting power, in order that we may
+have clearer proof that arithmetic is, as I suspect, one of them.
+
+Explain, he said.
+
+I mean to say that objects of sense are of two kinds; some of them do
+not invite thought because the sense is an adequate judge of them; while
+in the case of other objects sense is so untrustworthy that further
+enquiry is imperatively demanded.
+
+You are clearly referring, he said, to the manner in which the senses
+are imposed upon by distance, and by painting in light and shade.
+
+No, I said, that is not at all my meaning.
+
+Then what is your meaning?
+
+When speaking of uninviting objects, I mean those which do not pass from
+one sensation to the opposite; inviting objects are those which do; in
+this latter case the sense coming upon the object, whether at a distance
+or near, gives no more vivid idea of anything in particular than of its
+opposite. An illustration will make my meaning clearer:--here are three
+fingers--a little finger, a second finger, and a middle finger.
+
+Very good.
+
+You may suppose that they are seen quite close: And here comes the
+point.
+
+What is it?
+
+Each of them equally appears a finger, whether seen in the middle or
+at the extremity, whether white or black, or thick or thin--it makes no
+difference; a finger is a finger all the same. In these cases a man is
+not compelled to ask of thought the question what is a finger? for the
+sight never intimates to the mind that a finger is other than a finger.
+
+True.
+
+And therefore, I said, as we might expect, there is nothing here which
+invites or excites intelligence.
+
+There is not, he said.
+
+But is this equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers?
+Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the
+circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at
+the extremity? And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the
+qualities of thickness or thinness, of softness or hardness? And so of
+the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters? Is
+not their mode of operation on this wise--the sense which is concerned
+with the quality of hardness is necessarily concerned also with the
+quality of softness, and only intimates to the soul that the same thing
+is felt to be both hard and soft?
+
+You are quite right, he said.
+
+And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense
+gives of a hard which is also soft? What, again, is the meaning of
+light and heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which is
+heavy, light?
+
+Yes, he said, these intimations which the soul receives are very curious
+and require to be explained.
+
+Yes, I said, and in these perplexities the soul naturally summons to her
+aid calculation and intelligence, that she may see whether the several
+objects announced to her are one or two.
+
+True.
+
+And if they turn out to be two, is not each of them one and different?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if each is one, and both are two, she will conceive the two as in
+a state of division, for if there were undivided they could only be
+conceived of as one?
+
+True.
+
+The eye certainly did see both small and great, but only in a confused
+manner; they were not distinguished.
+
+Yes.
+
+Whereas the thinking mind, intending to light up the chaos, was
+compelled to reverse the process, and look at small and great as
+separate and not confused.
+
+Very true.
+
+Was not this the beginning of the enquiry 'What is great?' and 'What is
+small?'
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And thus arose the distinction of the visible and the intelligible.
+
+Most true.
+
+This was what I meant when I spoke of impressions which invited the
+intellect, or the reverse--those which are simultaneous with opposite
+impressions, invite thought; those which are not simultaneous do not.
+
+I understand, he said, and agree with you.
+
+And to which class do unity and number belong?
+
+I do not know, he replied.
+
+Think a little and you will see that what has preceded will supply the
+answer; for if simple unity could be adequately perceived by the sight
+or by any other sense, then, as we were saying in the case of the
+finger, there would be nothing to attract towards being; but when there
+is some contradiction always present, and one is the reverse of one and
+involves the conception of plurality, then thought begins to be aroused
+within us, and the soul perplexed and wanting to arrive at a decision
+asks 'What is absolute unity?' This is the way in which the study of the
+one has a power of drawing and converting the mind to the contemplation
+of true being.
+
+And surely, he said, this occurs notably in the case of one; for we see
+the same thing to be both one and infinite in multitude?
+
+Yes, I said; and this being true of one must be equally true of all
+number?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And all arithmetic and calculation have to do with number?
+
+Yes.
+
+And they appear to lead the mind towards truth?
+
+Yes, in a very remarkable manner.
+
+Then this is knowledge of the kind for which we are seeking, having a
+double use, military and philosophical; for the man of war must learn
+the art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the
+philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and
+lay hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.
+
+That is true.
+
+And our guardian is both warrior and philosopher?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then this is a kind of knowledge which legislation may fitly prescribe;
+and we must endeavour to persuade those who are to be the principal men
+of our State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs, but they must
+carry on the study until they see the nature of numbers with the mind
+only; nor again, like merchants or retail-traders, with a view to buying
+or selling, but for the sake of their military use, and of the soul
+herself; and because this will be the easiest way for her to pass from
+becoming to truth and being.
+
+That is excellent, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, and now having spoken of it, I must add how charming the
+science is! and in how many ways it conduces to our desired end, if
+pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, and not of a shopkeeper!
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I mean, as I was saying, that arithmetic has a very great and elevating
+effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and
+rebelling against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into
+the argument. You know how steadily the masters of the art repel and
+ridicule any one who attempts to divide absolute unity when he is
+calculating, and if you divide, they multiply (Meaning either (1)
+that they integrate the number because they deny the possibility of
+fractions; or (2) that division is regarded by them as a process of
+multiplication, for the fractions of one continue to be units.), taking
+care that one shall continue one and not become lost in fractions.
+
+That is very true.
+
+Now, suppose a person were to say to them: O my friends, what are these
+wonderful numbers about which you are reasoning, in which, as you say,
+there is a unity such as you demand, and each unit is equal, invariable,
+indivisible,--what would they answer?
+
+They would answer, as I should conceive, that they were speaking of
+those numbers which can only be realized in thought.
+
+Then you see that this knowledge may be truly called necessary,
+necessitating as it clearly does the use of the pure intelligence in the
+attainment of pure truth?
+
+Yes; that is a marked characteristic of it.
+
+And have you further observed, that those who have a natural talent for
+calculation are generally quick at every other kind of knowledge; and
+even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they
+may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than
+they would otherwise have been.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And indeed, you will not easily find a more difficult study, and not
+many as difficult.
+
+You will not.
+
+And, for all these reasons, arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which
+the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.
+
+I agree.
+
+Let this then be made one of our subjects of education. And next, shall
+we enquire whether the kindred science also concerns us?
+
+You mean geometry?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+Clearly, he said, we are concerned with that part of geometry which
+relates to war; for in pitching a camp, or taking up a position,
+or closing or extending the lines of an army, or any other military
+manoeuvre, whether in actual battle or on a march, it will make all the
+difference whether a general is or is not a geometrician.
+
+Yes, I said, but for that purpose a very little of either geometry or
+calculation will be enough; the question relates rather to the greater
+and more advanced part of geometry--whether that tends in any degree
+to make more easy the vision of the idea of good; and thither, as I was
+saying, all things tend which compel the soul to turn her gaze towards
+that place, where is the full perfection of being, which she ought, by
+all means, to behold.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then if geometry compels us to view being, it concerns us; if becoming
+only, it does not concern us?
+
+Yes, that is what we assert.
+
+Yet anybody who has the least acquaintance with geometry will not deny
+that such a conception of the science is in flat contradiction to the
+ordinary language of geometricians.
+
+How so?
+
+They have in view practice only, and are always speaking, in a narrow
+and ridiculous manner, of squaring and extending and applying and the
+like--they confuse the necessities of geometry with those of daily life;
+whereas knowledge is the real object of the whole science.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Then must not a further admission be made?
+
+What admission?
+
+That the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal,
+and not of aught perishing and transient.
+
+That, he replied, may be readily allowed, and is true.
+
+Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth,
+and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now
+unhappily allowed to fall down.
+
+Nothing will be more likely to have such an effect.
+
+Then nothing should be more sternly laid down than that the inhabitants
+of your fair city should by all means learn geometry. Moreover the
+science has indirect effects, which are not small.
+
+Of what kind? he said.
+
+There are the military advantages of which you spoke, I said; and in all
+departments of knowledge, as experience proves, any one who has studied
+geometry is infinitely quicker of apprehension than one who has not.
+
+Yes indeed, he said, there is an infinite difference between them.
+
+Then shall we propose this as a second branch of knowledge which our
+youth will study?
+
+Let us do so, he replied.
+
+And suppose we make astronomy the third--what do you say?
+
+I am strongly inclined to it, he said; the observation of the seasons
+and of months and years is as essential to the general as it is to the
+farmer or sailor.
+
+I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard
+against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite
+admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye
+of the soul which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these
+purified and re-illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand
+bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen. Now there are two classes of
+persons: one class of those who will agree with you and will take
+your words as a revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly
+unmeaning, and who will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they
+see no sort of profit which is to be obtained from them. And therefore
+you had better decide at once with which of the two you are proposing to
+argue. You will very likely say with neither, and that your chief aim in
+carrying on the argument is your own improvement; at the same time you
+do not grudge to others any benefit which they may receive.
+
+I think that I should prefer to carry on the argument mainly on my own
+behalf.
+
+Then take a step backward, for we have gone wrong in the order of the
+sciences.
+
+What was the mistake? he said.
+
+After plane geometry, I said, we proceeded at once to solids in
+revolution, instead of taking solids in themselves; whereas after the
+second dimension the third, which is concerned with cubes and dimensions
+of depth, ought to have followed.
+
+That is true, Socrates; but so little seems to be known as yet about
+these subjects.
+
+Why, yes, I said, and for two reasons:--in the first place, no
+government patronises them; this leads to a want of energy in the
+pursuit of them, and they are difficult; in the second place, students
+cannot learn them unless they have a director. But then a director
+can hardly be found, and even if he could, as matters now stand,
+the students, who are very conceited, would not attend to him. That,
+however, would be otherwise if the whole State became the director of
+these studies and gave honour to them; then disciples would want to
+come, and there would be continuous and earnest search, and discoveries
+would be made; since even now, disregarded as they are by the world, and
+maimed of their fair proportions, and although none of their votaries
+can tell the use of them, still these studies force their way by their
+natural charm, and very likely, if they had the help of the State, they
+would some day emerge into light.
+
+Yes, he said, there is a remarkable charm in them. But I do not clearly
+understand the change in the order. First you began with a geometry of
+plane surfaces?
+
+Yes, I said.
+
+And you placed astronomy next, and then you made a step backward?
+
+Yes, and I have delayed you by my hurry; the ludicrous state of solid
+geometry, which, in natural order, should have followed, made me pass
+over this branch and go on to astronomy, or motion of solids.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then assuming that the science now omitted would come into existence
+if encouraged by the State, let us go on to astronomy, which will be
+fourth.
+
+The right order, he replied. And now, Socrates, as you rebuked the
+vulgar manner in which I praised astronomy before, my praise shall
+be given in your own spirit. For every one, as I think, must see that
+astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world
+to another.
+
+Every one but myself, I said; to every one else this may be clear, but
+not to me.
+
+And what then would you say?
+
+I should rather say that those who elevate astronomy into philosophy
+appear to me to make us look downwards and not upwards.
+
+What do you mean? he asked.
+
+You, I replied, have in your mind a truly sublime conception of our
+knowledge of the things above. And I dare say that if a person were to
+throw his head back and study the fretted ceiling, you would still think
+that his mind was the percipient, and not his eyes. And you are very
+likely right, and I may be a simpleton: but, in my opinion, that
+knowledge only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul
+look upwards, and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the
+ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he
+can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science; his soul is
+looking downwards, not upwards, whether his way to knowledge is by water
+or by land, whether he floats, or only lies on his back.
+
+I acknowledge, he said, the justice of your rebuke. Still, I should like
+to ascertain how astronomy can be learned in any manner more conducive
+to that knowledge of which we are speaking?
+
+I will tell you, I said: The starry heaven which we behold is wrought
+upon a visible ground, and therefore, although the fairest and most
+perfect of visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to
+the true motions of absolute swiftness and absolute slowness, which are
+relative to each other, and carry with them that which is contained in
+them, in the true number and in every true figure. Now, these are to be
+apprehended by reason and intelligence, but not by sight.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that
+higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures
+excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist,
+which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would
+appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never
+dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true
+double, or the truth of any other proportion.
+
+No, he replied, such an idea would be ridiculous.
+
+And will not a true astronomer have the same feeling when he looks at
+the movements of the stars? Will he not think that heaven and the things
+in heaven are framed by the Creator of them in the most perfect manner?
+But he will never imagine that the proportions of night and day, or of
+both to the month, or of the month to the year, or of the stars to these
+and to one another, and any other things that are material and visible
+can also be eternal and subject to no deviation--that would be absurd;
+and it is equally absurd to take so much pains in investigating their
+exact truth.
+
+I quite agree, though I never thought of this before.
+
+Then, I said, in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems,
+and let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right
+way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.
+
+That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers.
+
+Yes, I said; and there are many other things which must also have a
+similar extension given to them, if our legislation is to be of any
+value. But can you tell me of any other suitable study?
+
+No, he said, not without thinking.
+
+Motion, I said, has many forms, and not one only; two of them are
+obvious enough even to wits no better than ours; and there are others,
+as I imagine, which may be left to wiser persons.
+
+But where are the two?
+
+There is a second, I said, which is the counterpart of the one already
+named.
+
+And what may that be?
+
+The second, I said, would seem relatively to the ears to be what the
+first is to the eyes; for I conceive that as the eyes are designed to
+look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and
+these are sister sciences--as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon,
+agree with them?
+
+Yes, he replied.
+
+But this, I said, is a laborious study, and therefore we had better go
+and learn of them; and they will tell us whether there are any other
+applications of these sciences. At the same time, we must not lose sight
+of our own higher object.
+
+What is that?
+
+There is a perfection which all knowledge ought to reach, and which our
+pupils ought also to attain, and not to fall short of, as I was saying
+that they did in astronomy. For in the science of harmony, as you
+probably know, the same thing happens. The teachers of harmony compare
+the sounds and consonances which are heard only, and their labour, like
+that of the astronomers, is in vain.
+
+Yes, by heaven! he said; and 'tis as good as a play to hear them talking
+about their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears
+close alongside of the strings like persons catching a sound from their
+neighbour's wall--one set of them declaring that they distinguish an
+intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be
+the unit of measurement; the others insisting that the two sounds have
+passed into the same--either party setting their ears before their
+understanding.
+
+You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and
+rack them on the pegs of the instrument: I might carry on the metaphor
+and speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives,
+and make accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and
+forwardness to sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will
+only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the
+Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about harmony.
+For they too are in error, like the astronomers; they investigate the
+numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they never attain to
+problems--that is to say, they never reach the natural harmonies of
+number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and others not.
+
+That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.
+
+A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if sought
+after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in any other
+spirit, useless.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and
+connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual
+affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them
+have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.
+
+I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.
+
+What do you mean? I said; the prelude or what? Do you not know that all
+this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to learn? For
+you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a dialectician?
+
+Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was
+capable of reasoning.
+
+But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason
+will have the knowledge which we require of them?
+
+Neither can this be supposed.
+
+And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of
+dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which
+the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight,
+as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold the
+real animals and stars, and last of all the sun himself. And so with
+dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by
+the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and
+perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception
+of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the
+intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.
+
+Exactly, he said.
+
+Then this is the progress which you call dialectic?
+
+True.
+
+But the release of the prisoners from chains, and their translation
+from the shadows to the images and to the light, and the ascent from the
+underground den to the sun, while in his presence they are vainly trying
+to look on animals and plants and the light of the sun, but are able to
+perceive even with their weak eyes the images in the water (which are
+divine), and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows of images
+cast by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only an
+image)--this power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to
+the contemplation of that which is best in existence, with which we may
+compare the raising of that faculty which is the very light of the body
+to the sight of that which is brightest in the material and visible
+world--this power is given, as I was saying, by all that study and
+pursuit of the arts which has been described.
+
+I agree in what you are saying, he replied, which may be hard to
+believe, yet, from another point of view, is harder still to deny. This,
+however, is not a theme to be treated of in passing only, but will have
+to be discussed again and again. And so, whether our conclusion be true
+or false, let us assume all this, and proceed at once from the prelude
+or preamble to the chief strain (A play upon the Greek word, which means
+both 'law' and 'strain.'), and describe that in like manner. Say, then,
+what is the nature and what are the divisions of dialectic, and what
+are the paths which lead thither; for these paths will also lead to our
+final rest.
+
+Dear Glaucon, I said, you will not be able to follow me here, though
+I would do my best, and you should behold not an image only but the
+absolute truth, according to my notion. Whether what I told you would
+or would not have been a reality I cannot venture to say; but you would
+have seen something like reality; of that I am confident.
+
+Doubtless, he replied.
+
+But I must also remind you, that the power of dialectic alone can reveal
+this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences.
+
+Of that assertion you may be as confident as of the last.
+
+And assuredly no one will argue that there is any other method
+of comprehending by any regular process all true existence or of
+ascertaining what each thing is in its own nature; for the arts in
+general are concerned with the desires or opinions of men, or are
+cultivated with a view to production and construction, or for the
+preservation of such productions and constructions; and as to the
+mathematical sciences which, as we were saying, have some apprehension
+of true being--geometry and the like--they only dream about being,
+but never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the
+hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account
+of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the
+conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he knows
+not what, how can he imagine that such a fabric of convention can ever
+become science?
+
+Impossible, he said.
+
+Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first
+principle and is the only science which does away with hypotheses in
+order to make her ground secure; the eye of the soul, which is literally
+buried in an outlandish slough, is by her gentle aid lifted upwards;
+and she uses as handmaids and helpers in the work of conversion, the
+sciences which we have been discussing. Custom terms them sciences,
+but they ought to have some other name, implying greater clearness
+than opinion and less clearness than science: and this, in our previous
+sketch, was called understanding. But why should we dispute about names
+when we have realities of such importance to consider?
+
+Why indeed, he said, when any name will do which expresses the thought
+of the mind with clearness?
+
+At any rate, we are satisfied, as before, to have four divisions;
+two for intellect and two for opinion, and to call the first division
+science, the second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth
+perception of shadows, opinion being concerned with becoming, and
+intellect with being; and so to make a proportion:--
+
+As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as
+intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and understanding to
+the perception of shadows.
+
+But let us defer the further correlation and subdivision of the subjects
+of opinion and of intellect, for it will be a long enquiry, many times
+longer than this has been.
+
+As far as I understand, he said, I agree.
+
+And do you also agree, I said, in describing the dialectician as one who
+attains a conception of the essence of each thing? And he who does not
+possess and is therefore unable to impart this conception, in
+whatever degree he fails, may in that degree also be said to fail in
+intelligence? Will you admit so much?
+
+Yes, he said; how can I deny it?
+
+And you would say the same of the conception of the good? Until the
+person is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of good,
+and unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is ready to
+disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth, never
+faltering at any step of the argument--unless he can do all this, you
+would say that he knows neither the idea of good nor any other good; he
+apprehends only a shadow, if anything at all, which is given by opinion
+and not by science;--dreaming and slumbering in this life, before he
+is well awake here, he arrives at the world below, and has his final
+quietus.
+
+In all that I should most certainly agree with you.
+
+And surely you would not have the children of your ideal State, whom you
+are nurturing and educating--if the ideal ever becomes a reality--you
+would not allow the future rulers to be like posts (Literally 'lines,'
+probably the starting-point of a race-course.), having no reason in
+them, and yet to be set in authority over the highest matters?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as
+will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering
+questions?
+
+Yes, he said, you and I together will make it.
+
+Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences,
+and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher--the nature
+of knowledge can no further go?
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+But to whom we are to assign these studies, and in what way they are to
+be assigned, are questions which remain to be considered.
+
+Yes, clearly.
+
+You remember, I said, how the rulers were chosen before?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+The same natures must still be chosen, and the preference again given
+to the surest and the bravest, and, if possible, to the fairest; and,
+having noble and generous tempers, they should also have the natural
+gifts which will facilitate their education.
+
+And what are these?
+
+Such gifts as keenness and ready powers of acquisition; for the mind
+more often faints from the severity of study than from the severity of
+gymnastics: the toil is more entirely the mind's own, and is not shared
+with the body.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Further, he of whom we are in search should have a good memory, and be
+an unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in any line; or he will
+never be able to endure the great amount of bodily exercise and to go
+through all the intellectual discipline and study which we require of
+him.
+
+Certainly, he said; he must have natural gifts.
+
+The mistake at present is, that those who study philosophy have no
+vocation, and this, as I was before saying, is the reason why she has
+fallen into disrepute: her true sons should take her by the hand and not
+bastards.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+In the first place, her votary should not have a lame or halting
+industry--I mean, that he should not be half industrious and half idle:
+as, for example, when a man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting, and all
+other bodily exercises, but a hater rather than a lover of the labour
+of learning or listening or enquiring. Or the occupation to which he
+devotes himself may be of an opposite kind, and he may have the other
+sort of lameness.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And as to truth, I said, is not a soul equally to be deemed halt and
+lame which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at
+herself and others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary
+falsehood, and does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire
+of ignorance, and has no shame at being detected?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And, again, in respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every
+other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son
+and the bastard? for where there is no discernment of such qualities
+states and individuals unconsciously err; and the state makes a ruler,
+and the individual a friend, of one who, being defective in some part of
+virtue, is in a figure lame or a bastard.
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+All these things, then, will have to be carefully considered by us; and
+if only those whom we introduce to this vast system of education and
+training are sound in body and mind, justice herself will have nothing
+to say against us, and we shall be the saviours of the constitution and
+of the State; but, if our pupils are men of another stamp, the reverse
+will happen, and we shall pour a still greater flood of ridicule on
+philosophy than she has to endure at present.
+
+That would not be creditable.
+
+Certainly not, I said; and yet perhaps, in thus turning jest into
+earnest I am equally ridiculous.
+
+In what respect?
+
+I had forgotten, I said, that we were not serious, and spoke with too
+much excitement. For when I saw philosophy so undeservedly trampled
+under foot of men I could not help feeling a sort of indignation at the
+authors of her disgrace: and my anger made me too vehement.
+
+Indeed! I was listening, and did not think so.
+
+But I, who am the speaker, felt that I was. And now let me remind you
+that, although in our former selection we chose old men, we must not do
+so in this. Solon was under a delusion when he said that a man when he
+grows old may learn many things--for he can no more learn much than he
+can run much; youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.
+
+Of course.
+
+And, therefore, calculation and geometry and all the other elements of
+instruction, which are a preparation for dialectic, should be presented
+to the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing our
+system of education.
+
+Why not?
+
+Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of
+knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm
+to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no
+hold on the mind.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then, my good friend, I said, do not use compulsion, but let early
+education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find
+out the natural bent.
+
+That is a very rational notion, he said.
+
+Do you remember that the children, too, were to be taken to see the
+battle on horseback; and that if there were no danger they were to be
+brought close up and, like young hounds, have a taste of blood given
+them?
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+The same practice may be followed, I said, in all these things--labours,
+lessons, dangers--and he who is most at home in all of them ought to be
+enrolled in a select number.
+
+At what age?
+
+At the age when the necessary gymnastics are over: the period whether of
+two or three years which passes in this sort of training is useless for
+any other purpose; for sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning;
+and the trial of who is first in gymnastic exercises is one of the most
+important tests to which our youth are subjected.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+After that time those who are selected from the class of twenty years
+old will be promoted to higher honour, and the sciences which they
+learned without any order in their early education will now be brought
+together, and they will be able to see the natural relationship of them
+to one another and to true being.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the only kind of knowledge which takes lasting
+root.
+
+Yes, I said; and the capacity for such knowledge is the great criterion
+of dialectical talent: the comprehensive mind is always the dialectical.
+
+I agree with you, he said.
+
+These, I said, are the points which you must consider; and those who
+have most of this comprehension, and who are most steadfast in their
+learning, and in their military and other appointed duties, when they
+have arrived at the age of thirty have to be chosen by you out of the
+select class, and elevated to higher honour; and you will have to prove
+them by the help of dialectic, in order to learn which of them is able
+to give up the use of sight and the other senses, and in company with
+truth to attain absolute being: And here, my friend, great caution is
+required.
+
+Why great caution?
+
+Do you not remark, I said, how great is the evil which dialectic has
+introduced?
+
+What evil? he said.
+
+The students of the art are filled with lawlessness.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Do you think that there is anything so very unnatural or inexcusable in
+their case? or will you make allowance for them?
+
+In what way make allowance?
+
+I want you, I said, by way of parallel, to imagine a supposititious son
+who is brought up in great wealth; he is one of a great and numerous
+family, and has many flatterers. When he grows up to manhood, he learns
+that his alleged are not his real parents; but who the real are he
+is unable to discover. Can you guess how he will be likely to behave
+towards his flatterers and his supposed parents, first of all during the
+period when he is ignorant of the false relation, and then again when he
+knows? Or shall I guess for you?
+
+If you please.
+
+Then I should say, that while he is ignorant of the truth he will be
+likely to honour his father and his mother and his supposed relations
+more than the flatterers; he will be less inclined to neglect them when
+in need, or to do or say anything against them; and he will be less
+willing to disobey them in any important matter.
+
+He will.
+
+But when he has made the discovery, I should imagine that he would
+diminish his honour and regard for them, and would become more devoted
+to the flatterers; their influence over him would greatly increase; he
+would now live after their ways, and openly associate with them, and,
+unless he were of an unusually good disposition, he would trouble
+himself no more about his supposed parents or other relations.
+
+Well, all that is very probable. But how is the image applicable to the
+disciples of philosophy?
+
+In this way: you know that there are certain principles about justice
+and honour, which were taught us in childhood, and under their parental
+authority we have been brought up, obeying and honouring them.
+
+That is true.
+
+There are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and
+attract the soul, but do not influence those of us who have any sense of
+right, and they continue to obey and honour the maxims of their fathers.
+
+True.
+
+Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what
+is fair or honourable, and he answers as the legislator has taught him,
+and then arguments many and diverse refute his words, until he is driven
+into believing that nothing is honourable any more than dishonourable,
+or just and good any more than the reverse, and so of all the notions
+which he most valued, do you think that he will still honour and obey
+them as before?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And when he ceases to think them honourable and natural as heretofore,
+and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life
+other than that which flatters his desires?
+
+He cannot.
+
+And from being a keeper of the law he is converted into a breaker of it?
+
+Unquestionably.
+
+Now all this is very natural in students of philosophy such as I have
+described, and also, as I was just now saying, most excusable.
+
+Yes, he said; and, I may add, pitiable.
+
+Therefore, that your feelings may not be moved to pity about our
+citizens who are now thirty years of age, every care must be taken in
+introducing them to dialectic.
+
+Certainly.
+
+There is a danger lest they should taste the dear delight too early; for
+youngsters, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste
+in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and
+refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; like puppy-dogs,
+they rejoice in pulling and tearing at all who come near them.
+
+Yes, he said, there is nothing which they like better.
+
+And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands
+of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing
+anything which they believed before, and hence, not only they, but
+philosophy and all that relates to it is apt to have a bad name with the
+rest of the world.
+
+Too true, he said.
+
+But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such
+insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and
+not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the
+greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing
+the honour of the pursuit.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And did we not make special provision for this, when we said that the
+disciples of philosophy were to be orderly and steadfast, not, as now,
+any chance aspirant or intruder?
+
+Very true.
+
+Suppose, I said, the study of philosophy to take the place of gymnastics
+and to be continued diligently and earnestly and exclusively for twice
+the number of years which were passed in bodily exercise--will that be
+enough?
+
+Would you say six or four years? he asked.
+
+Say five years, I replied; at the end of the time they must be sent down
+again into the den and compelled to hold any military or other office
+which young men are qualified to hold: in this way they will get their
+experience of life, and there will be an opportunity of trying whether,
+when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they will stand
+firm or flinch.
+
+And how long is this stage of their lives to last?
+
+Fifteen years, I answered; and when they have reached fifty years of
+age, then let those who still survive and have distinguished themselves
+in every action of their lives and in every branch of knowledge come at
+last to their consummation: the time has now arrived at which they must
+raise the eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all
+things, and behold the absolute good; for that is the pattern according
+to which they are to order the State and the lives of individuals, and
+the remainder of their own lives also; making philosophy their chief
+pursuit, but, when their turn comes, toiling also at politics and ruling
+for the public good, not as though they were performing some heroic
+action, but simply as a matter of duty; and when they have brought up in
+each generation others like themselves and left them in their place to
+be governors of the State, then they will depart to the Islands of the
+Blest and dwell there; and the city will give them public memorials and
+sacrifices and honour them, if the Pythian oracle consent, as demigods,
+but if not, as in any case blessed and divine.
+
+You are a sculptor, Socrates, and have made statues of our governors
+faultless in beauty.
+
+Yes, I said, Glaucon, and of our governesses too; for you must not
+suppose that what I have been saying applies to men only and not to
+women as far as their natures can go.
+
+There you are right, he said, since we have made them to share in all
+things like the men.
+
+Well, I said, and you would agree (would you not?) that what has
+been said about the State and the government is not a mere dream, and
+although difficult not impossible, but only possible in the way which
+has been supposed; that is to say, when the true philosopher kings are
+born in a State, one or more of them, despising the honours of this
+present world which they deem mean and worthless, esteeming above all
+things right and the honour that springs from right, and regarding
+justice as the greatest and most necessary of all things, whose
+ministers they are, and whose principles will be exalted by them when
+they set in order their own city?
+
+How will they proceed?
+
+They will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of
+the city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of
+their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents;
+these they will train in their own habits and laws, I mean in the laws
+which we have given them: and in this way the State and constitution of
+which we were speaking will soonest and most easily attain happiness,
+and the nation which has such a constitution will gain most.
+
+Yes, that will be the best way. And I think, Socrates, that you have
+very well described how, if ever, such a constitution might come into
+being.
+
+Enough then of the perfect State, and of the man who bears its
+image--there is no difficulty in seeing how we shall describe him.
+
+There is no difficulty, he replied; and I agree with you in thinking
+that nothing more need be said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VIII.
+
+And so, Glaucon, we have arrived at the conclusion that in the perfect
+State wives and children are to be in common; and that all education
+and the pursuits of war and peace are also to be common, and the best
+philosophers and the bravest warriors are to be their kings?
+
+That, replied Glaucon, has been acknowledged.
+
+Yes, I said; and we have further acknowledged that the governors, when
+appointed themselves, will take their soldiers and place them in houses
+such as we were describing, which are common to all, and contain nothing
+private, or individual; and about their property, you remember what we
+agreed?
+
+Yes, I remember that no one was to have any of the ordinary possessions
+of mankind; they were to be warrior athletes and guardians, receiving
+from the other citizens, in lieu of annual payment, only their
+maintenance, and they were to take care of themselves and of the whole
+State.
+
+True, I said; and now that this division of our task is concluded, let
+us find the point at which we digressed, that we may return into the old
+path.
+
+There is no difficulty in returning; you implied, then as now, that you
+had finished the description of the State: you said that such a State
+was good, and that the man was good who answered to it, although, as now
+appears, you had more excellent things to relate both of State and man.
+And you said further, that if this was the true form, then the others
+were false; and of the false forms, you said, as I remember, that there
+were four principal ones, and that their defects, and the defects of
+the individuals corresponding to them, were worth examining. When we had
+seen all the individuals, and finally agreed as to who was the best and
+who was the worst of them, we were to consider whether the best was not
+also the happiest, and the worst the most miserable. I asked you
+what were the four forms of government of which you spoke, and then
+Polemarchus and Adeimantus put in their word; and you began again, and
+have found your way to the point at which we have now arrived.
+
+Your recollection, I said, is most exact.
+
+Then, like a wrestler, he replied, you must put yourself again in the
+same position; and let me ask the same questions, and do you give me the
+same answer which you were about to give me then.
+
+Yes, if I can, I will, I said.
+
+I shall particularly wish to hear what were the four constitutions of
+which you were speaking.
+
+That question, I said, is easily answered: the four governments of which
+I spoke, so far as they have distinct names, are, first, those of Crete
+and Sparta, which are generally applauded; what is termed oligarchy
+comes next; this is not equally approved, and is a form of government
+which teems with evils: thirdly, democracy, which naturally follows
+oligarchy, although very different: and lastly comes tyranny, great
+and famous, which differs from them all, and is the fourth and worst
+disorder of a State. I do not know, do you? of any other constitution
+which can be said to have a distinct character. There are lordships and
+principalities which are bought and sold, and some other intermediate
+forms of government. But these are nondescripts and may be found equally
+among Hellenes and among barbarians.
+
+Yes, he replied, we certainly hear of many curious forms of government
+which exist among them.
+
+Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men
+vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the
+other? For we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock,' and
+not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure
+turn the scale and draw other things after them?
+
+Yes, he said, the States are as the men are; they grow out of human
+characters.
+
+Then if the constitutions of States are five, the dispositions of
+individual minds will also be five?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Him who answers to aristocracy, and whom we rightly call just and good,
+we have already described.
+
+We have.
+
+Then let us now proceed to describe the inferior sort of natures, being
+the contentious and ambitious, who answer to the Spartan polity; also
+the oligarchical, democratical, and tyrannical. Let us place the most
+just by the side of the most unjust, and when we see them we shall be
+able to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of him who leads
+a life of pure justice or pure injustice. The enquiry will then be
+completed. And we shall know whether we ought to pursue injustice,
+as Thrasymachus advises, or in accordance with the conclusions of the
+argument to prefer justice.
+
+Certainly, he replied, we must do as you say.
+
+Shall we follow our old plan, which we adopted with a view to clearness,
+of taking the State first and then proceeding to the individual, and
+begin with the government of honour?--I know of no name for such a
+government other than timocracy, or perhaps timarchy. We will compare
+with this the like character in the individual; and, after that,
+consider oligarchy and the oligarchical man; and then again we will turn
+our attention to democracy and the democratical man; and lastly, we
+will go and view the city of tyranny, and once more take a look into the
+tyrant's soul, and try to arrive at a satisfactory decision.
+
+That way of viewing and judging of the matter will be very suitable.
+
+First, then, I said, let us enquire how timocracy (the government of
+honour) arises out of aristocracy (the government of the best). Clearly,
+all political changes originate in divisions of the actual governing
+power; a government which is united, however small, cannot be moved.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+In what way, then, will our city be moved, and in what manner will the
+two classes of auxiliaries and rulers disagree among themselves or with
+one another? Shall we, after the manner of Homer, pray the Muses to tell
+us 'how discord first arose'? Shall we imagine them in solemn mockery,
+to play and jest with us as if we were children, and to address us in a
+lofty tragic vein, making believe to be in earnest?
+
+How would they address us?
+
+After this manner:--A city which is thus constituted can hardly be
+shaken; but, seeing that everything which has a beginning has also an
+end, even a constitution such as yours will not last for ever, but will
+in time be dissolved. And this is the dissolution:--In plants that grow
+in the earth, as well as in animals that move on the earth's surface,
+fertility and sterility of soul and body occur when the circumferences
+of the circles of each are completed, which in short-lived existences
+pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones over a long space. But
+to the knowledge of human fecundity and sterility all the wisdom and
+education of your rulers will not attain; the laws which regulate them
+will not be discovered by an intelligence which is alloyed with sense,
+but will escape them, and they will bring children into the world when
+they ought not. Now that which is of divine birth has a period which is
+contained in a perfect number (i.e. a cyclical number, such as 6, which
+is equal to the sum of its divisors 1, 2, 3, so that when the circle
+or time represented by 6 is completed, the lesser times or rotations
+represented by 1, 2, 3 are also completed.), but the period of
+human birth is comprehended in a number in which first increments
+by involution and evolution (or squared and cubed) obtaining three
+intervals and four terms of like and unlike, waxing and waning numbers,
+make all the terms commensurable and agreeable to one another. (Probably
+the numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 of which the three first = the sides of the
+Pythagorean triangle. The terms will then be 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed,
+which together = 6 cubed = 216.) The base of these (3) with a third
+added (4) when combined with five (20) and raised to the third power
+furnishes two harmonies; the first a square which is a hundred times
+as great (400 = 4 x 100) (Or the first a square which is 100 x 100 =
+10,000. The whole number will then be 17,500 = a square of 100, and an
+oblong of 100 by 75.), and the other a figure having one side equal to
+the former, but oblong, consisting of a hundred numbers squared upon
+rational diameters of a square (i.e. omitting fractions), the side of
+which is five (7 x 7 = 49 x 100 = 4900), each of them being less by one
+(than the perfect square which includes the fractions, sc. 50) or less
+by (Or, 'consisting of two numbers squared upon irrational diameters,'
+etc. = 100. For other explanations of the passage see Introduction.) two
+perfect squares of irrational diameters (of a square the side of which
+is five = 50 + 50 = 100); and a hundred cubes of three (27 x 100 = 2700
++ 4900 + 400 = 8000). Now this number represents a geometrical figure
+which has control over the good and evil of births. For when your
+guardians are ignorant of the law of births, and unite bride and
+bridegroom out of season, the children will not be goodly or
+fortunate. And though only the best of them will be appointed by their
+predecessors, still they will be unworthy to hold their fathers' places,
+and when they come into power as guardians, they will soon be found
+to fail in taking care of us, the Muses, first by under-valuing music;
+which neglect will soon extend to gymnastic; and hence the young men of
+your State will be less cultivated. In the succeeding generation rulers
+will be appointed who have lost the guardian power of testing the metal
+of your different races, which, like Hesiod's, are of gold and silver
+and brass and iron. And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass
+with gold, and hence there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and
+irregularity, which always and in all places are causes of hatred
+and war. This the Muses affirm to be the stock from which discord has
+sprung, wherever arising; and this is their answer to us.
+
+Yes, and we may assume that they answer truly.
+
+Why, yes, I said, of course they answer truly; how can the Muses speak
+falsely?
+
+And what do the Muses say next?
+
+When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the
+iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and
+silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the
+true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient
+order of things. There was a battle between them, and at last they
+agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual owners;
+and they enslaved their friends and maintainers, whom they had formerly
+protected in the condition of freemen, and made of them subjects and
+servants; and they themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch
+against them.
+
+I believe that you have rightly conceived the origin of the change.
+
+And the new government which thus arises will be of a form intermediate
+between oligarchy and aristocracy?
+
+Very true.
+
+Such will be the change, and after the change has been made, how will
+they proceed? Clearly, the new State, being in a mean between oligarchy
+and the perfect State, will partly follow one and partly the other, and
+will also have some peculiarities.
+
+True, he said.
+
+In the honour given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior class
+from agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution
+of common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military
+training--in all these respects this State will resemble the former.
+
+True.
+
+But in the fear of admitting philosophers to power, because they are no
+longer to be had simple and earnest, but are made up of mixed elements;
+and in turning from them to passionate and less complex characters, who
+are by nature fitted for war rather than peace; and in the value set
+by them upon military stratagems and contrivances, and in the waging of
+everlasting wars--this State will be for the most part peculiar.
+
+Yes.
+
+Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those
+who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after
+gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines
+and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them;
+also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will
+spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And they are miserly because they have no means of openly acquiring the
+money which they prize; they will spend that which is another man's on
+the gratification of their desires, stealing their pleasures and running
+away like children from the law, their father: they have been schooled
+not by gentle influences but by force, for they have neglected her
+who is the true Muse, the companion of reason and philosophy, and have
+honoured gymnastic more than music.
+
+Undoubtedly, he said, the form of government which you describe is a
+mixture of good and evil.
+
+Why, there is a mixture, I said; but one thing, and one thing only, is
+predominantly seen,--the spirit of contention and ambition; and these
+are due to the prevalence of the passionate or spirited element.
+
+Assuredly, he said.
+
+Such is the origin and such the character of this State, which has been
+described in outline only; the more perfect execution was not required,
+for a sketch is enough to show the type of the most perfectly just and
+most perfectly unjust; and to go through all the States and all the
+characters of men, omitting none of them, would be an interminable
+labour.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Now what man answers to this form of government-how did he come into
+being, and what is he like?
+
+I think, said Adeimantus, that in the spirit of contention which
+characterises him, he is not unlike our friend Glaucon.
+
+Perhaps, I said, he may be like him in that one point; but there are
+other respects in which he is very different.
+
+In what respects?
+
+He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet
+a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker.
+Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man,
+who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and
+remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of
+honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any
+ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats
+of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.
+
+Yes, that is the type of character which answers to timocracy.
+
+Such an one will despise riches only when he is young; but as he gets
+older he will be more and more attracted to them, because he has a
+piece of the avaricious nature in him, and is not single-minded towards
+virtue, having lost his best guardian.
+
+Who was that? said Adeimantus.
+
+Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes up her
+abode in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life.
+
+Good, he said.
+
+Such, I said, is the timocratical youth, and he is like the timocratical
+State.
+
+Exactly.
+
+His origin is as follows:--He is often the young son of a brave father,
+who dwells in an ill-governed city, of which he declines the honours
+and offices, and will not go to law, or exert himself in any way, but is
+ready to waive his rights in order that he may escape trouble.
+
+And how does the son come into being?
+
+The character of the son begins to develope when he hears his mother
+complaining that her husband has no place in the government, of which
+the consequence is that she has no precedence among other women.
+Further, when she sees her husband not very eager about money, and
+instead of battling and railing in the law courts or assembly, taking
+whatever happens to him quietly; and when she observes that his thoughts
+always centre in himself, while he treats her with very considerable
+indifference, she is annoyed, and says to her son that his father is
+only half a man and far too easy-going: adding all the other complaints
+about her own ill-treatment which women are so fond of rehearsing.
+
+Yes, said Adeimantus, they give us plenty of them, and their complaints
+are so like themselves.
+
+And you know, I said, that the old servants also, who are supposed to
+be attached to the family, from time to time talk privately in the same
+strain to the son; and if they see any one who owes money to his father,
+or is wronging him in any way, and he fails to prosecute them, they tell
+the youth that when he grows up he must retaliate upon people of this
+sort, and be more of a man than his father. He has only to walk abroad
+and he hears and sees the same sort of thing: those who do their own
+business in the city are called simpletons, and held in no esteem, while
+the busy-bodies are honoured and applauded. The result is that the young
+man, hearing and seeing all these things--hearing, too, the words of
+his father, and having a nearer view of his way of life, and making
+comparisons of him and others--is drawn opposite ways: while his father
+is watering and nourishing the rational principle in his soul, the
+others are encouraging the passionate and appetitive; and he being not
+originally of a bad nature, but having kept bad company, is at last
+brought by their joint influence to a middle point, and gives up the
+kingdom which is within him to the middle principle of contentiousness
+and passion, and becomes arrogant and ambitious.
+
+You seem to me to have described his origin perfectly.
+
+Then we have now, I said, the second form of government and the second
+type of character?
+
+We have.
+
+Next, let us look at another man who, as Aeschylus says,
+
+'Is set over against another State;'
+
+or rather, as our plan requires, begin with the State.
+
+By all means.
+
+I believe that oligarchy follows next in order.
+
+And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?
+
+A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have
+power and the poor man is deprived of it.
+
+I understand, he replied.
+
+Ought I not to begin by describing how the change from timocracy to
+oligarchy arises?
+
+Yes.
+
+Well, I said, no eyes are required in order to see how the one passes
+into the other.
+
+How?
+
+The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the
+ruin of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do
+they or their wives care about the law?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the
+great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.
+
+Likely enough.
+
+And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making
+a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
+placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as
+the other falls.
+
+True.
+
+And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State,
+virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is
+neglected.
+
+That is obvious.
+
+And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become
+lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and
+make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.
+
+They do so.
+
+They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the
+qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower
+in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow
+no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in
+the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force
+of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.
+
+Very true.
+
+And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is
+established.
+
+Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of
+government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?
+
+First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification. Just
+think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their
+property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though
+he were a better pilot?
+
+You mean that they would shipwreck?
+
+Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?
+
+I should imagine so.
+
+Except a city?--or would you include a city?
+
+Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as
+the rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.
+
+This, then, will be the first great defect of oligarchy?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And here is another defect which is quite as bad.
+
+What defect?
+
+The inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the
+one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot
+and always conspiring against one another.
+
+That, surely, is at least as bad.
+
+Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are
+incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and
+then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not
+call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to
+fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for
+money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.
+
+How discreditable!
+
+And, as we said before, under such a constitution the same persons have
+too many callings--they are husbandmen, tradesmen, warriors, all in one.
+Does that look well?
+
+Anything but well.
+
+There is another evil which is, perhaps, the greatest of all, and to
+which this State first begins to be liable.
+
+What evil?
+
+A man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire his property;
+yet after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a
+part, being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman, nor hoplite, but
+only a poor, helpless creature.
+
+Yes, that is an evil which also first begins in this State.
+
+The evil is certainly not prevented there; for oligarchies have both the
+extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.
+
+True.
+
+But think again: In his wealthy days, while he was spending his money,
+was a man of this sort a whit more good to the State for the purposes
+of citizenship? Or did he only seem to be a member of the ruling
+body, although in truth he was neither ruler nor subject, but just a
+spendthrift?
+
+As you say, he seemed to be a ruler, but was only a spendthrift.
+
+May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone
+in the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as the
+other is of the hive?
+
+Just so, Socrates.
+
+And God has made the flying drones, Adeimantus, all without stings,
+whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings but others
+have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old
+age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they
+are termed.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Clearly then, whenever you see paupers in a State, somewhere in that
+neighborhood there are hidden away thieves, and cut-purses and robbers
+of temples, and all sorts of malefactors.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers?
+
+Yes, he said; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler.
+
+And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals to
+be found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities are
+careful to restrain by force?
+
+Certainly, we may be so bold.
+
+The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education,
+ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State?
+
+True.
+
+Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy; and there
+may be many other evils.
+
+Very likely.
+
+Then oligarchy, or the form of government in which the rulers are
+elected for their wealth, may now be dismissed. Let us next proceed to
+consider the nature and origin of the individual who answers to this
+State.
+
+By all means.
+
+Does not the timocratical man change into the oligarchical on this wise?
+
+How?
+
+A time arrives when the representative of timocracy has a son: at first
+he begins by emulating his father and walking in his footsteps, but
+presently he sees him of a sudden foundering against the State as upon
+a sunken reef, and he and all that he has is lost; he may have been
+a general or some other high officer who is brought to trial under a
+prejudice raised by informers, and either put to death, or exiled, or
+deprived of the privileges of a citizen, and all his property taken from
+him.
+
+Nothing more likely.
+
+And the son has seen and known all this--he is a ruined man, and his
+fear has taught him to knock ambition and passion headforemost from his
+bosom's throne; humbled by poverty he takes to money-making and by mean
+and miserly savings and hard work gets a fortune together. Is not such
+an one likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous element on the
+vacant throne and to suffer it to play the great king within him, girt
+with tiara and chain and scimitar?
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+And when he has made reason and spirit sit down on the ground obediently
+on either side of their sovereign, and taught them to know their place,
+he compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be turned into
+larger ones, and will not allow the other to worship and admire anything
+but riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything so much as the
+acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it.
+
+Of all changes, he said, there is none so speedy or so sure as the
+conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one.
+
+And the avaricious, I said, is the oligarchical youth?
+
+Yes, he said; at any rate the individual out of whom he came is like the
+State out of which oligarchy came.
+
+Let us then consider whether there is any likeness between them.
+
+Very good.
+
+First, then, they resemble one another in the value which they set upon
+wealth?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Also in their penurious, laborious character; the individual only
+satisfies his necessary appetites, and confines his expenditure to them;
+his other desires he subdues, under the idea that they are unprofitable.
+
+True.
+
+He is a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes a
+purse for himself; and this is the sort of man whom the vulgar applaud.
+Is he not a true image of the State which he represents?
+
+He appears to me to be so; at any rate money is highly valued by him as
+well as by the State.
+
+You see that he is not a man of cultivation, I said.
+
+I imagine not, he said; had he been educated he would never have made a
+blind god director of his chorus, or given him chief honour.
+
+Excellent! I said. Yet consider: Must we not further admit that owing to
+this want of cultivation there will be found in him dronelike desires as
+of pauper and rogue, which are forcibly kept down by his general habit
+of life?
+
+True.
+
+Do you know where you will have to look if you want to discover his
+rogueries?
+
+Where must I look?
+
+You should see him where he has some great opportunity of acting
+dishonestly, as in the guardianship of an orphan.
+
+Aye.
+
+It will be clear enough then that in his ordinary dealings which give
+him a reputation for honesty he coerces his bad passions by an enforced
+virtue; not making them see that they are wrong, or taming them by
+reason, but by necessity and fear constraining them, and because he
+trembles for his possessions.
+
+To be sure.
+
+Yes, indeed, my dear friend, but you will find that the natural desires
+of the drone commonly exist in him all the same whenever he has to spend
+what is not his own.
+
+Yes, and they will be strong in him too.
+
+The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not
+one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over
+his inferior ones.
+
+True.
+
+For these reasons such an one will be more respectable than most people;
+yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will flee far
+away and never come near him.
+
+I should expect so.
+
+And surely, the miser individually will be an ignoble competitor in a
+State for any prize of victory, or other object of honourable ambition;
+he will not spend his money in the contest for glory; so afraid is he of
+awakening his expensive appetites and inviting them to help and join in
+the struggle; in true oligarchical fashion he fights with a small part
+only of his resources, and the result commonly is that he loses the
+prize and saves his money.
+
+Very true.
+
+Can we any longer doubt, then, that the miser and money-maker answers to
+the oligarchical State?
+
+There can be no doubt.
+
+Next comes democracy; of this the origin and nature have still to
+be considered by us; and then we will enquire into the ways of the
+democratic man, and bring him up for judgment.
+
+That, he said, is our method.
+
+Well, I said, and how does the change from oligarchy into democracy
+arise? Is it not on this wise?--The good at which such a State aims is
+to become as rich as possible, a desire which is insatiable?
+
+What then?
+
+The rulers, being aware that their power rests upon their wealth, refuse
+to curtail by law the extravagance of the spendthrift youth because
+they gain by their ruin; they take interest from them and buy up their
+estates and thus increase their own wealth and importance?
+
+To be sure.
+
+There can be no doubt that the love of wealth and the spirit of
+moderation cannot exist together in citizens of the same state to any
+considerable extent; one or the other will be disregarded.
+
+That is tolerably clear.
+
+And in oligarchical States, from the general spread of carelessness and
+extravagance, men of good family have often been reduced to beggary?
+
+Yes, often.
+
+And still they remain in the city; there they are, ready to sting and
+fully armed, and some of them owe money, some have forfeited their
+citizenship; a third class are in both predicaments; and they hate
+and conspire against those who have got their property, and against
+everybody else, and are eager for revolution.
+
+That is true.
+
+On the other hand, the men of business, stooping as they walk, and
+pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert
+their sting--that is, their money--into some one else who is not on
+his guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times over
+multiplied into a family of children: and so they make drone and pauper
+to abound in the State.
+
+Yes, he said, there are plenty of them--that is certain.
+
+The evil blazes up like a fire; and they will not extinguish it, either
+by restricting a man's use of his own property, or by another remedy:
+
+What other?
+
+One which is the next best, and has the advantage of compelling the
+citizens to look to their characters:--Let there be a general rule that
+every one shall enter into voluntary contracts at his own risk, and
+there will be less of this scandalous money-making, and the evils of
+which we were speaking will be greatly lessened in the State.
+
+Yes, they will be greatly lessened.
+
+At present the governors, induced by the motives which I have named,
+treat their subjects badly; while they and their adherents, especially
+the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life
+of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are
+incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain.
+
+Very true.
+
+They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as
+the pauper to the cultivation of virtue.
+
+Yes, quite as indifferent.
+
+Such is the state of affairs which prevails among them. And often rulers
+and their subjects may come in one another's way, whether on a journey
+or on some other occasion of meeting, on a pilgrimage or a march,
+as fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye and they may observe the
+behaviour of each other in the very moment of danger--for where danger
+is, there is no fear that the poor will be despised by the rich--and
+very likely the wiry sunburnt poor man may be placed in battle at the
+side of a wealthy one who has never spoilt his complexion and has
+plenty of superfluous flesh--when he sees such an one puffing and at his
+wits'-end, how can he avoid drawing the conclusion that men like him are
+only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them? And when they
+meet in private will not people be saying to one another 'Our warriors
+are not good for much'?
+
+Yes, he said, I am quite aware that this is their way of talking.
+
+And, as in a body which is diseased the addition of a touch from without
+may bring on illness, and sometimes even when there is no external
+provocation a commotion may arise within--in the same way wherever there
+is weakness in the State there is also likely to be illness, of which
+the occasion may be very slight, the one party introducing from without
+their oligarchical, the other their democratical allies, and then
+the State falls sick, and is at war with herself; and may be at times
+distracted, even when there is no external cause.
+
+Yes, surely.
+
+And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their
+opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder
+they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of
+government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution
+has been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite party
+to withdraw.
+
+And now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government have
+they? for as the government is, such will be the man.
+
+Clearly, he said.
+
+In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of
+freedom and frankness--a man may say and do what he likes?
+
+'Tis said so, he replied.
+
+And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for
+himself his own life as he pleases?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human
+natures?
+
+There will.
+
+This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being like an
+embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just
+as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things
+most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is
+spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be
+the fairest of States.
+
+Yes.
+
+Yes, my good Sir, and there will be no better in which to look for a
+government.
+
+Why?
+
+Because of the liberty which reigns there--they have a complete
+assortment of constitutions; and he who has a mind to establish a State,
+as we have been doing, must go to a democracy as he would to a bazaar at
+which they sell them, and pick out the one that suits him; then, when he
+has made his choice, he may found his State.
+
+He will be sure to have patterns enough.
+
+And there being no necessity, I said, for you to govern in this State,
+even if you have the capacity, or to be governed, unless you like, or
+go to war when the rest go to war, or to be at peace when others are
+at peace, unless you are so disposed--there being no necessity also,
+because some law forbids you to hold office or be a dicast, that you
+should not hold office or be a dicast, if you have a fancy--is not this
+a way of life which for the moment is supremely delightful?
+
+For the moment, yes.
+
+And is not their humanity to the condemned in some cases quite charming?
+Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although they
+have been sentenced to death or exile, just stay where they are and walk
+about the world--the gentleman parades like a hero, and nobody sees or
+cares?
+
+Yes, he replied, many and many a one.
+
+See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the 'don't
+care' about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine
+principles which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the city--as
+when we said that, except in the case of some rarely gifted nature,
+there never will be a good man who has not from his childhood been used
+to play amid things of beauty and make of them a joy and a study--how
+grandly does she trample all these fine notions of ours under her feet,
+never giving a thought to the pursuits which make a statesman, and
+promoting to honour any one who professes to be the people's friend.
+
+Yes, she is of a noble spirit.
+
+These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which
+is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and
+dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
+
+We know her well.
+
+Consider now, I said, what manner of man the individual is, or rather
+consider, as in the case of the State, how he comes into being.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Is not this the way--he is the son of the miserly and oligarchical
+father who has trained him in his own habits?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And, like his father, he keeps under by force the pleasures which are of
+the spending and not of the getting sort, being those which are called
+unnecessary?
+
+Obviously.
+
+Would you like, for the sake of clearness, to distinguish which are the
+necessary and which are the unnecessary pleasures?
+
+I should.
+
+Are not necessary pleasures those of which we cannot get rid, and of
+which the satisfaction is a benefit to us? And they are rightly called
+so, because we are framed by nature to desire both what is beneficial
+and what is necessary, and cannot help it.
+
+True.
+
+We are not wrong therefore in calling them necessary?
+
+We are not.
+
+And the desires of which a man may get rid, if he takes pains from his
+youth upwards--of which the presence, moreover, does no good, and in
+some cases the reverse of good--shall we not be right in saying that all
+these are unnecessary?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+Suppose we select an example of either kind, in order that we may have a
+general notion of them?
+
+Very good.
+
+Will not the desire of eating, that is, of simple food and condiments,
+in so far as they are required for health and strength, be of the
+necessary class?
+
+That is what I should suppose.
+
+The pleasure of eating is necessary in two ways; it does us good and it
+is essential to the continuance of life?
+
+Yes.
+
+But the condiments are only necessary in so far as they are good for
+health?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the desire which goes beyond this, of more delicate food, or other
+luxuries, which might generally be got rid of, if controlled and trained
+in youth, and is hurtful to the body, and hurtful to the soul in the
+pursuit of wisdom and virtue, may be rightly called unnecessary?
+
+Very true.
+
+May we not say that these desires spend, and that the others make money
+because they conduce to production?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And of the pleasures of love, and all other pleasures, the same holds
+good?
+
+True.
+
+And the drone of whom we spoke was he who was surfeited in pleasures
+and desires of this sort, and was the slave of the unnecessary desires,
+whereas he who was subject to the necessary only was miserly and
+oligarchical?
+
+Very true.
+
+Again, let us see how the democratical man grows out of the
+oligarchical: the following, as I suspect, is commonly the process.
+
+What is the process?
+
+When a young man who has been brought up as we were just now describing,
+in a vulgar and miserly way, has tasted drones' honey and has come to
+associate with fierce and crafty natures who are able to provide for
+him all sorts of refinements and varieties of pleasure--then, as you may
+imagine, the change will begin of the oligarchical principle within him
+into the democratical?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+And as in the city like was helping like, and the change was effected by
+an alliance from without assisting one division of the citizens, so too
+the young man is changed by a class of desires coming from without
+to assist the desires within him, that which is akin and alike again
+helping that which is akin and alike?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if there be any ally which aids the oligarchical principle within
+him, whether the influence of a father or of kindred, advising or
+rebuking him, then there arises in his soul a faction and an opposite
+faction, and he goes to war with himself.
+
+It must be so.
+
+And there are times when the democratical principle gives way to the
+oligarchical, and some of his desires die, and others are banished;
+a spirit of reverence enters into the young man's soul and order is
+restored.
+
+Yes, he said, that sometimes happens.
+
+And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones
+spring up, which are akin to them, and because he their father does not
+know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.
+
+Yes, he said, that is apt to be the way.
+
+They draw him to his old associates, and holding secret intercourse with
+them, breed and multiply in him.
+
+Very true.
+
+At length they seize upon the citadel of the young man's soul, which
+they perceive to be void of all accomplishments and fair pursuits and
+true words, which make their abode in the minds of men who are dear to
+the gods, and are their best guardians and sentinels.
+
+None better.
+
+False and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their
+place.
+
+They are certain to do so.
+
+And so the young man returns into the country of the lotus-eaters, and
+takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men; and if any help be
+sent by his friends to the oligarchical part of him, the aforesaid vain
+conceits shut the gate of the king's fastness; and they will neither
+allow the embassy itself to enter, nor if private advisers offer the
+fatherly counsel of the aged will they listen to them or receive them.
+There is a battle and they gain the day, and then modesty, which
+they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and
+temperance, which they nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and
+cast forth; they persuade men that moderation and orderly expenditure
+are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil
+appetites, they drive them beyond the border.
+
+Yes, with a will.
+
+And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in
+their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the
+next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and
+waste and impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads, and
+a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by
+sweet names; insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and
+waste magnificence, and impudence courage. And so the young man
+passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of
+necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary
+pleasures.
+
+Yes, he said, the change in him is visible enough.
+
+After this he lives on, spending his money and labour and time on
+unnecessary pleasures quite as much as on necessary ones; but if he be
+fortunate, and is not too much disordered in his wits, when years have
+elapsed, and the heyday of passion is over--supposing that he then
+re-admits into the city some part of the exiled virtues, and does not
+wholly give himself up to their successors--in that case he balances his
+pleasures and lives in a sort of equilibrium, putting the government of
+himself into the hands of the one which comes first and wins the turn;
+and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another; he
+despises none of them but encourages them all equally.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress any true word of
+advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions
+of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought
+to use and honour some and chastise and master the others--whenever this
+is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike,
+and that one is as good as another.
+
+Yes, he said; that is the way with him.
+
+Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the
+hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then
+he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn
+at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once
+more living the life of a philosopher; often he is busy with politics,
+and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head;
+and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that
+direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has
+neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and
+bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.
+
+Yes, he replied, he is all liberty and equality.
+
+Yes, I said; his life is motley and manifold and an epitome of the
+lives of many;--he answers to the State which we described as fair
+and spangled. And many a man and many a woman will take him for their
+pattern, and many a constitution and many an example of manners is
+contained in him.
+
+Just so.
+
+Let him then be set over against democracy; he may truly be called the
+democratic man.
+
+Let that be his place, he said.
+
+Last of all comes the most beautiful of all, man and State alike,
+tyranny and the tyrant; these we have now to consider.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Say then, my friend, In what manner does tyranny arise?--that it has a
+democratic origin is evident.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as
+democracy from oligarchy--I mean, after a sort?
+
+How?
+
+The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it
+was maintained was excess of wealth--am I not right?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things
+for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy?
+
+True.
+
+And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings
+her to dissolution?
+
+What good?
+
+Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory
+of the State--and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman
+of nature deign to dwell.
+
+Yes; the saying is in every body's mouth.
+
+I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the
+neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which
+occasions a demand for tyranny.
+
+How so?
+
+When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cup-bearers
+presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of
+freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful
+draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they
+are cursed oligarchs.
+
+Yes, he replied, a very common occurrence.
+
+Yes, I said; and loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who
+hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like
+rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are men after her own
+heart, whom she praises and honours both in private and public. Now, in
+such a State, can liberty have any limit?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by
+getting among the animals and infecting them.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his
+sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he
+having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is
+his freedom, and the metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen
+with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the way.
+
+And these are not the only evils, I said--there are several lesser ones:
+In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his scholars,
+and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are
+all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready
+to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the
+young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought
+morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the
+young.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money,
+whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser; nor
+must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in
+relation to each other.
+
+Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?
+
+That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who
+does not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the
+animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in
+any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as
+good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of
+marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they
+will run at any body who comes in their way if he does not leave
+the road clear for them: and all things are just ready to burst with
+liberty.
+
+When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you
+describe. You and I have dreamed the same thing.
+
+And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the
+citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority,
+and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws,
+written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.
+
+Yes, he said, I know it too well.
+
+Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which
+springs tyranny.
+
+Glorious indeed, he said. But what is the next step?
+
+The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease
+magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy--the truth
+being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in
+the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and
+in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.
+
+True.
+
+The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to
+pass into excess of slavery.
+
+Yes, the natural order.
+
+And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most
+aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of
+liberty?
+
+As we might expect.
+
+That, however, was not, as I believe, your question--you rather desired
+to know what is that disorder which is generated alike in oligarchy and
+democracy, and is the ruin of both?
+
+Just so, he replied.
+
+Well, I said, I meant to refer to the class of idle spendthrifts,
+of whom the more courageous are the leaders and the more timid the
+followers, the same whom we were comparing to drones, some stingless,
+and others having stings.
+
+A very just comparison.
+
+These two classes are the plagues of every city in which they are
+generated, being what phlegm and bile are to the body. And the good
+physician and lawgiver of the State ought, like the wise bee-master, to
+keep them at a distance and prevent, if possible, their ever coming in;
+and if they have anyhow found a way in, then he should have them and
+their cells cut out as speedily as possible.
+
+Yes, by all means, he said.
+
+Then, in order that we may see clearly what we are doing, let us imagine
+democracy to be divided, as indeed it is, into three classes; for in the
+first place freedom creates rather more drones in the democratic than
+there were in the oligarchical State.
+
+That is true.
+
+And in the democracy they are certainly more intensified.
+
+How so?
+
+Because in the oligarchical State they are disqualified and driven from
+office, and therefore they cannot train or gather strength; whereas in a
+democracy they are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener
+sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema and do not
+suffer a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies almost
+everything is managed by the drones.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass.
+
+What is that?
+
+They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders is sure to be
+the richest.
+
+Naturally so.
+
+They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of
+honey to the drones.
+
+Why, he said, there is little to be squeezed out of people who have
+little.
+
+And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them.
+
+That is pretty much the case, he said.
+
+The people are a third class, consisting of those who work with their
+own hands; they are not politicians, and have not much to live upon.
+This, when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a
+democracy.
+
+True, he said; but then the multitude is seldom willing to congregate
+unless they get a little honey.
+
+And do they not share? I said. Do not their leaders deprive the rich
+of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time
+taking care to reserve the larger part for themselves?
+
+Why, yes, he said, to that extent the people do share.
+
+And the persons whose property is taken from them are compelled to
+defend themselves before the people as they best can?
+
+What else can they do?
+
+And then, although they may have no desire of change, the others charge
+them with plotting against the people and being friends of oligarchy?
+
+True.
+
+And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord,
+but through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers,
+seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become
+oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the
+drones torments them and breeds revolution in them.
+
+That is exactly the truth.
+
+Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.
+
+True.
+
+The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse
+into greatness.
+
+Yes, that is their way.
+
+This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first
+appears above ground he is a protector.
+
+Yes, that is quite clear.
+
+How then does a protector begin to change into a tyrant? Clearly when
+he does what the man is said to do in the tale of the Arcadian temple of
+Lycaean Zeus.
+
+What tale?
+
+The tale is that he who has tasted the entrails of a single human victim
+minced up with the entrails of other victims is destined to become a
+wolf. Did you never hear it?
+
+Oh, yes.
+
+And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at
+his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen;
+by the favourite method of false accusation he brings them into court
+and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy
+tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens; some he kills
+and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of
+debts and partition of lands: and after this, what will be his destiny?
+Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a
+man become a wolf--that is, a tyrant?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+This, I said, is he who begins to make a party against the rich?
+
+The same.
+
+After a while he is driven out, but comes back, in spite of his enemies,
+a tyrant full grown.
+
+That is clear.
+
+And if they are unable to expel him, or to get him condemned to death by
+a public accusation, they conspire to assassinate him.
+
+Yes, he said, that is their usual way.
+
+Then comes the famous request for a body-guard, which is the device of
+all those who have got thus far in their tyrannical career--'Let not the
+people's friend,' as they say, 'be lost to them.'
+
+Exactly.
+
+The people readily assent; all their fears are for him--they have none
+for themselves.
+
+Very true.
+
+And when a man who is wealthy and is also accused of being an enemy of
+the people sees this, then, my friend, as the oracle said to Croesus,
+
+'By pebbly Hermus' shore he flees and rests not, and is not ashamed to
+be a coward.'
+
+And quite right too, said he, for if he were, he would never be ashamed
+again.
+
+But if he is caught he dies.
+
+Of course.
+
+And he, the protector of whom we spoke, is to be seen, not 'larding the
+plain' with his bulk, but himself the overthrower of many, standing up
+in the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer protector,
+but tyrant absolute.
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+And now let us consider the happiness of the man, and also of the State
+in which a creature like him is generated.
+
+Yes, he said, let us consider that.
+
+At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and
+he salutes every one whom he meets;--he to be called a tyrant, who is
+making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and
+distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so
+kind and good to every one!
+
+Of course, he said.
+
+But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and
+there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some
+war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
+
+To be sure.
+
+Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished
+by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their
+daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom,
+and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for
+destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all
+these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.
+
+He must.
+
+Now he begins to grow unpopular.
+
+A necessary result.
+
+Then some of those who joined in setting him up, and who are in power,
+speak their minds to him and to one another, and the more courageous of
+them cast in his teeth what is being done.
+
+Yes, that may be expected.
+
+And the tyrant, if he means to rule, must get rid of them; he cannot
+stop while he has a friend or an enemy who is good for anything.
+
+He cannot.
+
+And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is
+high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy
+of them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no,
+until he has made a purgation of the State.
+
+Yes, he said, and a rare purgation.
+
+Yes, I said, not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the
+body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he
+does the reverse.
+
+If he is to rule, I suppose that he cannot help himself.
+
+What a blessed alternative, I said:--to be compelled to dwell only with
+the many bad, and to be by them hated, or not to live at all!
+
+Yes, that is the alternative.
+
+And the more detestable his actions are to the citizens the more
+satellites and the greater devotion in them will he require?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them?
+
+They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if he pays them.
+
+By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every
+land.
+
+Yes, he said, there are.
+
+But will he not desire to get them on the spot?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+He will rob the citizens of their slaves; he will then set them free and
+enrol them in his body-guard.
+
+To be sure, he said; and he will be able to trust them best of all.
+
+What a blessed creature, I said, must this tyrant be; he has put to
+death the others and has these for his trusted friends.
+
+Yes, he said; they are quite of his sort.
+
+Yes, I said, and these are the new citizens whom he has called into
+existence, who admire him and are his companions, while the good hate
+and avoid him.
+
+Of course.
+
+Verily, then, tragedy is a wise thing and Euripides a great tragedian.
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, because he is the author of the pregnant saying,
+
+'Tyrants are wise by living with the wise;'
+
+and he clearly meant to say that they are the wise whom the tyrant makes
+his companions.
+
+Yes, he said, and he also praises tyranny as godlike; and many other
+things of the same kind are said by him and by the other poets.
+
+And therefore, I said, the tragic poets being wise men will forgive us
+and any others who live after our manner if we do not receive them into
+our State, because they are the eulogists of tyranny.
+
+Yes, he said, those who have the wit will doubtless forgive us.
+
+But they will continue to go to other cities and attract mobs, and
+hire voices fair and loud and persuasive, and draw the cities over to
+tyrannies and democracies.
+
+Very true.
+
+Moreover, they are paid for this and receive honour--the greatest
+honour, as might be expected, from tyrants, and the next greatest from
+democracies; but the higher they ascend our constitution hill, the more
+their reputation fails, and seems unable from shortness of breath to
+proceed further.
+
+True.
+
+But we are wandering from the subject: Let us therefore return and
+enquire how the tyrant will maintain that fair and numerous and various
+and ever-changing army of his.
+
+If, he said, there are sacred treasures in the city, he will confiscate
+and spend them; and in so far as the fortunes of attainted persons may
+suffice, he will be able to diminish the taxes which he would otherwise
+have to impose upon the people.
+
+And when these fail?
+
+Why, clearly, he said, then he and his boon companions, whether male or
+female, will be maintained out of his father's estate.
+
+You mean to say that the people, from whom he has derived his being,
+will maintain him and his companions?
+
+Yes, he said; they cannot help themselves.
+
+But what if the people fly into a passion, and aver that a grown-up son
+ought not to be supported by his father, but that the father should be
+supported by the son? The father did not bring him into being, or settle
+him in life, in order that when his son became a man he should himself
+be the servant of his own servants and should support him and his rabble
+of slaves and companions; but that his son should protect him, and that
+by his help he might be emancipated from the government of the rich and
+aristocratic, as they are termed. And so he bids him and his companions
+depart, just as any other father might drive out of the house a riotous
+son and his undesirable associates.
+
+By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has
+been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he
+will find that he is weak and his son strong.
+
+Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence? What!
+beat his father if he opposes him?
+
+Yes, he will, having first disarmed him.
+
+Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and this
+is real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake: as the
+saying is, the people who would escape the smoke which is the slavery of
+freemen, has fallen into the fire which is the tyranny of slaves. Thus
+liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest
+and bitterest form of slavery.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Very well; and may we not rightly say that we have sufficiently
+discussed the nature of tyranny, and the manner of the transition from
+democracy to tyranny?
+
+Yes, quite enough, he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IX.
+
+Last of all comes the tyrannical man; about whom we have once more to
+ask, how is he formed out of the democratical? and how does he live, in
+happiness or in misery?
+
+Yes, he said, he is the only one remaining.
+
+There is, however, I said, a previous question which remains unanswered.
+
+What question?
+
+I do not think that we have adequately determined the nature and number
+of the appetites, and until this is accomplished the enquiry will always
+be confused.
+
+Well, he said, it is not too late to supply the omission.
+
+Very true, I said; and observe the point which I want to understand:
+Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be
+unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are
+controlled by the laws and by reason, and the better desires prevail
+over them--either they are wholly banished or they become few and weak;
+while in the case of others they are stronger, and there are more of
+them.
+
+Which appetites do you mean?
+
+I mean those which are awake when the reasoning and human and ruling
+power is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or
+drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy
+his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime--not excepting
+incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of
+forbidden food--which at such a time, when he has parted company with
+all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+But when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and when before going
+to sleep he has awakened his rational powers, and fed them on noble
+thoughts and enquiries, collecting himself in meditation; after having
+first indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just
+enough to lay them to sleep, and prevent them and their enjoyments and
+pains from interfering with the higher principle--which he leaves in
+the solitude of pure abstraction, free to contemplate and aspire to
+the knowledge of the unknown, whether in past, present, or future: when
+again he has allayed the passionate element, if he has a quarrel against
+any one--I say, when, after pacifying the two irrational principles, he
+rouses up the third, which is reason, before he takes his rest, then,
+as you know, he attains truth most nearly, and is least likely to be the
+sport of fantastic and lawless visions.
+
+I quite agree.
+
+In saying this I have been running into a digression; but the point
+which I desire to note is that in all of us, even in good men, there is
+a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. Pray, consider
+whether I am right, and you agree with me.
+
+Yes, I agree.
+
+And now remember the character which we attributed to the democratic
+man. He was supposed from his youth upwards to have been trained under
+a miserly parent, who encouraged the saving appetites in him, but
+discountenanced the unnecessary, which aim only at amusement and
+ornament?
+
+True.
+
+And then he got into the company of a more refined, licentious sort of
+people, and taking to all their wanton ways rushed into the opposite
+extreme from an abhorrence of his father's meanness. At last, being a
+better man than his corruptors, he was drawn in both directions until he
+halted midway and led a life, not of vulgar and slavish passion, but
+of what he deemed moderate indulgence in various pleasures. After this
+manner the democrat was generated out of the oligarch?
+
+Yes, he said; that was our view of him, and is so still.
+
+And now, I said, years will have passed away, and you must conceive this
+man, such as he is, to have a son, who is brought up in his father's
+principles.
+
+I can imagine him.
+
+Then you must further imagine the same thing to happen to the son
+which has already happened to the father:--he is drawn into a perfectly
+lawless life, which by his seducers is termed perfect liberty; and his
+father and friends take part with his moderate desires, and the opposite
+party assist the opposite ones. As soon as these dire magicians and
+tyrant-makers find that they are losing their hold on him, they contrive
+to implant in him a master passion, to be lord over his idle and
+spendthrift lusts--a sort of monstrous winged drone--that is the only
+image which will adequately describe him.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the only adequate image of him.
+
+And when his other lusts, amid clouds of incense and perfumes and
+garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life, now let
+loose, come buzzing around him, nourishing to the utmost the sting of
+desire which they implant in his drone-like nature, then at last this
+lord of the soul, having Madness for the captain of his guard, breaks
+out into a frenzy: and if he finds in himself any good opinions or
+appetites in process of formation, and there is in him any sense of
+shame remaining, to these better principles he puts an end, and casts
+them forth until he has purged away temperance and brought in madness to
+the full.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the way in which the tyrannical man is generated.
+
+And is not this the reason why of old love has been called a tyrant?
+
+I should not wonder.
+
+Further, I said, has not a drunken man also the spirit of a tyrant?
+
+He has.
+
+And you know that a man who is deranged and not right in his mind, will
+fancy that he is able to rule, not only over men, but also over the
+gods?
+
+That he will.
+
+And the tyrannical man in the true sense of the word comes into being
+when, either under the influence of nature, or habit, or both, he
+becomes drunken, lustful, passionate? O my friend, is not that so?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Such is the man and such is his origin. And next, how does he live?
+
+Suppose, as people facetiously say, you were to tell me.
+
+I imagine, I said, at the next step in his progress, that there will be
+feasts and carousals and revellings and courtezans, and all that sort
+of thing; Love is the lord of the house within him, and orders all the
+concerns of his soul.
+
+That is certain.
+
+Yes; and every day and every night desires grow up many and formidable,
+and their demands are many.
+
+They are indeed, he said.
+
+His revenues, if he has any, are soon spent.
+
+True.
+
+Then comes debt and the cutting down of his property.
+
+Of course.
+
+When he has nothing left, must not his desires, crowding in the nest
+like young ravens, be crying aloud for food; and he, goaded on by them,
+and especially by love himself, who is in a manner the captain of them,
+is in a frenzy, and would fain discover whom he can defraud or despoil
+of his property, in order that he may gratify them?
+
+Yes, that is sure to be the case.
+
+He must have money, no matter how, if he is to escape horrid pains and
+pangs.
+
+He must.
+
+And as in himself there was a succession of pleasures, and the new got
+the better of the old and took away their rights, so he being younger
+will claim to have more than his father and his mother, and if he has
+spent his own share of the property, he will take a slice of theirs.
+
+No doubt he will.
+
+And if his parents will not give way, then he will try first of all to
+cheat and deceive them.
+
+Very true.
+
+And if he fails, then he will use force and plunder them.
+
+Yes, probably.
+
+And if the old man and woman fight for their own, what then, my friend?
+Will the creature feel any compunction at tyrannizing over them?
+
+Nay, he said, I should not feel at all comfortable about his parents.
+
+But, O heavens! Adeimantus, on account of some new-fangled love of a
+harlot, who is anything but a necessary connection, can you believe that
+he would strike the mother who is his ancient friend and necessary
+to his very existence, and would place her under the authority of the
+other, when she is brought under the same roof with her; or that, under
+like circumstances, he would do the same to his withered old father,
+first and most indispensable of friends, for the sake of some
+newly-found blooming youth who is the reverse of indispensable?
+
+Yes, indeed, he said; I believe that he would.
+
+Truly, then, I said, a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and
+mother.
+
+He is indeed, he replied.
+
+He first takes their property, and when that fails, and pleasures are
+beginning to swarm in the hive of his soul, then he breaks into a house,
+or steals the garments of some nightly wayfarer; next he proceeds to
+clear a temple. Meanwhile the old opinions which he had when a child,
+and which gave judgment about good and evil, are overthrown by those
+others which have just been emancipated, and are now the body-guard of
+love and share his empire. These in his democratic days, when he was
+still subject to the laws and to his father, were only let loose in
+the dreams of sleep. But now that he is under the dominion of love, he
+becomes always and in waking reality what he was then very rarely and in
+a dream only; he will commit the foulest murder, or eat forbidden food,
+or be guilty of any other horrid act. Love is his tyrant, and lives
+lordly in him and lawlessly, and being himself a king, leads him on, as
+a tyrant leads a State, to the performance of any reckless deed by which
+he can maintain himself and the rabble of his associates, whether those
+whom evil communications have brought in from without, or those whom
+he himself has allowed to break loose within him by reason of a similar
+evil nature in himself. Have we not here a picture of his way of life?
+
+Yes, indeed, he said.
+
+And if there are only a few of them in the State, and the rest of the
+people are well disposed, they go away and become the body-guard or
+mercenary soldiers of some other tyrant who may probably want them for a
+war; and if there is no war, they stay at home and do many little pieces
+of mischief in the city.
+
+What sort of mischief?
+
+For example, they are the thieves, burglars, cut-purses, foot-pads,
+robbers of temples, man-stealers of the community; or if they are able
+to speak they turn informers, and bear false witness, and take bribes.
+
+A small catalogue of evils, even if the perpetrators of them are few in
+number.
+
+Yes, I said; but small and great are comparative terms, and all these
+things, in the misery and evil which they inflict upon a State, do not
+come within a thousand miles of the tyrant; when this noxious class and
+their followers grow numerous and become conscious of their strength,
+assisted by the infatuation of the people, they choose from among
+themselves the one who has most of the tyrant in his own soul, and him
+they create their tyrant.
+
+Yes, he said, and he will be the most fit to be a tyrant.
+
+If the people yield, well and good; but if they resist him, as he began
+by beating his own father and mother, so now, if he has the power, he
+beats them, and will keep his dear old fatherland or motherland, as the
+Cretans say, in subjection to his young retainers whom he has introduced
+to be their rulers and masters. This is the end of his passions and
+desires.
+
+Exactly.
+
+When such men are only private individuals and before they get power,
+this is their character; they associate entirely with their own
+flatterers or ready tools; or if they want anything from anybody, they
+in their turn are equally ready to bow down before them: they profess
+every sort of affection for them; but when they have gained their point
+they know them no more.
+
+Yes, truly.
+
+They are always either the masters or servants and never the friends of
+anybody; the tyrant never tastes of true freedom or friendship.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And may we not rightly call such men treacherous?
+
+No question.
+
+Also they are utterly unjust, if we were right in our notion of justice?
+
+Yes, he said, and we were perfectly right.
+
+Let us then sum up in a word, I said, the character of the worst man: he
+is the waking reality of what we dreamed.
+
+Most true.
+
+And this is he who being by nature most of a tyrant bears rule, and the
+longer he lives the more of a tyrant he becomes.
+
+That is certain, said Glaucon, taking his turn to answer.
+
+And will not he who has been shown to be the wickedest, be also the most
+miserable? and he who has tyrannized longest and most, most continually
+and truly miserable; although this may not be the opinion of men in
+general?
+
+Yes, he said, inevitably.
+
+And must not the tyrannical man be like the tyrannical State, and
+the democratical man like the democratical State; and the same of the
+others?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And as State is to State in virtue and happiness, so is man in relation
+to man?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then comparing our original city, which was under a king, and the city
+which is under a tyrant, how do they stand as to virtue?
+
+They are the opposite extremes, he said, for one is the very best and
+the other is the very worst.
+
+There can be no mistake, I said, as to which is which, and therefore
+I will at once enquire whether you would arrive at a similar decision
+about their relative happiness and misery. And here we must not allow
+ourselves to be panic-stricken at the apparition of the tyrant, who is
+only a unit and may perhaps have a few retainers about him; but let us
+go as we ought into every corner of the city and look all about, and
+then we will give our opinion.
+
+A fair invitation, he replied; and I see, as every one must, that a
+tyranny is the wretchedest form of government, and the rule of a king
+the happiest.
+
+And in estimating the men too, may I not fairly make a like request,
+that I should have a judge whose mind can enter into and see through
+human nature? he must not be like a child who looks at the outside and
+is dazzled at the pompous aspect which the tyrannical nature assumes to
+the beholder, but let him be one who has a clear insight. May I suppose
+that the judgment is given in the hearing of us all by one who is able
+to judge, and has dwelt in the same place with him, and been present at
+his dally life and known him in his family relations, where he may be
+seen stripped of his tragedy attire, and again in the hour of public
+danger--he shall tell us about the happiness and misery of the tyrant
+when compared with other men?
+
+That again, he said, is a very fair proposal.
+
+Shall I assume that we ourselves are able and experienced judges and
+have before now met with such a person? We shall then have some one who
+will answer our enquiries.
+
+By all means.
+
+Let me ask you not to forget the parallel of the individual and the
+State; bearing this in mind, and glancing in turn from one to the other
+of them, will you tell me their respective conditions?
+
+What do you mean? he asked.
+
+Beginning with the State, I replied, would you say that a city which is
+governed by a tyrant is free or enslaved?
+
+No city, he said, can be more completely enslaved.
+
+And yet, as you see, there are freemen as well as masters in such a
+State?
+
+Yes, he said, I see that there are--a few; but the people, speaking
+generally, and the best of them are miserably degraded and enslaved.
+
+Then if the man is like the State, I said, must not the same rule
+prevail? his soul is full of meanness and vulgarity--the best elements
+in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part, which is also the
+worst and maddest.
+
+Inevitably.
+
+And would you say that the soul of such an one is the soul of a freeman,
+or of a slave?
+
+He has the soul of a slave, in my opinion.
+
+And the State which is enslaved under a tyrant is utterly incapable of
+acting voluntarily?
+
+Utterly incapable.
+
+And also the soul which is under a tyrant (I am speaking of the soul
+taken as a whole) is least capable of doing what she desires; there is a
+gadfly which goads her, and she is full of trouble and remorse?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is the city which is under a tyrant rich or poor?
+
+Poor.
+
+And the tyrannical soul must be always poor and insatiable?
+
+True.
+
+And must not such a State and such a man be always full of fear?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+Is there any State in which you will find more of lamentation and sorrow
+and groaning and pain?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And is there any man in whom you will find more of this sort of misery
+than in the tyrannical man, who is in a fury of passions and desires?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Reflecting upon these and similar evils, you held the tyrannical State
+to be the most miserable of States?
+
+And I was right, he said.
+
+Certainly, I said. And when you see the same evils in the tyrannical
+man, what do you say of him?
+
+I say that he is by far the most miserable of all men.
+
+There, I said, I think that you are beginning to go wrong.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I do not think that he has as yet reached the utmost extreme of misery.
+
+Then who is more miserable?
+
+One of whom I am about to speak.
+
+Who is that?
+
+He who is of a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life
+has been cursed with the further misfortune of being a public tyrant.
+
+From what has been said, I gather that you are right.
+
+Yes, I replied, but in this high argument you should be a little more
+certain, and should not conjecture only; for of all questions, this
+respecting good and evil is the greatest.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Let me then offer you an illustration, which may, I think, throw a light
+upon this subject.
+
+What is your illustration?
+
+The case of rich individuals in cities who possess many slaves: from
+them you may form an idea of the tyrant's condition, for they both have
+slaves; the only difference is that he has more slaves.
+
+Yes, that is the difference.
+
+You know that they live securely and have nothing to apprehend from
+their servants?
+
+What should they fear?
+
+Nothing. But do you observe the reason of this?
+
+Yes; the reason is, that the whole city is leagued together for the
+protection of each individual.
+
+Very true, I said. But imagine one of these owners, the master say of
+some fifty slaves, together with his family and property and slaves,
+carried off by a god into the wilderness, where there are no freemen to
+help him--will he not be in an agony of fear lest he and his wife and
+children should be put to death by his slaves?
+
+Yes, he said, he will be in the utmost fear.
+
+The time has arrived when he will be compelled to flatter divers of his
+slaves, and make many promises to them of freedom and other things, much
+against his will--he will have to cajole his own servants.
+
+Yes, he said, that will be the only way of saving himself.
+
+And suppose the same god, who carried him away, to surround him with
+neighbours who will not suffer one man to be the master of another, and
+who, if they could catch the offender, would take his life?
+
+His case will be still worse, if you suppose him to be everywhere
+surrounded and watched by enemies.
+
+And is not this the sort of prison in which the tyrant will be bound--he
+who being by nature such as we have described, is full of all sorts of
+fears and lusts? His soul is dainty and greedy, and yet alone, of all
+men in the city, he is never allowed to go on a journey, or to see the
+things which other freemen desire to see, but he lives in his hole like
+a woman hidden in the house, and is jealous of any other citizen who
+goes into foreign parts and sees anything of interest.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And amid evils such as these will not he who is ill-governed in his own
+person--the tyrannical man, I mean--whom you just now decided to be the
+most miserable of all--will not he be yet more miserable when, instead
+of leading a private life, he is constrained by fortune to be a public
+tyrant? He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself:
+he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his
+life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other men.
+
+Yes, he said, the similitude is most exact.
+
+Is not his case utterly miserable? and does not the actual tyrant lead a
+worse life than he whose life you determined to be the worst?
+
+Certainly.
+
+He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave,
+and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to
+be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is
+utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly
+poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life
+long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions,
+even as the State which he resembles: and surely the resemblance holds?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power: he
+becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust,
+more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor
+and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is
+supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as
+himself.
+
+No man of any sense will dispute your words.
+
+Come then, I said, and as the general umpire in theatrical contests
+proclaims the result, do you also decide who in your opinion is first
+in the scale of happiness, and who second, and in what order the others
+follow: there are five of them in all--they are the royal, timocratical,
+oligarchical, democratical, tyrannical.
+
+The decision will be easily given, he replied; they shall be choruses
+coming on the stage, and I must judge them in the order in which they
+enter, by the criterion of virtue and vice, happiness and misery.
+
+Need we hire a herald, or shall I announce, that the son of Ariston (the
+best) has decided that the best and justest is also the happiest, and
+that this is he who is the most royal man and king over himself; and
+that the worst and most unjust man is also the most miserable, and that
+this is he who being the greatest tyrant of himself is also the greatest
+tyrant of his State?
+
+Make the proclamation yourself, he said.
+
+And shall I add, 'whether seen or unseen by gods and men'?
+
+Let the words be added.
+
+Then this, I said, will be our first proof; and there is another, which
+may also have some weight.
+
+What is that?
+
+The second proof is derived from the nature of the soul: seeing that
+the individual soul, like the State, has been divided by us into three
+principles, the division may, I think, furnish a new demonstration.
+
+Of what nature?
+
+It seems to me that to these three principles three pleasures
+correspond; also three desires and governing powers.
+
+How do you mean? he said.
+
+There is one principle with which, as we were saying, a man learns,
+another with which he is angry; the third, having many forms, has no
+special name, but is denoted by the general term appetitive, from
+the extraordinary strength and vehemence of the desires of eating and
+drinking and the other sensual appetites which are the main elements of
+it; also money-loving, because such desires are generally satisfied by
+the help of money.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+If we were to say that the loves and pleasures of this third part were
+concerned with gain, we should then be able to fall back on a single
+notion; and might truly and intelligibly describe this part of the soul
+as loving gain or money.
+
+I agree with you.
+
+Again, is not the passionate element wholly set on ruling and conquering
+and getting fame?
+
+True.
+
+Suppose we call it the contentious or ambitious--would the term be
+suitable?
+
+Extremely suitable.
+
+On the other hand, every one sees that the principle of knowledge is
+wholly directed to the truth, and cares less than either of the others
+for gain or fame.
+
+Far less.
+
+'Lover of wisdom,' 'lover of knowledge,' are titles which we may fitly
+apply to that part of the soul?
+
+Certainly.
+
+One principle prevails in the souls of one class of men, another in
+others, as may happen?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of
+men--lovers of wisdom, lovers of honour, lovers of gain?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And there are three kinds of pleasure, which are their several objects?
+
+Very true.
+
+Now, if you examine the three classes of men, and ask of them in turn
+which of their lives is pleasantest, each will be found praising his
+own and depreciating that of others: the money-maker will contrast the
+vanity of honour or of learning if they bring no money with the solid
+advantages of gold and silver?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And the lover of honour--what will be his opinion? Will he not think
+that the pleasure of riches is vulgar, while the pleasure of learning,
+if it brings no distinction, is all smoke and nonsense to him?
+
+Very true.
+
+And are we to suppose, I said, that the philosopher sets any value on
+other pleasures in comparison with the pleasure of knowing the truth,
+and in that pursuit abiding, ever learning, not so far indeed from the
+heaven of pleasure? Does he not call the other pleasures necessary,
+under the idea that if there were no necessity for them, he would rather
+not have them?
+
+There can be no doubt of that, he replied.
+
+Since, then, the pleasures of each class and the life of each are in
+dispute, and the question is not which life is more or less honourable,
+or better or worse, but which is the more pleasant or painless--how
+shall we know who speaks truly?
+
+I cannot myself tell, he said.
+
+Well, but what ought to be the criterion? Is any better than experience
+and wisdom and reason?
+
+There cannot be a better, he said.
+
+Then, I said, reflect. Of the three individuals, which has the greatest
+experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated? Has the lover of
+gain, in learning the nature of essential truth, greater experience of
+the pleasure of knowledge than the philosopher has of the pleasure of
+gain?
+
+The philosopher, he replied, has greatly the advantage; for he has
+of necessity always known the taste of the other pleasures from his
+childhood upwards: but the lover of gain in all his experience has not
+of necessity tasted--or, I should rather say, even had he desired, could
+hardly have tasted--the sweetness of learning and knowing truth.
+
+Then the lover of wisdom has a great advantage over the lover of gain,
+for he has a double experience?
+
+Yes, very great.
+
+Again, has he greater experience of the pleasures of honour, or the
+lover of honour of the pleasures of wisdom?
+
+Nay, he said, all three are honoured in proportion as they attain their
+object; for the rich man and the brave man and the wise man alike have
+their crowd of admirers, and as they all receive honour they all have
+experience of the pleasures of honour; but the delight which is to be
+found in the knowledge of true being is known to the philosopher only.
+
+His experience, then, will enable him to judge better than any one?
+
+Far better.
+
+And he is the only one who has wisdom as well as experience?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Further, the very faculty which is the instrument of judgment is not
+possessed by the covetous or ambitious man, but only by the philosopher?
+
+What faculty?
+
+Reason, with whom, as we were saying, the decision ought to rest.
+
+Yes.
+
+And reasoning is peculiarly his instrument?
+
+Certainly.
+
+If wealth and gain were the criterion, then the praise or blame of the
+lover of gain would surely be the most trustworthy?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Or if honour or victory or courage, in that case the judgment of the
+ambitious or pugnacious would be the truest?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But since experience and wisdom and reason are the judges--
+
+The only inference possible, he replied, is that pleasures which are
+approved by the lover of wisdom and reason are the truest.
+
+And so we arrive at the result, that the pleasure of the intelligent
+part of the soul is the pleasantest of the three, and that he of us in
+whom this is the ruling principle has the pleasantest life.
+
+Unquestionably, he said, the wise man speaks with authority when he
+approves of his own life.
+
+And what does the judge affirm to be the life which is next, and the
+pleasure which is next?
+
+Clearly that of the soldier and lover of honour; who is nearer to
+himself than the money-maker.
+
+Last comes the lover of gain?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Twice in succession, then, has the just man overthrown the unjust in
+this conflict; and now comes the third trial, which is dedicated to
+Olympian Zeus the saviour: a sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure
+except that of the wise is quite true and pure--all others are a shadow
+only; and surely this will prove the greatest and most decisive of
+falls?
+
+Yes, the greatest; but will you explain yourself?
+
+I will work out the subject and you shall answer my questions.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Say, then, is not pleasure opposed to pain?
+
+True.
+
+And there is a neutral state which is neither pleasure nor pain?
+
+There is.
+
+A state which is intermediate, and a sort of repose of the soul about
+either--that is what you mean?
+
+Yes.
+
+You remember what people say when they are sick?
+
+What do they say?
+
+That after all nothing is pleasanter than health. But then they never
+knew this to be the greatest of pleasures until they were ill.
+
+Yes, I know, he said.
+
+And when persons are suffering from acute pain, you must have heard them
+say that there is nothing pleasanter than to get rid of their pain?
+
+I have.
+
+And there are many other cases of suffering in which the mere rest and
+cessation of pain, and not any positive enjoyment, is extolled by them
+as the greatest pleasure?
+
+Yes, he said; at the time they are pleased and well content to be at
+rest.
+
+Again, when pleasure ceases, that sort of rest or cessation will be
+painful?
+
+Doubtless, he said.
+
+Then the intermediate state of rest will be pleasure and will also be
+pain?
+
+So it would seem.
+
+But can that which is neither become both?
+
+I should say not.
+
+And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul, are they not?
+
+Yes.
+
+But that which is neither was just now shown to be rest and not motion,
+and in a mean between them?
+
+Yes.
+
+How, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is
+pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?
+
+Impossible.
+
+This then is an appearance only and not a reality; that is to say, the
+rest is pleasure at the moment and in comparison of what is painful,
+and painful in comparison of what is pleasant; but all these
+representations, when tried by the test of true pleasure, are not real
+but a sort of imposition?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+Look at the other class of pleasures which have no antecedent pains and
+you will no longer suppose, as you perhaps may at present, that pleasure
+is only the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
+
+What are they, he said, and where shall I find them?
+
+There are many of them: take as an example the pleasures of smell, which
+are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a moment, and
+when they depart leave no pain behind them.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the
+cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
+
+No.
+
+Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul
+through the body are generally of this sort--they are reliefs of pain.
+
+That is true.
+
+And the anticipations of future pleasures and pains are of a like
+nature?
+
+Yes.
+
+Shall I give you an illustration of them?
+
+Let me hear.
+
+You would allow, I said, that there is in nature an upper and lower and
+middle region?
+
+I should.
+
+And if a person were to go from the lower to the middle region, would
+he not imagine that he is going up; and he who is standing in the middle
+and sees whence he has come, would imagine that he is already in the
+upper region, if he has never seen the true upper world?
+
+To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?
+
+But if he were taken back again he would imagine, and truly imagine,
+that he was descending?
+
+No doubt.
+
+All that would arise out of his ignorance of the true upper and middle
+and lower regions?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as
+they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong
+ideas about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when
+they are only being drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think
+the pain which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when
+drawn away from pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly
+believe that they have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they,
+not knowing pleasure, err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain,
+which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white--can you
+wonder, I say, at this?
+
+No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.
+
+Look at the matter thus:--Hunger, thirst, and the like, are inanitions
+of the bodily state?
+
+Yes.
+
+And ignorance and folly are inanitions of the soul?
+
+True.
+
+And food and wisdom are the corresponding satisfactions of either?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is the satisfaction derived from that which has less or from that
+which has more existence the truer?
+
+Clearly, from that which has more.
+
+What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence in your
+judgment--those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of
+sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion
+and knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue? Put
+the question in this way:--Which has a more pure being--that which is
+concerned with the invariable, the immortal, and the true, and is of
+such a nature, and is found in such natures; or that which is concerned
+with and found in the variable and mortal, and is itself variable and
+mortal?
+
+Far purer, he replied, is the being of that which is concerned with the
+invariable.
+
+And does the essence of the invariable partake of knowledge in the same
+degree as of essence?
+
+Yes, of knowledge in the same degree.
+
+And of truth in the same degree?
+
+Yes.
+
+And, conversely, that which has less of truth will also have less of
+essence?
+
+Necessarily.
+
+Then, in general, those kinds of things which are in the service of the
+body have less of truth and essence than those which are in the service
+of the soul?
+
+Far less.
+
+And has not the body itself less of truth and essence than the soul?
+
+Yes.
+
+What is filled with more real existence, and actually has a more real
+existence, is more really filled than that which is filled with less
+real existence and is less real?
+
+Of course.
+
+And if there be a pleasure in being filled with that which is according
+to nature, that which is more really filled with more real being
+will more really and truly enjoy true pleasure; whereas that which
+participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied,
+and will participate in an illusory and less real pleasure?
+
+Unquestionably.
+
+Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with
+gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and
+in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass
+into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever
+find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do
+they taste of pure and abiding pleasure. Like cattle, with their eyes
+always looking down and their heads stooping to the earth, that is,
+to the dining-table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their
+excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another with
+horns and hoofs which are made of iron; and they kill one another by
+reason of their insatiable lust. For they fill themselves with that
+which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is
+also unsubstantial and incontinent.
+
+Verily, Socrates, said Glaucon, you describe the life of the many like
+an oracle.
+
+Their pleasures are mixed with pains--how can they be otherwise? For
+they are mere shadows and pictures of the true, and are coloured by
+contrast, which exaggerates both light and shade, and so they implant
+in the minds of fools insane desires of themselves; and they are fought
+about as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of
+Helen at Troy in ignorance of the truth.
+
+Something of that sort must inevitably happen.
+
+And must not the like happen with the spirited or passionate element
+of the soul? Will not the passionate man who carries his passion into
+action, be in the like case, whether he is envious and ambitious, or
+violent and contentious, or angry and discontented, if he be seeking
+to attain honour and victory and the satisfaction of his anger without
+reason or sense?
+
+Yes, he said, the same will happen with the spirited element also.
+
+Then may we not confidently assert that the lovers of money and honour,
+when they seek their pleasures under the guidance and in the company
+of reason and knowledge, and pursue after and win the pleasures which
+wisdom shows them, will also have the truest pleasures in the highest
+degree which is attainable to them, inasmuch as they follow truth; and
+they will have the pleasures which are natural to them, if that which is
+best for each one is also most natural to him?
+
+Yes, certainly; the best is the most natural.
+
+And when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there
+is no division, the several parts are just, and do each of them their
+own business, and enjoy severally the best and truest pleasures of which
+they are capable?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But when either of the two other principles prevails, it fails in
+attaining its own pleasure, and compels the rest to pursue after a
+pleasure which is a shadow only and which is not their own?
+
+True.
+
+And the greater the interval which separates them from philosophy and
+reason, the more strange and illusive will be the pleasure?
+
+Yes.
+
+And is not that farthest from reason which is at the greatest distance
+from law and order?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the lustful and tyrannical desires are, as we saw, at the greatest
+distance? Yes.
+
+And the royal and orderly desires are nearest?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the tyrant will live at the greatest distance from true or natural
+pleasure, and the king at the least?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But if so, the tyrant will live most unpleasantly, and the king most
+pleasantly?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+Would you know the measure of the interval which separates them?
+
+Will you tell me?
+
+There appear to be three pleasures, one genuine and two spurious: now
+the transgression of the tyrant reaches a point beyond the spurious; he
+has run away from the region of law and reason, and taken up his abode
+with certain slave pleasures which are his satellites, and the measure
+of his inferiority can only be expressed in a figure.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I assume, I said, that the tyrant is in the third place from the
+oligarch; the democrat was in the middle?
+
+Yes.
+
+And if there is truth in what has preceded, he will be wedded to an
+image of pleasure which is thrice removed as to truth from the pleasure
+of the oligarch?
+
+He will.
+
+And the oligarch is third from the royal; since we count as one royal
+and aristocratical?
+
+Yes, he is third.
+
+Then the tyrant is removed from true pleasure by the space of a number
+which is three times three?
+
+Manifestly.
+
+The shadow then of tyrannical pleasure determined by the number of
+length will be a plane figure.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if you raise the power and make the plane a solid, there is no
+difficulty in seeing how vast is the interval by which the tyrant is
+parted from the king.
+
+Yes; the arithmetician will easily do the sum.
+
+Or if some person begins at the other end and measures the interval by
+which the king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will
+find him, when the multiplication is completed, living 729 times more
+pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval.
+
+What a wonderful calculation! And how enormous is the distance which
+separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!
+
+Yet a true calculation, I said, and a number which nearly concerns human
+life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and
+years. (729 NEARLY equals the number of days and nights in the year.)
+
+Yes, he said, human life is certainly concerned with them.
+
+Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil
+and unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of
+life and in beauty and virtue?
+
+Immeasurably greater.
+
+Well, I said, and now having arrived at this stage of the argument, we
+may revert to the words which brought us hither: Was not some one saying
+that injustice was a gain to the perfectly unjust who was reputed to be
+just?
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Now then, having determined the power and quality of justice and
+injustice, let us have a little conversation with him.
+
+What shall we say to him?
+
+Let us make an image of the soul, that he may have his own words
+presented before his eyes.
+
+Of what sort?
+
+An ideal image of the soul, like the composite creations of ancient
+mythology, such as the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus, and there are many
+others in which two or more different natures are said to grow into one.
+
+There are said of have been such unions.
+
+Then do you now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster,
+having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he
+is able to generate and metamorphose at will.
+
+You suppose marvellous powers in the artist; but, as language is more
+pliable than wax or any similar substance, let there be such a model as
+you propose.
+
+Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a
+man, the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the
+second.
+
+That, he said, is an easier task; and I have made them as you say.
+
+And now join them, and let the three grow into one.
+
+That has been accomplished.
+
+Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so
+that he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull,
+may believe the beast to be a single human creature.
+
+I have done so, he said.
+
+And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human
+creature to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply
+that, if he be right, it is profitable for this creature to feast
+the multitudinous monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like
+qualities, but to starve and weaken the man, who is consequently liable
+to be dragged about at the mercy of either of the other two; and he is
+not to attempt to familiarize or harmonize them with one another--he
+ought rather to suffer them to fight and bite and devour one another.
+
+Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.
+
+To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so
+speak and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the
+most complete mastery over the entire human creature. He should watch
+over the many-headed monster like a good husbandman, fostering and
+cultivating the gentle qualities, and preventing the wild ones from
+growing; he should be making the lion-heart his ally, and in common care
+of them all should be uniting the several parts with one another and
+with himself.
+
+Yes, he said, that is quite what the maintainer of justice say.
+
+And so from every point of view, whether of pleasure, honour, or
+advantage, the approver of justice is right and speaks the truth, and
+the disapprover is wrong and false and ignorant?
+
+Yes, from every point of view.
+
+Come, now, and let us gently reason with the unjust, who is not
+intentionally in error. 'Sweet Sir,' we will say to him, 'what think
+you of things esteemed noble and ignoble? Is not the noble that which
+subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man; and the
+ignoble that which subjects the man to the beast?' He can hardly avoid
+saying Yes--can he now?
+
+Not if he has any regard for my opinion.
+
+But, if he agree so far, we may ask him to answer another question:
+'Then how would a man profit if he received gold and silver on the
+condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst?
+Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for
+money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men,
+would be the gainer, however large might be the sum which he
+received? And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who
+remorselessly sells his own divine being to that which is most godless
+and detestable? Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her husband's
+life, but he is taking a bribe in order to compass a worse ruin.'
+
+Yes, said Glaucon, far worse--I will answer for him.
+
+Has not the intemperate been censured of old, because in him the huge
+multiform monster is allowed to be too much at large?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And men are blamed for pride and bad temper when the lion and serpent
+element in them disproportionately grows and gains strength?
+
+Yes.
+
+And luxury and softness are blamed, because they relax and weaken this
+same creature, and make a coward of him?
+
+Very true.
+
+And is not a man reproached for flattery and meanness who subordinates
+the spirited animal to the unruly monster, and, for the sake of money,
+of which he can never have enough, habituates him in the days of his
+youth to be trampled in the mire, and from being a lion to become a
+monkey?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And why are mean employments and manual arts a reproach? Only because
+they imply a natural weakness of the higher principle; the individual is
+unable to control the creatures within him, but has to court them, and
+his great study is how to flatter them.
+
+Such appears to be the reason.
+
+And therefore, being desirous of placing him under a rule like that of
+the best, we say that he ought to be the servant of the best, in whom
+the Divine rules; not, as Thrasymachus supposed, to the injury of the
+servant, but because every one had better be ruled by divine wisdom
+dwelling within him; or, if this be impossible, then by an external
+authority, in order that we may be all, as far as possible, under the
+same government, friends and equals.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And this is clearly seen to be the intention of the law, which is the
+ally of the whole city; and is seen also in the authority which we
+exercise over children, and the refusal to let them be free until we
+have established in them a principle analogous to the constitution of
+a state, and by cultivation of this higher element have set up in their
+hearts a guardian and ruler like our own, and when this is done they may
+go their ways.
+
+Yes, he said, the purpose of the law is manifest.
+
+From what point of view, then, and on what ground can we say that a man
+is profited by injustice or intemperance or other baseness, which will
+make him a worse man, even though he acquire money or power by his
+wickedness?
+
+From no point of view at all.
+
+What shall he profit, if his injustice be undetected and unpunished?
+He who is undetected only gets worse, whereas he who is detected and
+punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanized; the
+gentler element in him is liberated, and his whole soul is perfected and
+ennobled by the acquirement of justice and temperance and wisdom, more
+than the body ever is by receiving gifts of beauty, strength and health,
+in proportion as the soul is more honourable than the body.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+To this nobler purpose the man of understanding will devote the energies
+of his life. And in the first place, he will honour studies which
+impress these qualities on his soul and will disregard others?
+
+Clearly, he said.
+
+In the next place, he will regulate his bodily habit and training, and
+so far will he be from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, that
+he will regard even health as quite a secondary matter; his first object
+will be not that he may be fair or strong or well, unless he is likely
+thereby to gain temperance, but he will always desire so to attemper the
+body as to preserve the harmony of the soul?
+
+Certainly he will, if he has true music in him.
+
+And in the acquisition of wealth there is a principle of order and
+harmony which he will also observe; he will not allow himself to be
+dazzled by the foolish applause of the world, and heap up riches to his
+own infinite harm?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+He will look at the city which is within him, and take heed that no
+disorder occur in it, such as might arise either from superfluity or
+from want; and upon this principle he will regulate his property and
+gain or spend according to his means.
+
+Very true.
+
+And, for the same reason, he will gladly accept and enjoy such honours
+as he deems likely to make him a better man; but those, whether private
+or public, which are likely to disorder his life, he will avoid?
+
+Then, if that is his motive, he will not be a statesman.
+
+By the dog of Egypt, he will! in the city which is his own he certainly
+will, though in the land of his birth perhaps not, unless he have a
+divine call.
+
+I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we
+are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe
+that there is such an one anywhere on earth?
+
+In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which
+he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in
+order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no
+matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing
+to do with any other.
+
+I think so, he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK X.
+
+Of the many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State,
+there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule
+about poetry.
+
+To what do you refer?
+
+To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be
+received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have
+been distinguished.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated
+to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe--but I do not
+mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the
+understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true
+nature is the only antidote to them.
+
+Explain the purport of your remark.
+
+Well, I will tell you, although I have always from my earliest youth had
+an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on
+my lips, for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that
+charming tragic company; but a man is not to be reverenced more than the
+truth, and therefore I will speak out.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Listen to me then, or rather, answer me.
+
+Put your question.
+
+Can you tell me what imitation is? for I really do not know.
+
+A likely thing, then, that I should know.
+
+Why not? for the duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the
+keener.
+
+Very true, he said; but in your presence, even if I had any faint
+notion, I could not muster courage to utter it. Will you enquire
+yourself?
+
+Well then, shall we begin the enquiry in our usual manner: Whenever a
+number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a
+corresponding idea or form:--do you understand me?
+
+I do.
+
+Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the
+world--plenty of them, are there not?
+
+Yes.
+
+But there are only two ideas or forms of them--one the idea of a bed,
+the other of a table.
+
+True.
+
+And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our
+use, in accordance with the idea--that is our way of speaking in this
+and similar instances--but no artificer makes the ideas themselves: how
+could he?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And there is another artist,--I should like to know what you would say
+of him.
+
+Who is he?
+
+One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen.
+
+What an extraordinary man!
+
+Wait a little, and there will be more reason for your saying so. For
+this is he who is able to make not only vessels of every kind, but
+plants and animals, himself and all other things--the earth and heaven,
+and the things which are in heaven or under the earth; he makes the gods
+also.
+
+He must be a wizard and no mistake.
+
+Oh! you are incredulous, are you? Do you mean that there is no such
+maker or creator, or that in one sense there might be a maker of all
+these things but in another not? Do you see that there is a way in which
+you could make them all yourself?
+
+What way?
+
+An easy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in which the feat
+might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of
+turning a mirror round and round--you would soon enough make the sun and
+the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants,
+and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the
+mirror.
+
+Yes, he said; but they would be appearances only.
+
+Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now. And the painter too
+is, as I conceive, just such another--a creator of appearances, is he
+not?
+
+Of course.
+
+But then I suppose you will say that what he creates is untrue. And yet
+there is a sense in which the painter also creates a bed?
+
+Yes, he said, but not a real bed.
+
+And what of the maker of the bed? were you not saying that he too makes,
+not the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the bed,
+but only a particular bed?
+
+Yes, I did.
+
+Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true
+existence, but only some semblance of existence; and if any one were to
+say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has
+real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.
+
+At any rate, he replied, philosophers would say that he was not speaking
+the truth.
+
+No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth.
+
+No wonder.
+
+Suppose now that by the light of the examples just offered we enquire
+who this imitator is?
+
+If you please.
+
+Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by
+God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can be the maker?
+
+No.
+
+There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the work of the painter is a third?
+
+Yes.
+
+Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who
+superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?
+
+Yes, there are three of them.
+
+God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and
+one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever
+will be made by God.
+
+Why is that?
+
+Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind
+them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the
+ideal bed and not the two others.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not
+a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed
+which is essentially and by nature one only.
+
+So we believe.
+
+Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?
+
+Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is
+the author of this and of all other things.
+
+And what shall we say of the carpenter--is not he also the maker of the
+bed?
+
+Yes.
+
+But would you call the painter a creator and maker?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?
+
+I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of
+that which the others make.
+
+Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature
+an imitator?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other
+imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?
+
+That appears to be so.
+
+Then about the imitator we are agreed. And what about the painter?--I
+would like to know whether he may be thought to imitate that which
+originally exists in nature, or only the creations of artists?
+
+The latter.
+
+As they are or as they appear? you have still to determine this.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view,
+obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will
+appear different, but there is no difference in reality. And the same of
+all things.
+
+Yes, he said, the difference is only apparent.
+
+Now let me ask you another question: Which is the art of painting
+designed to be--an imitation of things as they are, or as they
+appear--of appearance or of reality?
+
+Of appearance.
+
+Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all
+things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part
+an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or
+any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is
+a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows
+them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy
+that they are looking at a real carpenter.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all
+the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing
+with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man--whoever tells us
+this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who
+is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and
+whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse
+the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
+
+Most true.
+
+And so, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who
+is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well
+as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot compose
+well unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this knowledge
+can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also there may
+not be a similar illusion. Perhaps they may have come across imitators
+and been deceived by them; they may not have remembered when they saw
+their works that these were but imitations thrice removed from the
+truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth,
+because they are appearances only and not realities? Or, after all, they
+may be in the right, and poets do really know the things about which
+they seem to the many to speak so well?
+
+The question, he said, should by all means be considered.
+
+Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as
+well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making
+branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life,
+as if he had nothing higher in him?
+
+I should say not.
+
+The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in
+realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials
+of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of
+encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.
+
+Yes, he said, that would be to him a source of much greater honour and
+profit.
+
+Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or
+any of the arts to which his poems only incidentally refer: we are not
+going to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured patients
+like Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the
+Asclepiads were, or whether he only talks about medicine and other arts
+at second-hand; but we have a right to know respecting military tactics,
+politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his
+poems, and we may fairly ask him about them. 'Friend Homer,' then we say
+to him, 'if you are only in the second remove from truth in what you say
+of virtue, and not in the third--not an image maker or imitator--and
+if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in
+private or public life, tell us what State was ever better governed by
+your help? The good order of Lacedaemon is due to Lycurgus, and many
+other cities great and small have been similarly benefited by others;
+but who says that you have been a good legislator to them and have done
+them any good? Italy and Sicily boast of Charondas, and there is Solon
+who is renowned among us; but what city has anything to say about you?'
+Is there any city which he might name?
+
+I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that
+he was a legislator.
+
+Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully
+by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?
+
+There is not.
+
+Or is there any invention of his, applicable to the arts or to human
+life, such as Thales the Milesian or Anacharsis the Scythian, and other
+ingenious men have conceived, which is attributed to him?
+
+There is absolutely nothing of the kind.
+
+But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or
+teacher of any? Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate
+with him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such
+as was established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his
+wisdom, and whose followers are to this day quite celebrated for the
+order which was named after him?
+
+Nothing of the kind is recorded of him. For surely, Socrates,
+Creophylus, the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name
+always makes us laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his stupidity,
+if, as is said, Homer was greatly neglected by him and others in his own
+day when he was alive?
+
+Yes, I replied, that is the tradition. But can you imagine, Glaucon,
+that if Homer had really been able to educate and improve mankind--if he
+had possessed knowledge and not been a mere imitator--can you imagine,
+I say, that he would not have had many followers, and been honoured and
+loved by them? Protagoras of Abdera, and Prodicus of Ceos, and a host of
+others, have only to whisper to their contemporaries: 'You will never be
+able to manage either your own house or your own State until you appoint
+us to be your ministers of education'--and this ingenious device of
+theirs has such an effect in making men love them that their companions
+all but carry them about on their shoulders. And is it conceivable that
+the contemporaries of Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed
+either of them to go about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able
+to make mankind virtuous? Would they not have been as unwilling to part
+with them as with gold, and have compelled them to stay at home with
+them? Or, if the master would not stay, then the disciples would have
+followed him about everywhere, until they had got education enough?
+
+Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
+
+Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning
+with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like,
+but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as
+we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he
+understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for
+those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and
+figures.
+
+Quite so.
+
+In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on
+the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only
+enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is,
+and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling,
+or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and
+rhythm, he speaks very well--such is the sweet influence which melody
+and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again
+and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped
+of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only
+blooming; and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Here is another point: The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing
+of true existence; he knows appearances only. Am I not right?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then let us have a clear understanding, and not be satisfied with half
+an explanation.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Of the painter we say that he will paint reins, and he will paint a bit?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the worker in leather and brass will make them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But does the painter know the right form of the bit and reins? Nay,
+hardly even the workers in brass and leather who make them; only the
+horseman who knows how to use them--he knows their right form.
+
+Most true.
+
+And may we not say the same of all things?
+
+What?
+
+That there are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which
+uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or
+inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which
+nature or the artist has intended them.
+
+True.
+
+Then the user of them must have the greatest experience of them, and
+he must indicate to the maker the good or bad qualities which develop
+themselves in use; for example, the flute-player will tell the
+flute-maker which of his flutes is satisfactory to the performer; he
+will tell him how he ought to make them, and the other will attend to
+his instructions?
+
+Of course.
+
+The one knows and therefore speaks with authority about the goodness and
+badness of flutes, while the other, confiding in him, will do what he is
+told by him?
+
+True.
+
+The instrument is the same, but about the excellence or badness of it
+the maker will only attain to a correct belief; and this he will gain
+from him who knows, by talking to him and being compelled to hear what
+he has to say, whereas the user will have knowledge?
+
+True.
+
+But will the imitator have either? Will he know from use whether or no
+his drawing is correct or beautiful? or will he have right opinion
+from being compelled to associate with another who knows and gives him
+instructions about what he should draw?
+
+Neither.
+
+Then he will no more have true opinion than he will have knowledge about
+the goodness or badness of his imitations?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+The imitative artist will be in a brilliant state of intelligence about
+his own creations?
+
+Nay, very much the reverse.
+
+And still he will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing
+good or bad, and may be expected therefore to imitate only that which
+appears to be good to the ignorant multitude?
+
+Just so.
+
+Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no
+knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind
+of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in Iambic or
+in Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree?
+
+Very true.
+
+And now tell me, I conjure you, has not imitation been shown by us to be
+concerned with that which is thrice removed from the truth?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I will explain: The body which is large when seen near, appears small
+when seen at a distance?
+
+True.
+
+And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water,
+and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to
+the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort
+of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the
+human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and
+shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us
+like magic.
+
+True.
+
+And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the
+rescue of the human understanding--there is the beauty of them--and the
+apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery
+over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?
+
+Most true.
+
+And this, surely, must be the work of the calculating and rational
+principle in the soul?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And when this principle measures and certifies that some things are
+equal, or that some are greater or less than others, there occurs an
+apparent contradiction?
+
+True.
+
+But were we not saying that such a contradiction is impossible--the same
+faculty cannot have contrary opinions at the same time about the same
+thing?
+
+Very true.
+
+Then that part of the soul which has an opinion contrary to measure is
+not the same with that which has an opinion in accordance with measure?
+
+True.
+
+And the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to
+measure and calculation?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that which is opposed to them is one of the inferior principles of
+the soul?
+
+No doubt.
+
+This was the conclusion at which I was seeking to arrive when I said
+that painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own
+proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends
+and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from
+reason, and that they have no true or healthy aim.
+
+Exactly.
+
+The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has
+inferior offspring.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is this confined to the sight only, or does it extend to the hearing
+also, relating in fact to what we term poetry?
+
+Probably the same would be true of poetry.
+
+Do not rely, I said, on a probability derived from the analogy of
+painting; but let us examine further and see whether the faculty with
+which poetical imitation is concerned is good or bad.
+
+By all means.
+
+We may state the question thus:--Imitation imitates the actions of men,
+whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or
+bad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly. Is there
+anything more?
+
+No, there is nothing else.
+
+But in all this variety of circumstances is the man at unity with
+himself--or rather, as in the instance of sight there was confusion and
+opposition in his opinions about the same things, so here also is there
+not strife and inconsistency in his life? Though I need hardly raise the
+question again, for I remember that all this has been already admitted;
+and the soul has been acknowledged by us to be full of these and ten
+thousand similar oppositions occurring at the same moment?
+
+And we were right, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, thus far we were right; but there was an omission which
+must now be supplied.
+
+What was the omission?
+
+Were we not saying that a good man, who has the misfortune to lose his
+son or anything else which is most dear to him, will bear the loss with
+more equanimity than another?
+
+Yes.
+
+But will he have no sorrow, or shall we say that although he cannot help
+sorrowing, he will moderate his sorrow?
+
+The latter, he said, is the truer statement.
+
+Tell me: will he be more likely to struggle and hold out against his
+sorrow when he is seen by his equals, or when he is alone?
+
+It will make a great difference whether he is seen or not.
+
+When he is by himself he will not mind saying or doing many things which
+he would be ashamed of any one hearing or seeing him do?
+
+True.
+
+There is a principle of law and reason in him which bids him resist, as
+well as a feeling of his misfortune which is forcing him to indulge his
+sorrow?
+
+True.
+
+But when a man is drawn in two opposite directions, to and from the same
+object, this, as we affirm, necessarily implies two distinct principles
+in him?
+
+Certainly.
+
+One of them is ready to follow the guidance of the law?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+The law would say that to be patient under suffering is best, and that
+we should not give way to impatience, as there is no knowing whether
+such things are good or evil; and nothing is gained by impatience; also,
+because no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands in the
+way of that which at the moment is most required.
+
+What is most required? he asked.
+
+That we should take counsel about what has happened, and when the dice
+have been thrown order our affairs in the way which reason deems best;
+not, like children who have had a fall, keeping hold of the part struck
+and wasting time in setting up a howl, but always accustoming the soul
+forthwith to apply a remedy, raising up that which is sickly and fallen,
+banishing the cry of sorrow by the healing art.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the true way of meeting the attacks of fortune.
+
+Yes, I said; and the higher principle is ready to follow this suggestion
+of reason?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the other principle, which inclines us to recollection of our
+troubles and to lamentation, and can never have enough of them, we may
+call irrational, useless, and cowardly?
+
+Indeed, we may.
+
+And does not the latter--I mean the rebellious principle--furnish a
+great variety of materials for imitation? Whereas the wise and calm
+temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or
+to appreciate when imitated, especially at a public festival when a
+promiscuous crowd is assembled in a theatre. For the feeling represented
+is one to which they are strangers.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made,
+nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle
+in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which
+is easily imitated?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of the painter,
+for he is like him in two ways: first, inasmuch as his creations have an
+inferior degree of truth--in this, I say, he is like him; and he is
+also like him in being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and
+therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered
+State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings
+and impairs the reason. As in a city when the evil are permitted to have
+authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man,
+as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he
+indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater
+and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another
+small--he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the
+truth.
+
+Exactly.
+
+But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our
+accusation:--the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and
+there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?
+
+Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.
+
+Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a
+passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents
+some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or
+weeping, and smiting his breast--the best of us, you know, delight in
+giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the
+poet who stirs our feelings most.
+
+Yes, of course I know.
+
+But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that
+we pride ourselves on the opposite quality--we would fain be quiet and
+patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the
+recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that
+which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?
+
+No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.
+
+Nay, I said, quite reasonable from one point of view.
+
+What point of view?
+
+If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural
+hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and
+that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is
+satisfied and delighted by the poets;--the better nature in each of
+us, not having been sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the
+sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another's;
+and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in
+praising and pitying any one who comes telling him what a good man he
+is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure
+is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem
+too? Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil
+of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves. And so
+the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the
+misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own.
+
+How very true!
+
+And does not the same hold also of the ridiculous? There are jests which
+you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or
+indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused by them,
+and are not at all disgusted at their unseemliness;--the case of pity
+is repeated;--there is a principle in human nature which is disposed to
+raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you
+were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again; and
+having stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are betrayed
+unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet at home.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections,
+of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable
+from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions
+instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be
+controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.
+
+I cannot deny it.
+
+Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists
+of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he
+is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and
+that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and
+regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those
+who say these things--they are excellent people, as far as their lights
+extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest
+of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our
+conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only
+poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond
+this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse,
+not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever
+been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our
+defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in
+sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have
+described; for reason constrained us. But that she may not impute to us
+any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an
+ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many
+proofs, such as the saying of 'the yelping hound howling at her lord,'
+or of one 'mighty in the vain talk of fools,' and 'the mob of sages
+circumventing Zeus,' and the 'subtle thinkers who are beggars after
+all'; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between
+them. Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the
+sister arts of imitation, that if she will only prove her title to exist
+in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her--we are
+very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the
+truth. I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am,
+especially when she appears in Homer?
+
+Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.
+
+Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but
+upon this condition only--that she make a defence of herself in lyrical
+or some other metre?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of
+poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf:
+let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States
+and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this
+can be proved we shall surely be the gainers--I mean, if there is a use
+in poetry as well as a delight?
+
+Certainly, he said, we shall be the gainers.
+
+If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are
+enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they
+think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after
+the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle. We too
+are inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble States
+has implanted in us, and therefore we would have her appear at her best
+and truest; but so long as she is unable to make good her defence,
+this argument of ours shall be a charm to us, which we will repeat to
+ourselves while we listen to her strains; that we may not fall away into
+the childish love of her which captivates the many. At all events we
+are well aware that poetry being such as we have described is not to be
+regarded seriously as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her,
+fearing for the safety of the city which is within him, should be on his
+guard against her seductions and make our words his law.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite agree with you.
+
+Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater
+than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one
+be profited if under the influence of honour or money or power, aye, or
+under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?
+
+Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the argument, as I believe that
+any one else would have been.
+
+And yet no mention has been made of the greatest prizes and rewards
+which await virtue.
+
+What, are there any greater still? If there are, they must be of an
+inconceivable greatness.
+
+Why, I said, what was ever great in a short time? The whole period of
+three score years and ten is surely but a little thing in comparison
+with eternity?
+
+Say rather 'nothing,' he replied.
+
+And should an immortal being seriously think of this little space rather
+than of the whole?
+
+Of the whole, certainly. But why do you ask?
+
+Are you not aware, I said, that the soul of man is immortal and
+imperishable?
+
+He looked at me in astonishment, and said: No, by heaven: And are you
+really prepared to maintain this?
+
+Yes, I said, I ought to be, and you too--there is no difficulty in
+proving it.
+
+I see a great difficulty; but I should like to hear you state this
+argument of which you make so light.
+
+Listen then.
+
+I am attending.
+
+There is a thing which you call good and another which you call evil?
+
+Yes, he replied.
+
+Would you agree with me in thinking that the corrupting and destroying
+element is the evil, and the saving and improving element the good?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you admit that every thing has a good and also an evil; as
+ophthalmia is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as
+mildew is of corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron: in
+everything, or in almost everything, there is an inherent evil and
+disease?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And anything which is infected by any of these evils is made evil, and
+at last wholly dissolves and dies?
+
+True.
+
+The vice and evil which is inherent in each is the destruction of each;
+and if this does not destroy them there is nothing else that will; for
+good certainly will not destroy them, nor again, that which is neither
+good nor evil.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+If, then, we find any nature which having this inherent corruption
+cannot be dissolved or destroyed, we may be certain that of such a
+nature there is no destruction?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+Well, I said, and is there no evil which corrupts the soul?
+
+Yes, he said, there are all the evils which we were just now passing in
+review: unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance.
+
+But does any of these dissolve or destroy her?--and here do not let us
+fall into the error of supposing that the unjust and foolish man, when
+he is detected, perishes through his own injustice, which is an evil
+of the soul. Take the analogy of the body: The evil of the body is a
+disease which wastes and reduces and annihilates the body; and all the
+things of which we were just now speaking come to annihilation through
+their own corruption attaching to them and inhering in them and so
+destroying them. Is not this true?
+
+Yes.
+
+Consider the soul in like manner. Does the injustice or other evil which
+exists in the soul waste and consume her? Do they by attaching to the
+soul and inhering in her at last bring her to death, and so separate her
+from the body?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And yet, I said, it is unreasonable to suppose that anything can perish
+from without through affection of external evil which could not be
+destroyed from within by a corruption of its own?
+
+It is, he replied.
+
+Consider, I said, Glaucon, that even the badness of food, whether
+staleness, decomposition, or any other bad quality, when confined to
+the actual food, is not supposed to destroy the body; although, if the
+badness of food communicates corruption to the body, then we should say
+that the body has been destroyed by a corruption of itself, which is
+disease, brought on by this; but that the body, being one thing, can be
+destroyed by the badness of food, which is another, and which does not
+engender any natural infection--this we shall absolutely deny?
+
+Very true.
+
+And, on the same principle, unless some bodily evil can produce an evil
+of the soul, we must not suppose that the soul, which is one thing, can
+be dissolved by any merely external evil which belongs to another?
+
+Yes, he said, there is reason in that.
+
+Either, then, let us refute this conclusion, or, while it remains
+unrefuted, let us never say that fever, or any other disease, or the
+knife put to the throat, or even the cutting up of the whole body into
+the minutest pieces, can destroy the soul, until she herself is proved
+to become more unholy or unrighteous in consequence of these things
+being done to the body; but that the soul, or anything else if not
+destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is
+not to be affirmed by any man.
+
+And surely, he replied, no one will ever prove that the souls of men
+become more unjust in consequence of death.
+
+But if some one who would rather not admit the immortality of the soul
+boldly denies this, and says that the dying do really become more
+evil and unrighteous, then, if the speaker is right, I suppose that
+injustice, like disease, must be assumed to be fatal to the unjust, and
+that those who take this disorder die by the natural inherent power of
+destruction which evil has, and which kills them sooner or later, but
+in quite another way from that in which, at present, the wicked receive
+death at the hands of others as the penalty of their deeds?
+
+Nay, he said, in that case injustice, if fatal to the unjust, will not
+be so very terrible to him, for he will be delivered from evil. But I
+rather suspect the opposite to be the truth, and that injustice which,
+if it have the power, will murder others, keeps the murderer alive--aye,
+and well awake too; so far removed is her dwelling-place from being a
+house of death.
+
+True, I said; if the inherent natural vice or evil of the soul is unable
+to kill or destroy her, hardly will that which is appointed to be the
+destruction of some other body, destroy a soul or anything else except
+that of which it was appointed to be the destruction.
+
+Yes, that can hardly be.
+
+But the soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil, whether inherent
+or external, must exist for ever, and if existing for ever, must be
+immortal?
+
+Certainly.
+
+That is the conclusion, I said; and, if a true conclusion, then the
+souls must always be the same, for if none be destroyed they will not
+diminish in number. Neither will they increase, for the increase of the
+immortal natures must come from something mortal, and all things would
+thus end in immortality.
+
+Very true.
+
+But this we cannot believe--reason will not allow us--any more than we
+can believe the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and
+difference and dissimilarity.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+The soul, I said, being, as is now proven, immortal, must be the fairest
+of compositions and cannot be compounded of many elements?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are
+many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now behold
+her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must
+contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity; and
+then her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all the
+things which we have described will be manifested more clearly. Thus
+far, we have spoken the truth concerning her as she appears at present,
+but we must remember also that we have seen her only in a condition
+which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original
+image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken
+off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and
+incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so
+that he is more like some monster than he is to his own natural form.
+And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by
+ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look.
+
+Where then?
+
+At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and
+converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal
+and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly
+following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of
+the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells
+and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her
+because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of
+this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know
+whether she have one shape only or many, or what her nature is. Of her
+affections and of the forms which she takes in this present life I think
+that we have now said enough.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And thus, I said, we have fulfilled the conditions of the argument; we
+have not introduced the rewards and glories of justice, which, as you
+were saying, are to be found in Homer and Hesiod; but justice in her own
+nature has been shown to be best for the soul in her own nature. Let a
+man do what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not, and even
+if in addition to the ring of Gyges he put on the helmet of Hades.
+
+Very true.
+
+And now, Glaucon, there will be no harm in further enumerating how
+many and how great are the rewards which justice and the other virtues
+procure to the soul from gods and men, both in life and after death.
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+Will you repay me, then, what you borrowed in the argument?
+
+What did I borrow?
+
+The assumption that the just man should appear unjust and the unjust
+just: for you were of opinion that even if the true state of the case
+could not possibly escape the eyes of gods and men, still this admission
+ought to be made for the sake of the argument, in order that pure
+justice might be weighed against pure injustice. Do you remember?
+
+I should be much to blame if I had forgotten.
+
+Then, as the cause is decided, I demand on behalf of justice that the
+estimation in which she is held by gods and men and which we acknowledge
+to be her due should now be restored to her by us; since she has been
+shown to confer reality, and not to deceive those who truly possess her,
+let what has been taken from her be given back, that so she may win that
+palm of appearance which is hers also, and which she gives to her own.
+
+The demand, he said, is just.
+
+In the first place, I said--and this is the first thing which you will
+have to give back--the nature both of the just and unjust is truly known
+to the gods.
+
+Granted.
+
+And if they are both known to them, one must be the friend and the other
+the enemy of the gods, as we admitted from the beginning?
+
+True.
+
+And the friend of the gods may be supposed to receive from them all
+things at their best, excepting only such evil as is the necessary
+consequence of former sins?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in
+poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will
+in the end work together for good to him in life and death: for the gods
+have a care of any one whose desire is to become just and to be like
+God, as far as man can attain the divine likeness, by the pursuit of
+virtue?
+
+Yes, he said; if he is like God he will surely not be neglected by him.
+
+And of the unjust may not the opposite be supposed?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Such, then, are the palms of victory which the gods give the just?
+
+That is my conviction.
+
+And what do they receive of men? Look at things as they really are, and
+you will see that the clever unjust are in the case of runners, who run
+well from the starting-place to the goal but not back again from the
+goal: they go off at a great pace, but in the end only look foolish,
+slinking away with their ears draggling on their shoulders, and without
+a crown; but the true runner comes to the finish and receives the prize
+and is crowned. And this is the way with the just; he who endures to the
+end of every action and occasion of his entire life has a good report
+and carries off the prize which men have to bestow.
+
+True.
+
+And now you must allow me to repeat of the just the blessings which you
+were attributing to the fortunate unjust. I shall say of them, what you
+were saying of the others, that as they grow older, they become rulers
+in their own city if they care to be; they marry whom they like and give
+in marriage to whom they will; all that you said of the others I now say
+of these. And, on the other hand, of the unjust I say that the greater
+number, even though they escape in their youth, are found out at last
+and look foolish at the end of their course, and when they come to be
+old and miserable are flouted alike by stranger and citizen; they are
+beaten and then come those things unfit for ears polite, as you truly
+term them; they will be racked and have their eyes burned out, as you
+were saying. And you may suppose that I have repeated the remainder of
+your tale of horrors. But will you let me assume, without reciting them,
+that these things are true?
+
+Certainly, he said, what you say is true.
+
+These, then, are the prizes and rewards and gifts which are bestowed
+upon the just by gods and men in this present life, in addition to the
+other good things which justice of herself provides.
+
+Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting.
+
+And yet, I said, all these are as nothing either in number or greatness
+in comparison with those other recompenses which await both just and
+unjust after death. And you ought to hear them, and then both just and
+unjust will have received from us a full payment of the debt which the
+argument owes to them.
+
+Speak, he said; there are few things which I would more gladly hear.
+
+Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which
+Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero,
+Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. He was slain in battle,
+and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up
+already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by
+decay, and carried away home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he
+was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he
+had seen in the other world. He said that when his soul left the body
+he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came to a
+mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they
+were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the
+heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who
+commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound
+their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the
+right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend
+by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the symbols of their
+deeds, but fastened on their backs. He drew near, and they told him that
+he was to be the messenger who would carry the report of the other world
+to men, and they bade him hear and see all that was to be heard and seen
+in that place. Then he beheld and saw on one side the souls departing at
+either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been given on them;
+and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending out of the
+earth dusty and worn with travel, some descending out of heaven clean
+and bright. And arriving ever and anon they seemed to have come from a
+long journey, and they went forth with gladness into the meadow, where
+they encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one another embraced
+and conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about
+the things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things
+beneath. And they told one another of what had happened by the way,
+those from below weeping and sorrowing at the remembrance of the things
+which they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth
+(now the journey lasted a thousand years), while those from above were
+describing heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty. The
+story, Glaucon, would take too long to tell; but the sum was this:--He
+said that for every wrong which they had done to any one they suffered
+tenfold; or once in a hundred years--such being reckoned to be the
+length of man's life, and the penalty being thus paid ten times in a
+thousand years. If, for example, there were any who had been the cause
+of many deaths, or had betrayed or enslaved cities or armies, or been
+guilty of any other evil behaviour, for each and all of their offences
+they received punishment ten times over, and the rewards of beneficence
+and justice and holiness were in the same proportion. I need hardly
+repeat what he said concerning young children dying almost as soon
+as they were born. Of piety and impiety to gods and parents, and of
+murderers, there were retributions other and greater far which he
+described. He mentioned that he was present when one of the spirits
+asked another, 'Where is Ardiaeus the Great?' (Now this Ardiaeus lived
+a thousand years before the time of Er: he had been the tyrant of
+some city of Pamphylia, and had murdered his aged father and his elder
+brother, and was said to have committed many other abominable crimes.)
+The answer of the other spirit was: 'He comes not hither and will never
+come. And this,' said he, 'was one of the dreadful sights which we
+ourselves witnessed. We were at the mouth of the cavern, and, having
+completed all our experiences, were about to reascend, when of a sudden
+Ardiaeus appeared and several others, most of whom were tyrants; and
+there were also besides the tyrants private individuals who had been
+great criminals: they were just, as they fancied, about to return into
+the upper world, but the mouth, instead of admitting them, gave a roar,
+whenever any of these incurable sinners or some one who had not been
+sufficiently punished tried to ascend; and then wild men of fiery
+aspect, who were standing by and heard the sound, seized and carried
+them off; and Ardiaeus and others they bound head and foot and hand, and
+threw them down and flayed them with scourges, and dragged them along
+the road at the side, carding them on thorns like wool, and declaring
+to the passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were being taken
+away to be cast into hell.' And of all the many terrors which they had
+endured, he said that there was none like the terror which each of them
+felt at that moment, lest they should hear the voice; and when there was
+silence, one by one they ascended with exceeding joy. These, said Er,
+were the penalties and retributions, and there were blessings as great.
+
+Now when the spirits which were in the meadow had tarried seven days,
+on the eighth they were obliged to proceed on their journey, and, on the
+fourth day after, he said that they came to a place where they could
+see from above a line of light, straight as a column, extending right
+through the whole heaven and through the earth, in colour resembling the
+rainbow, only brighter and purer; another day's journey brought them to
+the place, and there, in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of
+the chains of heaven let down from above: for this light is the belt
+of heaven, and holds together the circle of the universe, like the
+under-girders of a trireme. From these ends is extended the spindle of
+Necessity, on which all the revolutions turn. The shaft and hook of this
+spindle are made of steel, and the whorl is made partly of steel and
+also partly of other materials. Now the whorl is in form like the whorl
+used on earth; and the description of it implied that there is one large
+hollow whorl which is quite scooped out, and into this is fitted another
+lesser one, and another, and another, and four others, making eight
+in all, like vessels which fit into one another; the whorls show their
+edges on the upper side, and on their lower side all together form one
+continuous whorl. This is pierced by the spindle, which is driven home
+through the centre of the eighth. The first and outermost whorl has the
+rim broadest, and the seven inner whorls are narrower, in the following
+proportions--the sixth is next to the first in size, the fourth next
+to the sixth; then comes the eighth; the seventh is fifth, the fifth
+is sixth, the third is seventh, last and eighth comes the second.
+The largest (or fixed stars) is spangled, and the seventh (or sun) is
+brightest; the eighth (or moon) coloured by the reflected light of the
+seventh; the second and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) are in colour like
+one another, and yellower than the preceding; the third (Venus) has the
+whitest light; the fourth (Mars) is reddish; the sixth (Jupiter) is in
+whiteness second. Now the whole spindle has the same motion; but, as the
+whole revolves in one direction, the seven inner circles move slowly in
+the other, and of these the swiftest is the eighth; next in swiftness
+are the seventh, sixth, and fifth, which move together; third in
+swiftness appeared to move according to the law of this reversed motion
+the fourth; the third appeared fourth and the second fifth. The spindle
+turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle
+is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The
+eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals,
+there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon her throne:
+these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white
+robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho
+and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the
+sirens--Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of
+the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her right
+hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle, and
+Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and
+Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then
+with the other.
+
+When Er and the spirits arrived, their duty was to go at once to
+Lachesis; but first of all there came a prophet who arranged them in
+order; then he took from the knees of Lachesis lots and samples of
+lives, and having mounted a high pulpit, spoke as follows: 'Hear the
+word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new
+cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you,
+but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot
+have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his
+destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he will
+have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser--God
+is justified.' When the Interpreter had thus spoken he scattered lots
+indifferently among them all, and each of them took up the lot which
+fell near him, all but Er himself (he was not allowed), and each as
+he took his lot perceived the number which he had obtained. Then the
+Interpreter placed on the ground before them the samples of lives; and
+there were many more lives than the souls present, and they were of all
+sorts. There were lives of every animal and of man in every condition.
+And there were tyrannies among them, some lasting out the tyrant's life,
+others which broke off in the middle and came to an end in poverty and
+exile and beggary; and there were lives of famous men, some who were
+famous for their form and beauty as well as for their strength and
+success in games, or, again, for their birth and the qualities of their
+ancestors; and some who were the reverse of famous for the opposite
+qualities. And of women likewise; there was not, however, any definite
+character in them, because the soul, when choosing a new life, must of
+necessity become different. But there was every other quality, and
+the all mingled with one another, and also with elements of wealth and
+poverty, and disease and health; and there were mean states also. And
+here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and
+therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave
+every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if
+peradventure he may be able to learn and may find some one who will make
+him able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose
+always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity. He should
+consider the bearing of all these things which have been mentioned
+severally and collectively upon virtue; he should know what the effect
+of beauty is when combined with poverty or wealth in a particular soul,
+and what are the good and evil consequences of noble and humble birth,
+of private and public station, of strength and weakness, of cleverness
+and dullness, and of all the natural and acquired gifts of the soul, and
+the operation of them when conjoined; he will then look at the nature of
+the soul, and from the consideration of all these qualities he will be
+able to determine which is the better and which is the worse; and so
+he will choose, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his
+soul more unjust, and good to the life which will make his soul more
+just; all else he will disregard. For we have seen and know that this is
+the best choice both in life and after death. A man must take with him
+into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there
+too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements
+of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and similar villainies, he do
+irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself; but let him
+know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as
+far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come.
+For this is the way of happiness.
+
+And according to the report of the messenger from the other world this
+was what the prophet said at the time: 'Even for the last comer, if he
+chooses wisely and will live diligently, there is appointed a happy and
+not undesirable existence. Let not him who chooses first be careless,
+and let not the last despair.' And when he had spoken, he who had the
+first choice came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny;
+his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not
+thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first
+sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own
+children. But when he had time to reflect, and saw what was in the lot,
+he began to beat his breast and lament over his choice, forgetting the
+proclamation of the prophet; for, instead of throwing the blame of his
+misfortune on himself, he accused chance and the gods, and everything
+rather than himself. Now he was one of those who came from heaven, and
+in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered State, but his virtue was
+a matter of habit only, and he had no philosophy. And it was true of
+others who were similarly overtaken, that the greater number of them
+came from heaven and therefore they had never been schooled by trial,
+whereas the pilgrims who came from earth having themselves suffered and
+seen others suffer, were not in a hurry to choose. And owing to this
+inexperience of theirs, and also because the lot was a chance, many of
+the souls exchanged a good destiny for an evil or an evil for a good.
+For if a man had always on his arrival in this world dedicated himself
+from the first to sound philosophy, and had been moderately fortunate
+in the number of the lot, he might, as the messenger reported, be happy
+here, and also his journey to another life and return to this, instead
+of being rough and underground, would be smooth and heavenly. Most
+curious, he said, was the spectacle--sad and laughable and strange; for
+the choice of the souls was in most cases based on their experience of
+a previous life. There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus
+choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating
+to be born of a woman because they had been his murderers; he beheld
+also the soul of Thamyras choosing the life of a nightingale; birds, on
+the other hand, like the swan and other musicians, wanting to be men.
+The soul which obtained the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion, and
+this was the soul of Ajax the son of Telamon, who would not be a man,
+remembering the injustice which was done him in the judgment about the
+arms. The next was Agamemnon, who took the life of an eagle, because,
+like Ajax, he hated human nature by reason of his sufferings. About
+the middle came the lot of Atalanta; she, seeing the great fame of
+an athlete, was unable to resist the temptation: and after her there
+followed the soul of Epeus the son of Panopeus passing into the nature
+of a woman cunning in the arts; and far away among the last who chose,
+the soul of the jester Thersites was putting on the form of a monkey.
+There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and
+his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of
+former toils had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for
+a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no
+cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and
+had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that
+he would have done the same had his lot been first instead of last,
+and that he was delighted to have it. And not only did men pass into
+animals, but I must also mention that there were animals tame and wild
+who changed into one another and into corresponding human natures--the
+good into the gentle and the evil into the savage, in all sorts of
+combinations.
+
+All the souls had now chosen their lives, and they went in the order of
+their choice to Lachesis, who sent with them the genius whom they had
+severally chosen, to be the guardian of their lives and the fulfiller
+of the choice: this genius led the souls first to Clotho, and drew
+them within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand, thus
+ratifying the destiny of each; and then, when they were fastened to
+this, carried them to Atropos, who spun the threads and made them
+irreversible, whence without turning round they passed beneath the
+throne of Necessity; and when they had all passed, they marched on in a
+scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste
+destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped
+by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this
+they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were
+not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he
+drank forgot all things. Now after they had gone to rest, about the
+middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then
+in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their
+birth, like stars shooting. He himself was hindered from drinking the
+water. But in what manner or by what means he returned to the body he
+could not say; only, in the morning, awaking suddenly, he found himself
+lying on the pyre.
+
+And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and
+will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass
+safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled.
+Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and
+follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is
+immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.
+Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while
+remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to
+gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both
+in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have
+been describing.
+
+
+
+
+
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+*****The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Republic, by Plato*****
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
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+The Republic
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+
+THE REPUBLIC
+by PLATO
+
+
+
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
+
+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 politics with philosophy. 
+The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped;
+here philosophy reaches the highest point (cp, especially in Books V, VI,
+VII) to which ancient thinkers ever attained.  Plato among the Greeks, like
+Bacon among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge,
+although neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form from
+the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content with an
+abstraction of science which was not yet realized.  He was the greatest
+metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any
+other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained.  The
+sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments
+of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and
+Plato.  The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy
+of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents
+of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and
+conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent,
+and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and
+unnecessary--these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be
+found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato.  The
+greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy
+are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and things, has
+been most strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.; Cratyl),
+although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own
+writings (e.g. Rep.).  But he does not bind up truth in logical formulae,--
+logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the science which he imagines to
+'contemplate all truth and all existence' is very unlike the doctrine of
+the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have discovered (Soph. Elenchi).
+
+Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a still
+larger design which was to have included an ideal history of Athens, as
+well as a political and physical philosophy.  The fragment of the Critias
+has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second only in importance to the
+tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said as a fact to have
+inspired some of the early navigators of the sixteenth century.  This
+mythical tale, of which the subject was a history of the wars of the
+Athenians against the Island of Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an
+unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have stood in the same relation
+as the writings of the logographers to the poems of Homer.  It would have
+told of a struggle for Liberty (cp. Tim.), intended to represent the
+conflict of Persia and Hellas.  We may judge from the noble commencement of
+the Timaeus, from the fragment of the Critias itself, and from the third
+book of the Laws, in what manner Plato would have treated this high
+argument.  We can only guess why the great design was abandoned; perhaps
+because Plato became sensible of some incongruity in a fictitious history,
+or because he had lost his interest in it, or because advancing years
+forbade the completion of it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy
+that had this imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have found
+Plato himself sympathising with the struggle for Hellenic independence (cp.
+Laws), singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making
+the reflection of Herodotus where he contemplates the growth of the
+Athenian empire--'How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made
+the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!' or,
+more probably, attributing the victory to the ancient good order of Athens
+and to the favor of Apollo and Athene (cp. Introd. to Critias).
+
+Again, Plato may be regarded as the 'captain' ('arhchegoz') 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 extent to which Aristotle or the
+Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has been little
+recognised, and the recognition is the more necessary because it is not
+made by Aristotle himself.  The two philosophers had more in common than
+they were conscious of; and probably some elements of Plato remain still
+undetected in Aristotle.  In English philosophy too, many affinities may be
+traced, not only in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great
+original writers like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas.  That
+there is a truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to
+herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has been
+enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground.  Of the Greek
+authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has
+had the greatest influence.  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 the legitimate descendants.  Like Dante
+or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is
+profoundly impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church he
+exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on
+politics.  Even the fragments of his words when 'repeated at second-hand'
+(Symp.) 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
+philosophy, in politics, in literature.  And many of the latest conceptions
+of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the 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 Polemarchus--
+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 first care of the rulers is to be education,
+of which an outline is drawn after the old Hellenic model, providing only
+for an improved religion and morality, and more simplicity in music and
+gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry, and greater harmony of the
+individual and the State.  We are thus led on 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,
+intellectual 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 is hardly to
+be realized in this world and quickly degenerates.  To the perfect ideal
+succeeds the government of the soldier and the lover of honour, this again
+declining into democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but
+regular order having not much resemblance to the actual facts.  When 'the
+wheel has come full circle' we do not begin again with a new period of
+human life; but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we
+end.  The subject is then changed and the old quarrel of poetry and
+philosophy which had been more lightly treated in the earlier books of the
+Republic is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion.  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 (Cp. Sir G.C. Lewis in
+the Classical Museum.), is probably later than the age of Plato.  The
+natural divisions are five in number;--(1) Book I and the first half of
+Book II down to the paragraph beginning, 'I had always admired the genius
+of Glaucon and Adeimantus,' which is introductory; 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 any
+definite result.  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.  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 of the individuals who
+correspond to them are reviewed in succession; and the nature of pleasure
+and the principle of tyranny are further analysed in the individual man. 
+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
+Introduction to Phaedrus), 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.  Whether this imperfection of structure
+arises from an enlargement of the plan; or from the imperfect 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 Odyssey, 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 chronological 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, 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 wanting in unity.  Tried by this test, several of the Platonic
+Dialogues, according 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 in some degree confirmed by
+the 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
+assumed 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 Christian language, the
+kingdom of God is within, and yet developes into a Church or external
+kingdom; 'the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,' is
+reduced to the proportions of an earthly building.  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 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 motions of the heavenly bodies (cp. Tim.). 
+The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than the ethical side of
+the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with hypotheses concerning the
+outward world, yet contains many indications that the same law is supposed
+to reign over the State, 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 plan grows under the
+author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not
+worked 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 explanations of the argument of the
+Republic, imagines himself to have found the true argument 'in the
+representation of human life in a State perfected 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, and which does not
+interfere with the general purpose.  What kind or degree of unity is to be
+sought after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a
+problem which has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter.  To
+Plato himself, the enquiry 'what was the intention of the writer,' or 'what
+was the principal argument of the Republic' would have been hardly
+intelligible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed (cp. the
+Introduction to the Phaedrus).
+
+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,' or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the 'Sun of
+righteousness with healing in his wings' 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--like the
+sun in the visible world;--about human perfection, which is justice--about
+education beginning in youth and continuing in later years--about poets and
+sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind
+--about 'the world' which is the embodiment of them--about a kingdom which
+exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern and
+rule of human life.  No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any
+more than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them.  Every
+shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is the veil of
+truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical imagination.  It is not all
+on the same plane; it easily passes from ideas to myths and fancies, from
+facts to figures of speech.  It is not prose but poetry, at least a great
+part of it, and ought not to be judged by the rules of logic or the
+probabilities of history.  The writer is not fashioning his ideas into an
+artistic whole; they take possession of him and are too much for him.  We
+have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as Plato has
+conceived is practicable or not, or whether the outward form or the inward
+life came first into the mind of the writer.  For the practicability of his
+ideas 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 frame-work of the State, the idea of good
+more than justice.  The great science of dialectic or the organisation of
+ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in
+which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time
+and all existence.  It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato
+reaches the 'summit of speculation,' and these, although they fail to
+satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, 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 conversation
+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 (cp. Rep., Symp., etc.), 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 which 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 respecting one
+of his own dramas); and need not greatly trouble us now.  Yet this may be a
+question having no answer 'which is still worth asking,' because the
+investigation shows that we cannot argue historically from the dates in
+Plato; it would be useless therefore 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 (cp. Apol.), 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 unknown Charmantides--these are mute
+auditors; also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as in the
+Dialogue which bears his name, he appears as the friend and ally of
+Thrasymachus.
+
+Cephalus, the patriarch of the house, 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 consciousness
+of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the tyranny of youthful
+lusts.  His love of conversation, his affection, 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 riches have the
+advantage of placing men above the temptation to dishonesty or falsehood. 
+The respectful attention shown to him by Socrates, whose love of
+conversation, no less than the mission imposed upon him by the Oracle,
+leads him to ask questions of all men, young and old alike, should also be
+noted.  Who better suited to raise the question of justice than Cephalus,
+whose life might seem to be the expression of it?  The moderation with
+which old age is pictured by Cephalus 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 the De
+Senectute.  The evening of life is described by Plato in the most
+expressive manner, yet with the fewest possible touches.  As Cicero remarks
+(Ep. ad Attic.), the aged Cephalus would have been out of place in the
+discussion which follows, and which he could neither have understood nor
+taken part in without a violation of dramatic propriety (cp. Lysimachus in
+the Laches).
+
+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' 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 principles; and he quotes
+Simonides (cp. Aristoph. Clouds) as his father had quoted Pindar.  But
+after this 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 Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he
+sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the pre-Socratic
+or pre-dialectical age.  He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by
+Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying.  He is
+made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the
+analogy of the arts.  From his brother Lysias (contra Eratosth.) we learn
+that he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants, but no allusion is here made
+to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus and his family were of
+Syracusan origin, and had migrated from Thurii to Athens.
+
+The 'Chalcedonian giant,' Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard in
+the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to Plato's
+conception of them, in some of their worst characteristics.  He is vain and
+blustering, refusing to discourse unless he is paid, fond of making an
+oration, and hoping thereby 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.'  He has reached the stage of
+framing general notions, and in this respect is in advance of Cephalus and
+Polemarchus.  But he is incapable of defending them in a discussion, and
+vainly tries to cover his confusion with banter and insolence.  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 infancy of philosophy
+serious errors about morality might easily grow up--they 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.  The
+pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless in the hands of the great
+master of dialectic, who knows how to touch all the springs of vanity and
+weakness in him.  He is greatly irritated by the irony of Socrates, but his
+noisy and imbecile rage only lays him more and more open to the thrusts of
+his assailant.  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
+continue the discussion with reluctance, but soon with apparent good-will,
+and he even testifies his interest at a later stage by one or two
+occasional remarks.  When attacked by Glaucon he is humorously protected by
+Socrates 'as one who has never been his enemy and is now his friend.'  From
+Cicero and Quintilian and from Aristotle's Rhetoric we learn that the
+Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note whose writings
+were preserved in later ages.  The play on his name which was made by his
+contemporary Herodicus (Aris. Rhet.), 'thou wast ever bold in battle,'
+seems to show that the description of him is not devoid of verisimilitude.
+
+When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal respondents, 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 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; the 'juvenis qui gaudet canibus,'
+and who improves the breed of animals; the lover of art and music 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 when the argument offers him an opportunity, and who
+is ever ready to second the humour of Socrates and to appreciate the
+ridiculous, whether in the connoisseurs of music, or in the lovers of
+theatricals, or in the fantastic behaviour of the citizens of democracy. 
+His weaknesses are several times alluded to by Socrates, who, however, will
+not allow him to be attacked by his brother Adeimantus.  He is a soldier,
+and, like Adeimantus, has been distinguished at the battle of Megara (anno
+456?)...The character of Adeimantus is deeper and graver, and the
+profounder objections are commonly put into his mouth.  Glaucon is more
+demonstrative, and generally opens the game.  Adeimantus pursues the
+argument 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 first but the second thing, 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, but 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 of argument, and who refuses to let Socrates pass
+lightly over the question of women and children.  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 corruption of philosophy
+and the conception of the idea of good are discussed with Adeimantus. 
+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.  Once more Adeimantus returns with the
+allusion to his brother Glaucon whom he compares to the contentious State;
+in the next book he is again superseded, and Glaucon continues to the end.
+
+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 distinguished from one another.  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 have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted in
+the Memorabilia of Xenophon, 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 acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the
+corrupters of the world.  He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive,
+passing beyond the range either of the political or the speculative ideas
+of the real Socrates.  In one passage 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 perfect state were comprehended in the Socratic
+teaching, though he certainly dwelt on the nature of the universal and of
+final causes (cp. Xen. Mem.; Phaedo); 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.)  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, of which the affectation 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, and
+may, perhaps, give the answer to a question more fluently than another.
+
+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 (cp. Apol.); nor is there any reason to suppose 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
+favorite oath is retained, and a slight mention is made of the daemonium,
+or internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as a phenomenon peculiar
+to himself.  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 (Greek):  'Let us apply the test of common
+instances.'  'You,' says Adeimantus, ironically, in the sixth book, 'are so
+unaccustomed to speak in images.'  And this use of examples or images,
+though truly Socratic in origin, is enlarged by the genius of Plato into
+the form of an allegory or parable, which embodies in the concrete what has
+been already described, or is about to be described, in the abstract.  Thus
+the figure of the cave in Book VII is a recapitulation of the divisions of
+knowledge in Book VI.  The composite animal in Book IX is an allegory of
+the parts of the soul.  The noble captain and the ship and the true pilot
+in Book VI are a figure of the relation of the people to the philosophers
+in the State which has been described.  Other figures, such as the dog, or
+the marriage of the portionless maiden, or the drones and wasps in the
+eighth and ninth books, also form links of connexion in long passages, or
+are used to recall previous discussions.
+
+Plato is most true to the character of his master when he describes him as
+'not of this world.'  And with this representation of him the ideal state
+and the other paradoxes of the Republic are quite in accordance, though
+they cannot be shown to have been speculations of Socrates.  To him, as to
+other great teachers both philosophical and religious, when they looked
+upward, the world seemed to be the embodiment of error and evil.  The
+common sense of mankind has revolted against this view, or has only
+partially admitted it.  And even in Socrates himself the sterner judgement
+of the multitude at times passes into a sort of ironical pity or love.  Men
+in general are incapable of philosophy, and are therefore at enmity with
+the philosopher; but their misunderstanding of him is unavoidable:  for
+they have never seen him as he truly is in his own image; they are only
+acquainted with artificial systems possessing no native force of truth--
+words which admit of many applications.  Their leaders have nothing to
+measure with, and are therefore ignorant of their own stature.  But they
+are to be pitied or laughed at, not to be quarrelled with; they mean well
+with their nostrums, if they could only learn that they are cutting off a
+Hydra's head.  This moderation towards those who are in error is one of the
+most characteristic features of Socrates in the Republic.  In all the
+different representations of Socrates, whether of Xenophon or Plato, and
+amid the differences of the earlier or later Dialogues, he always retains
+the character of the unwearied and disinterested seeker after truth,
+without which he would have ceased to be Socrates.
+
+Leaving the characters we may now analyse the contents of the Republic, and
+then proceed to consider (1) The general aspects of this Hellenic ideal of
+the State, (2) The modern lights in which the thoughts of Plato may be
+read.
+
+BOOK I.  The Republic opens with a truly Greek scene--a festival in honour
+of the goddess Bendis which is held in the Piraeus; to this is added the
+promise of an equestrian torch-race in the evening.  The whole work is
+supposed to be recited by Socrates on the day after the festival to a small
+party, consisting of Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and another; this we
+learn from the first words of the Timaeus.
+
+When the rhetorical advantage of reciting the Dialogue has been gained, the
+attention is not distracted by any reference to the audience; nor is the
+reader further reminded of the extraordinary length of the narrative.  Of
+the numerous company, three only take any serious part in the discussion;
+nor are we informed whether in the evening they went to the torch-race, or
+talked, as in the Symposium, through the night.  The manner in which the
+conversation has arisen is described as follows:--Socrates and his
+companion Glaucon are about to leave the festival when they are detained by
+a message from Polemarchus, who speedily appears accompanied by Adeimantus,
+the brother of Glaucon, and with playful violence compels them to remain,
+promising them not only the torch-race, but the pleasure of conversation
+with the young, which to Socrates is a far greater attraction.  They return
+to the house of Cephalus, Polemarchus' father, now in extreme old age, who
+is found sitting upon a cushioned seat crowned for a sacrifice.  'You
+should come to me oftener, Socrates, for I am too old to go to you; and at
+my time of life, having lost other pleasures, I care the more for
+conversation.'  Socrates asks him what he thinks of age, to which the old
+man replies, that the sorrows and discontents of age are to be attributed
+to the tempers of men, and that age is a time of peace in which the tyranny
+of the passions is no longer felt.  Yes, replies Socrates, but the world
+will say, Cephalus, that you are happy in old age because you are rich. 
+'And there is something in what they say, Socrates, but not so much as they
+imagine--as Themistocles replied to the Seriphian, "Neither you, if you had
+been an Athenian, nor I, if I had been a Seriphian, would ever have been
+famous," I might in like manner reply to you, Neither a good poor man can
+be happy in age, nor yet a bad rich man.'  Socrates remarks that Cephalus
+appears not to care about riches, a quality which he ascribes to his having
+inherited, not acquired them, and would like to know what he considers to
+be the chief advantage of them.  Cephalus answers that when you are old the
+belief in the world below grows upon you, and then to have done justice and
+never to have been compelled to do injustice through poverty, and never to
+have deceived anyone, are felt to be unspeakable blessings.  Socrates, who
+is evidently preparing for an argument, next asks, What is the meaning of
+the word justice?  To tell the truth and pay your debts?  No more than
+this?  Or must we admit exceptions?  Ought I, for example, to put back into
+the hands of my friend, who has gone mad, the sword which I borrowed of him
+when he was in his right mind?  'There must be exceptions.'  'And yet,'
+says Polemarchus, 'the definition which has been given has the authority of
+Simonides.'  Here Cephalus retires to look after the sacrifices, and
+bequeaths, as Socrates facetiously remarks, the possession of the argument
+to his heir, Polemarchus...
+
+The description of old age is finished, and Plato, as his manner is, has
+touched the key-note of the whole work in asking for the definition of
+justice, first suggesting the question which Glaucon afterwards pursues
+respecting external goods, and preparing for the concluding mythus of the
+world below in the slight allusion of Cephalus.  The portrait of the just
+man is a natural frontispiece or introduction to the long discourse which
+follows, and may perhaps imply that in all our perplexity about the nature
+of justice, there is no difficulty in discerning 'who is a just man.'  The
+first explanation has been supported by a saying of Simonides; and now
+Socrates has a mind to show that the resolution of justice into two
+unconnected precepts, which have no common principle, fails to satisfy the
+demands of dialectic.
+
+...He proceeds:  What did Simonides mean by this saying of his?  Did he
+mean that I was to give back arms to a madman?  'No, not in that case, not
+if the parties are friends, and evil would result.  He meant that you were
+to do what was proper, good to friends and harm to enemies.'  Every act
+does something to somebody; and following this analogy, Socrates asks, What
+is this due and proper thing which justice does, and to whom?  He is
+answered that justice does good to friends and harm to enemies.  But in
+what way good or harm?  'In making alliances with the one, and going to war
+with the other.'  Then in time of peace what is the good of justice?  The
+answer is that justice is of use in contracts, and contracts are money
+partnerships.  Yes; but how in such partnerships is the just man of more
+use than any other man?  'When you want to have money safely kept and not
+used.'  Then justice will be useful when money is useless.  And there is
+another difficulty:  justice, like the art of war or any other art, must be
+of opposites, good at attack as well as at defence, at stealing as well as
+at guarding.  But then justice is a thief, though a hero notwithstanding,
+like Autolycus, the Homeric hero, who was 'excellent above all men in theft
+and perjury'--to such a pass have you and Homer and Simonides brought us;
+though I do not forget that the thieving must be for the good of friends
+and the harm of enemies.  And still there arises another question:  Are
+friends to be interpreted as real or seeming; enemies as real or seeming? 
+And are our friends to be only the good, and our enemies to be the evil? 
+The answer is, that we must do good to our seeming and real good friends,
+and evil to our seeming and real evil enemies--good to the good, evil to
+the evil.  But ought we to render evil for evil at all, when to do so will
+only make men more evil?  Can justice produce injustice any more than the
+art of horsemanship can make bad horsemen, or heat produce cold?  The final
+conclusion is, that no sage or poet ever said that the just return evil for
+evil; this was a maxim of some rich and mighty man, Periander, Perdiccas,
+or Ismenias the Theban (about B.C. 398-381)...
+
+Thus the first stage of aphoristic or unconscious morality is shown to be
+inadequate to the wants of the age; the authority of the poets is set
+aside, and through the winding mazes of dialectic we make an approach to
+the Christian precept of forgiveness of injuries.  Similar words are
+applied by the Persian mystic poet to the Divine being when the questioning
+spirit is stirred within him:--'If because I do evil, Thou punishest me by
+evil, what is the difference between Thee and me?'  In this both Plato and
+Kheyam rise above the level of many Christian (?) theologians.  The first
+definition of justice easily passes into the second; for the simple words
+'to speak the truth and pay your debts' is substituted the more abstract
+'to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies.'  Either of these
+explanations gives a sufficient rule of life for plain men, but they both
+fall short of the precision of philosophy.  We may note in passing the
+antiquity of casuistry, which not only arises out of the conflict of
+established principles in particular cases, but also out of the effort to
+attain them, and is prior as well as posterior to our fundamental notions
+of morality.  The 'interrogation' of moral ideas; the appeal to the
+authority of Homer; the conclusion that the maxim, 'Do good to your friends
+and harm to your enemies,' being erroneous, could not have been the word of
+any great man, are all of them very characteristic of the Platonic
+Socrates.
+
+...Here Thrasymachus, who has made several attempts to interrupt, but has
+hitherto been kept in order by the company, takes advantage of a pause and
+rushes into the arena, beginning, like a savage animal, with a roar. 
+'Socrates,' he says, 'what folly is this?--Why do you agree to be
+vanquished by one another in a pretended argument?'  He then prohibits all
+the ordinary definitions of justice; to which Socrates replies that he
+cannot tell how many twelve is, if he is forbidden to say 2 x 6, or 3 x 4,
+or 6 x 2, or 4 x 3.  At first Thrasymachus is reluctant to argue; but at
+length, with a promise of payment on the part of the company and of praise
+from Socrates, he is induced to open the game.  'Listen,' he says, 'my
+answer is that might is right, justice the interest of the stronger:  now
+praise me.'  Let me understand you first.  Do you mean that because
+Polydamas the wrestler, who is stronger than we are, finds the eating of
+beef for his interest, the eating of beef is also for our interest, who are
+not so strong?  Thrasymachus is indignant at the illustration, and in
+pompous words, apparently intended to restore dignity to the argument, he
+explains his meaning to be that the rulers make laws for their own
+interests.  But suppose, says Socrates, that the ruler or stronger makes a
+mistake--then the interest of the stronger is not his interest. 
+Thrasymachus is saved from this speedy downfall by his disciple Cleitophon,
+who introduces the word 'thinks;'--not the actual interest of the ruler,
+but what he thinks or what seems to be his interest, is justice.  The
+contradiction is escaped by the unmeaning evasion:  for though his real and
+apparent interests may differ, what the ruler thinks to be his interest
+will always remain what he thinks to be his interest.
+
+Of course this was not the original assertion, nor is the new
+interpretation accepted by Thrasymachus himself.  But Socrates is not
+disposed to quarrel about words, if, as he significantly insinuates, his
+adversary has changed his mind.  In what follows Thrasymachus does in fact
+withdraw his admission that the ruler may make a mistake, for he affirms
+that the ruler as a ruler is infallible.  Socrates is quite ready to accept
+the new position, which he equally turns against Thrasymachus by the help
+of the analogy of the arts.  Every art or science has an interest, but this
+interest is to be distinguished from the accidental interest of the artist,
+and is only concerned with the good of the things or persons which come
+under the art.  And justice has an interest which is the interest not of
+the ruler or judge, but of those who come under his sway.
+
+Thrasymachus is on the brink of the inevitable conclusion, when he makes a
+bold diversion.  'Tell me, Socrates,' he says, 'have you a nurse?'  What a
+question!  Why do you ask?  'Because, if you have, she neglects you and
+lets you go about drivelling, and has not even taught you to know the
+shepherd from the sheep.  For you fancy that shepherds and rulers never
+think of their own interest, but only of their sheep or subjects, whereas
+the truth is that they fatten them for their use, sheep and subjects alike. 
+And experience proves that in every relation of life the just man is the
+loser and the unjust the gainer, especially where injustice is on the grand
+scale, which is quite another thing from the petty rogueries of swindlers
+and burglars and robbers of temples.  The language of men proves this--our
+'gracious' and 'blessed' tyrant and the like--all which tends to show (1)
+that justice is the interest of the stronger; and (2) that injustice is
+more profitable and also stronger than justice.'
+
+Thrasymachus, who is better at a speech than at a close argument, having
+deluged the company with words, has a mind to escape.  But the others will
+not let him go, and Socrates adds a humble but earnest request that he will
+not desert them at such a crisis of their fate.  'And what can I do more
+for you?' he says; 'would you have me put the words bodily into your
+souls?'  God forbid! replies Socrates; but we want you to be consistent in
+the use of terms, and not to employ 'physician' in an exact sense, and then
+again 'shepherd' or 'ruler' in an inexact,--if the words are strictly
+taken, the ruler and the shepherd look only to the good of their people or
+flocks and not to their own:  whereas you insist that rulers are solely
+actuated by love of office.  'No doubt about it,' replies Thrasymachus. 
+Then why are they paid?  Is not the reason, that their interest is not
+comprehended in their art, and is therefore the concern of another art, the
+art of pay, which is common to the arts in general, and therefore not
+identical with any one of them?  Nor would any man be a ruler unless he
+were induced by the hope of reward or the fear of punishment;--the reward
+is money or honour, the punishment is the necessity of being ruled by a man
+worse than himself.  And if a State (or Church) were composed entirely of
+good men, they would be affected by the last motive only; and there would
+be as much 'nolo episcopari' as there is at present of the opposite...
+
+The satire on existing governments is heightened by the simple and
+apparently incidental manner in which the last remark is introduced.  There
+is a similar irony in the argument that the governors of mankind do not
+like being in office, and that therefore they demand pay.
+
+...Enough of this:  the other assertion of Thrasymachus is far more
+important--that the unjust life is more gainful than the just.  Now, as you
+and I, Glaucon, are not convinced by him, we must reply to him; but if we
+try to compare their respective gains we shall want a judge to decide for
+us; we had better therefore proceed by making mutual admissions of the
+truth to one another.
+
+Thrasymachus had asserted that perfect injustice was more gainful than
+perfect justice, and after a little hesitation he is induced by Socrates to
+admit the still greater paradox that injustice is virtue and justice vice. 
+Socrates praises his frankness, and assumes the attitude of one whose only
+wish is to understand the meaning of his opponents.  At the same time he is
+weaving a net in which Thrasymachus is finally enclosed.  The admission is
+elicited from him that the just man seeks to gain an advantage over the
+unjust only, but not over the just, while the unjust would gain an
+advantage over either.  Socrates, in order to test this statement, employs
+once more the favourite analogy of the arts.  The musician, doctor, skilled
+artist of any sort, does not seek to gain more than the skilled, but only
+more than the unskilled (that is to say, he works up to a rule, standard,
+law, and does not exceed it), whereas the unskilled makes random efforts at
+excess.  Thus the skilled falls on the side of the good, and the unskilled
+on the side of the evil, and the just is the skilled, and the unjust is the
+unskilled.
+
+There was great difficulty in bringing Thrasymachus to the point; the day
+was hot and he was streaming with perspiration, and for the first time in
+his life he was seen to blush.  But his other thesis that injustice was
+stronger than justice has not yet been refuted, and Socrates now proceeds
+to the consideration of this, which, with the assistance of Thrasymachus,
+he hopes to clear up; the latter is at first churlish, but in the judicious
+hands of Socrates is soon restored to good-humour:  Is there not honour
+among thieves?  Is not the strength of injustice only a remnant of justice?
+Is not absolute injustice absolute weakness also?  A house that is divided
+against itself cannot stand; two men who quarrel detract from one another's
+strength, and he who is at war with himself is the enemy of himself and the
+gods.  Not wickedness therefore, but semi-wickedness flourishes in states,
+--a remnant of good is needed in order to make union in action possible,--
+there is no kingdom of evil in this world.
+
+Another question has not been answered:  Is the just or the unjust the
+happier?  To this we reply, that every art has an end and an excellence or
+virtue by which the end is accomplished.  And is not the end of the soul
+happiness, and justice the excellence of the soul by which happiness is
+attained?  Justice and happiness being thus shown to be inseparable, the
+question whether the just or the unjust is the happier has disappeared.
+
+Thrasymachus replies:  'Let this be your entertainment, Socrates, at the
+festival of Bendis.'  Yes; and a very good entertainment with which your
+kindness has supplied me, now that you have left off scolding.  And yet not
+a good entertainment--but that was my own fault, for I tasted of too many
+things.  First of all the nature of justice was the subject of our enquiry,
+and then whether justice is virtue and wisdom, or evil and folly; and then
+the comparative advantages of just and unjust:  and the sum of all is that
+I know not what justice is; how then shall I know whether the just is happy
+or not?...
+
+Thus the sophistical fabric has been demolished, chiefly by appealing to
+the analogy of the arts.  'Justice is like the arts (1) in having no
+external interest, and (2) in not aiming at excess, and (3) justice is to
+happiness what the implement of the workman is to his work.'  At this the
+modern reader is apt to stumble, because he forgets that Plato is writing
+in an age when the arts and the virtues, like the moral and intellectual
+faculties, were still undistinguished.  Among early enquirers into the
+nature of human action the arts helped to fill up the void of speculation;
+and at first the comparison of the arts and the virtues was not perceived
+by them to be fallacious.  They only saw the points of agreement in them
+and not the points of difference.  Virtue, like art, must take means to an
+end; good manners are both an art and a virtue; character is naturally
+described under the image of a statue; and there are many other figures of
+speech which are readily transferred from art to morals.  The next
+generation cleared up these perplexities; or at least supplied after ages
+with a further analysis of them.  The contemporaries of Plato were in a
+state of transition, and had not yet fully realized the common-sense
+distinction of Aristotle, that 'virtue is concerned with action, art with
+production' (Nic. Eth.), or that 'virtue implies intention and constancy of
+purpose,' whereas 'art requires knowledge only'.  And yet in the
+absurdities which follow from some uses of the analogy, there seems to be
+an intimation conveyed that virtue is more than art.  This is implied in
+the reductio ad absurdum that 'justice is a thief,' and in the
+dissatisfaction which Socrates expresses at the final result.
+
+The expression 'an art of pay' which is described as 'common to all the
+arts' is not in accordance with the ordinary use of language.  Nor is it
+employed elsewhere either by Plato or by any other Greek writer.  It is
+suggested by the argument, and seems to extend the conception of art to
+doing as well as making.  Another flaw or inaccuracy of language may be
+noted in the words 'men who are injured are made more unjust.'  For those
+who are injured are not necessarily made worse, but only harmed or ill-
+treated.
+
+The second of the three arguments, 'that the just does not aim at excess,'
+has a real meaning, though wrapped up in an enigmatical form.  That the
+good is of the nature of the finite is a peculiarly Hellenic sentiment,
+which may be compared with the language of those modern writers who speak
+of virtue as fitness, and of freedom as obedience to law.  The mathematical
+or logical notion of limit easily passes into an ethical one, and even
+finds a mythological expression in the conception of envy (Greek).  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.)
+
+The harmony of the soul and body, and of the parts of the soul with one
+another, a harmony 'fairer 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 Thrasymachus,
+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.  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 reconcilement of justice and happiness and the
+identity of the individual and the State are also intimated.  Socrates
+reassumes the character of a 'know-nothing;' at the same time he appears to
+be not wholly satisfied with the manner in which the argument has been
+conducted.  Nothing is concluded; but the tendency of the dialectical
+process, here as always, is to enlarge our conception of ideas, and to
+widen their application to human life.
+
+BOOK II.  Thrasymachus is pacified, but the intrepid Glaucon insists on
+continuing the argument.  He is not satisfied with the indirect manner in
+which, at the end of the last book, Socrates had disposed 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 themselves 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 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.)
+
+'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!  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 joined in the already
+unequal fray.  He considered that the most important point of all had been
+omitted:--'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, such as wealthy marriages and
+high offices.  There are the pictures in Homer and Hesiod of fat sheep and
+heavy fleeces, rich corn-fields and trees toppling with fruit, which the
+gods provide in this life for the just.  And the Orphic poets add a similar
+picture of another.  The heroes of Musaeus and Eumolpus lie on couches at a
+festival, with garlands on their heads, enjoying as the meed of virtue a
+paradise of immortal drunkenness.  Some go further, and speak of a fair
+posterity in the third and fourth generation.  But the wicked they bury in
+a slough and make them carry water in a sieve:  and in this life they
+attribute to them the infamy which Glaucon was assuming to be the lot of
+the just who are supposed to be unjust.
+
+'Take another kind of argument which is found both in poetry and prose:--
+"Virtue," as Hesiod says, "is honourable but difficult, vice is easy and
+profitable."  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 an easy fashion with sacrifices and 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 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 I will turn,--I will put on the show of
+virtue and trail behind me the fox of Archilochus.  I hear some one saying
+that "wickedness is not easily concealed," to which I reply that "nothing
+great is easy."  Union and force and rhetoric will do much; and if men say
+that 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 only unpunished, still they have no further reward,
+while the wicked may be unpunished and have the pleasure of sinning too. 
+But what of the world below?  Nay, says the argument, there are atoning
+powers who will set that matter right, as the poets, who are the sons of
+the gods, tell us; and this is confirmed by the authority of the State.
+
+'How can we resist such arguments in favour of injustice?  Add good
+manners, and, as the wise tell us, 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 others; 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.
+
+'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 and profits of justice.  Had we been taught in early youth the
+power of justice and injustice inherent in the soul, and unseen by any
+human or divine eye, we should not have needed others to be our guardians,
+but every one would have been the guardian of himself.  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.  Starting 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.  The obligation of maintaining authority
+under all circumstances and sometimes by rather questionable means is felt
+strongly and has become a sort of instinct among civilized men.  The divine
+right of kings, or more generally of governments, is one of the forms under
+which this natural feeling is expressed.  Nor again is there any evil which
+has not some accompaniment of good or pleasure; nor any good which is free
+from some alloy of evil; nor any noble or generous thought which may not be
+attended by a shadow or the ghost of a shadow of self-interest or of self-
+love.  We know that all human actions are imperfect; but we do not
+therefore attribute them to the worse rather than to the better motive or
+principle.  Such a philosophy is both foolish and false, like that opinion
+of the clever rogue who assumes all other men to be like himself.  And
+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 they
+describe 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 explained 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 (1) 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.  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 expressing 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
+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, 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, whether the morality of
+actions is determined by their consequences; 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 (Protag.), '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 the two opposite theses 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
+philosophical 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 indirect.  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 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 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' 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 ye 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 genuine character of
+Greek thought in beginning with the State and in going on to the
+individual.  First ethics, then politics--this 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 individual
+and the State, of ethics and politics, which pervades early Greek
+speculation, and even in modern times retains a certain degree of
+influence.  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,
+whenever we either elevate politics into ethics, or lower 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.
+
+...Socrates praises the sons of Ariston, 'inspired offspring of the
+renowned hero,' as the elegiac poet terms them; but he does not understand
+how they can argue so eloquently on behalf of injustice while their
+character shows that they are uninfluenced by their own arguments.  He
+knows not 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, that is, he must look for justice in the State first, and will
+then proceed to the individual.  Accordingly he 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 required 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 trade; 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 purchasers; 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 spend their days
+in houses which they have built for themselves; they make their own clothes
+and produce their own corn and wine.  Their principal food is meal and
+flour, and they drink in moderation.  They live on the best of terms with
+each other, and take care not to have too many children.  'But,' said
+Glaucon, interposing, 'are they not to have a relish?'  Certainly; they
+will have salt and olives and cheese, vegetables and fruits, and chestnuts
+to roast at the fire.  ''Tis a city of pigs, Socrates.'  Why, I replied,
+what do you want more?  'Only the comforts of life,--sofas and tables, also
+sauces and sweets.'  I see; you want not only a State, but a luxurious
+State; and possibly in the more complex frame we may sooner find justice
+and injustice.  Then the fine arts must go to work--every conceivable
+instrument and ornament of luxury will be wanted.  There will be dancers,
+painters, sculptors, musicians, cooks, barbers, tire-women, nurses,
+artists; swineherds and neatherds too for the animals, and physicians to
+cure the disorders of which luxury is the source.  To feed all these
+superfluous mouths we shall need a part of our neighbour's 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 again 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
+warlike natures who have this aptitude--dogs keen of scent, swift of foot
+to pursue, and strong of limb to fight.  And as spirit is the foundation of
+courage, such natures, whether of men or animals, will be full of spirit. 
+But these spirited natures are apt to bite and devour one another; the
+union of gentleness to friends and fierceness against enemies appears to be
+an impossibility, and the guardian of a State requires both qualities.  Who
+then can be a guardian?  The image of the dog suggests an answer.  For dogs
+are gentle to friends and fierce to strangers.  Your dog is a philosopher
+who judges by the rule of knowing or not knowing; and philosophy, whether
+in man or beast, is the parent of gentleness.  The human watchdogs must be
+philosophers or lovers of learning which will make them gentle.  And how
+are they to be learned without education?
+
+But what shall their education be?  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 either untrue, or have at most one or
+two grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood.  Now early life is very
+impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn
+when they grow up; we must therefore 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 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 quarrel by hearing or seeing representations of strife among the
+gods?  Shall they listen to the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother,
+and of Zeus sending him flying for helping her when she was beaten?  Such
+tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but the young are
+incapable of understanding allegory.  If any one asks what tales are to be
+allowed, we will answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we
+only lay down the principles according to which books are to be written; to
+write them is the duty of others.
+
+And our first principle is, that God must be represented as he is; not as
+the author of all things, but of good only.  We will not suffer the poets
+to say that he is the steward of good and evil, or that he has two casks
+full of destinies;--or that Athene and Zeus incited Pandarus to break the
+treaty; or that God caused the sufferings of Niobe, or of Pelops, or the
+Trojan war; or that he makes men sin when he wishes to destroy them. 
+Either these were not the actions of the gods, or God was just, and men
+were the better for being punished.  But that the deed was evil, and God
+the author, is a wicked, suicidal fiction which we will allow no one, old
+or young, to utter.  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 variableness or
+change of form.  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; 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 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 must 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 antiquity 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 proceeds
+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.  He
+indulges, like Rousseau, in a picture of primitive life--an idea which has
+indeed often had a powerful influence on the imagination of mankind, but he
+does not seriously mean to say that one is better than the other
+(Politicus); 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.  We should not interpret a Platonic dialogue any more than
+a poem or a parable in too literal or matter-of-fact a style.  On the other
+hand, when we compare the lively fancy of Plato with the dried-up
+abstractions of modern treatises on philosophy, we are compelled to say
+with Protagoras, that the 'mythus is more interesting' (Protag.)
+
+Several interesting remarks which in modern times would have a place in a
+treatise on Political Economy are scattered up and down the writings of
+Plato:  especially Laws, Population; Free Trade; Adulteration; Wills and
+Bequests; Begging; Eryxias, (though not Plato's), Value and Demand;
+Republic, Division of Labour.  The last subject, and also the origin of
+Retail Trade, is treated with admirable lucidity in the second book of the
+Republic.  But Plato never combined his economic ideas into a system, and
+never seems to have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive powers
+of the State and of the world.  He would make retail traders only of the
+inferior sort of citizens (Rep., Laws), though he remarks, quaintly enough
+(Laws), that 'if only the best men and the best women everywhere were
+compelled to keep taverns for a time or to carry on retail trade, etc.,
+then we should knew how pleasant and agreeable all these things are.'
+
+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 offering 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 meaning.  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.  This is also the substance of Plato's view, though he must
+be acknowledged to have drawn the line somewhat differently from modern
+ethical writers, respecting truth and falsehood.  To us, economies or
+accommodations would not be allowable unless they were required by the
+human faculties 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 question whether
+his religion was an historical fact.  He was just beginning 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 consideration of their morality comes first, afterwards
+the truth of the documents in which they are recorded, or of the events
+natural or 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 accuracy 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 disregarding 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 therefore tolerant of many things which science and criticism would
+condemn.
+
+We note in passing that the allegorical interpretation of mythology, said
+to have been first introduced as early as the sixth century before Christ
+by Theagenes of Rhegium, was well established in the age of Plato, and
+here, as in the Phaedrus, though for a different reason, was rejected by
+him.  That anachronisms whether of religion or law, when men have reached
+another stage of civilization, should be got rid of by fictions is in
+accordance with universal experience.  Great is the art of interpretation;
+and by a natural process, which when once discovered was always going on,
+what could not be altered was explained away.  And so without any palpable
+inconsistency there existed side by side two forms of religion, the
+tradition inherited or invented by the poets and the customary worship of
+the temple; on the other hand, there was the religion of the philosopher,
+who was dwelling in the heaven of ideas, but did not therefore refuse to
+offer a cock to Aesculapius, or to be seen saying his prayers at the rising
+of the sun.  At length the antagonism between the popular and philosophical
+religion, never so great among the Greeks as in our own age, disappeared,
+and was only felt like the difference between the religion of the educated
+and uneducated among ourselves.  The Zeus of Homer and Hesiod easily passed
+into the 'royal mind' of Plato (Philebus); the giant Heracles became the
+knight-errant and benefactor of mankind.  These and still more wonderful
+transformations were readily effected by the ingenuity of Stoics and neo-
+Platonists in the two or three centuries before and after Christ.  The
+Greek and Roman religions were gradually permeated by the spirit of
+philosophy; having lost their ancient meaning, they were resolved into
+poetry and morality; and probably were never purer than at the time of
+their decay, when their influence over the world was waning.
+
+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 deception of the highest
+part of the soul, from which he who is deceived has no 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 Protagoras 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 (John), '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), 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 about the propriety of deceiving a madman; and he is also
+contrasting the nature of God and man.  For God is Truth, but mankind can
+only be true by appearing sometimes to be partial, or false.  Reserving for
+another place the greater questions of religion or education, we may note
+further, (1) 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 contemptuous and at the same time euphemistic manner
+in which here as below he alludes to the 'Chronique Scandaleuse' 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 concerning the world
+below.  They must be gently requested not to abuse hell; they may be
+reminded that their stories are both untrue and discouraging.  Nor must
+they be angry if we expunge obnoxious passages, such as the depressing
+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 lost strength and youth, the soul
+with a gibber going beneath the earth like smoke, or the souls of the
+suitors which flutter about like bats.  The terrors and horrors of Cocytus
+and Styx, ghosts and sapless shades, and the rest of their Tartarean
+nomenclature, must vanish.  Such tales may have their use; but they are not
+the proper food for soldiers.  As little can we admit the sorrows and
+sympathies of the Homeric heroes:--Achilles, the son of Thetis, in tears,
+throwing ashes on his head, or pacing up and down the sea-shore in
+distraction; or Priam, the cousin of the gods, crying aloud, rolling in the
+mire.  A good man is not 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
+inferior persons only, whether women or men.  Still worse is the
+attribution of such weakness to the gods; as when the goddesses say, 'Alas!
+my 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 will not be admitted by us.  'Certainly not.'
+
+Truth should have a high place among the virtues, for falsehood, as we were
+saying, is useless to the gods, and only useful to men as a medicine.  But
+this employment of falsehood must remain a privilege of state; the common
+man 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.
+
+In the next place our youth must be temperate, and temperance consists in
+self-control and obedience to authority.  That is a lesson which Homer
+teaches in some places:  'The Achaeans marched on breathing prowess, in
+silent awe of their leaders;'--but a very different one in other places: 
+'O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog, but the heart of a stag.' 
+Language of the latter kind will not impress self-control on the minds of
+youth.  The same may be said about his praises of eating and drinking and
+his dread of starvation; also about the verses in which he tells of the
+rapturous loves of Zeus and Here, or of how Hephaestus once 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 his cruelty in dragging the body of Hector round
+the walls, and slaying the captives at the pyre:  such a combination of
+meanness and cruelty in Cheiron's pupil is inconceivable.  The amatory
+exploits of Peirithous and Theseus are equally unworthy.  Either these so-
+called sons of gods were not the sons of gods, or they were not such as the
+poets imagine them, any more than the gods themselves are the authors of
+evil.  The youth who believes that such things are done by those who have
+the 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?  Such misrepresentations
+cannot be allowed by us.  But in this we are anticipating the definition of
+justice, and had therefore better defer the enquiry.
+
+The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next follows style.
+Now all poetry is a narrative of events past, present, or to come; and
+narrative is of three kinds, the simple, the 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,' the
+passage will run thus:  The priest came and prayed Apollo 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--The whole then 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 also
+something more--Is it not doubtful whether our guardians are to be
+imitators at all?  Or rather, has not the question been already answered,
+for we have decided that one man cannot in his life play many parts, any
+more than he can act both tragedy and comedy, or be 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.  If they imitate they should imitate,
+not 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, quarrelling, weeping, scolding, or boasting against the
+gods,--least of all when making love or in labour.  They must not represent
+slaves, or bullies, or cowards, 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 to employ the descriptive 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 and cries of animals alike; 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 is not
+adapted for complexity.  And when one of these polyphonous pantomimic
+gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will show him every
+observance of respect, but at the same time tell him that there is no room
+for his kind in our State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, and will not
+depart from our original models (Laws).
+
+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 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.  These
+should be like the harmonies, simple and suitable to the occasion.  There
+are four notes of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre, 3/2,
+2/2, 2/1, which have all their characteristics, and the feet have different
+characteristics as well as the rhythms.  But about this you and I must ask
+Damon, the great 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 equalize the syllables with one another, assigning to
+each the proper quantity.  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
+all.  This principle of simplicity has to be learnt by every one in the
+days of his youth, and may be gathered anywhere, from the creative and
+constructive arts, as well as from the forms of plants and animals.
+
+Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or
+unseemliness.  Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to
+the law of simplicity.  He who violates it cannot be allowed to work in our
+city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens.  For our guardians must
+grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison and
+corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they will
+drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences.  And of all
+these influences the greatest is the education given by music, which finds
+a way into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense of beauty and of
+deformity.  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 cannot recognize
+reflections of them until we know the letters themselves;--in like manner
+we must first attain the elements or essential forms of the virtues, and
+then trace their combinations 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.
+
+Next we pass on to 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 gymnastic is a sleepy
+sort of thing, and if left off suddenly is apt to endanger health.  But our
+warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, and must also be inured to all
+changes of food and climate.  Hence they will require a simpler kind of
+gymnastic, akin to their simple music; and for their diet a rule may be
+found in Homer, who feeds his heroes on roast meat only, and gives them no
+fish although they are 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 confections and
+Corinthian courtezans, which are to gymnastic what Lydian and Ionian
+melodies are to music, must be forbidden.  Where gluttony and intemperance
+prevail the town quickly fills with doctors and pleaders; and law and
+medicine give themselves airs as soon as the freemen of a State take an
+interest in them.  But what can show a more disgraceful state of education
+than to have to go abroad for justice because you have none of your own at
+home?  And yet there IS a worse 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 like
+disgrace in employing a physician, not for the cure of wounds or epidemic
+disorders, but because a man has by laziness and luxury contracted diseases
+which were unknown in the days of Asclepius.  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 medicine tortured first himself
+and then a good many other people, and lived a great deal longer than he
+had any right.  But Asclepius would not 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 'kill or cure' method, which artisans and
+labourers employ.  'They must be at their business,' they say, 'and have no
+time for coddling:  if they recover, well; 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 sooner) 'he should practise
+virtue'?  But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent with an
+ordinary occupation, and yet consistent with that practice of virtue which
+Phocylides inculcates?  When a student imagines that philosophy gives him a
+headache, he never does anything; he is always unwell.  This was the reason
+why Asclepius and his sons practised no such art.  They were acting 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, they applied the proper remedies, and then
+let him eat and drink what he liked.  But they declined to treat
+intemperate and worthless subjects, even though they might have made large
+fortunes out of them.  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 the two
+professions.  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 judge
+controls mind by mind; and therefore his mind should not be corrupted by
+crime.  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 of a certain age; his youth should have been innocent, and he
+should have acquired insight into evil not by the practice of it, but by
+the observation of it in others.  This is the ideal of a judge; the
+criminal turned detective is wonderfully suspicious, but when in company
+with good men who have experience, he is at fault, for he foolishly
+imagines that every one is as bad as himself.  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
+both equally concerned with the soul, which 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 when it has too much
+gymnastic is hardened and brutalized, the gentle or philosophic temper
+which has too much music becomes enervated.  While a man is allowing music
+to pour 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 exhausted; too much quickly passes
+into nervous irritability.  So, again, the athlete by feeding and training
+has his courage doubled, but he soon grows stupid; he is like a wild beast,
+ready to do everything by blows and nothing by counsel or policy.  There
+are two principles in man, reason and passion, and to these, not to the
+soul and body, the two arts of music and gymnastic correspond.  He who
+mingles them in harmonious concord is the true musician,--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.  Now
+they will be the best who love their subjects most, and think that they
+have a common interest with them in the welfare of the state.  These we
+must select; but they must be watched at every epoch of life to see whether
+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 the force of grief and pain may compel
+him.  And therefore our guardians must be men who have been tried by many
+tests, like gold in the refiner's fire, and have been passed first through
+danger, 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.  These shall receive the highest honours both in life
+and death.  (It would perhaps be better to confine the term 'guardians' to
+this select class:  the younger men may be called 'auxiliaries.')
+
+And now for one magnificent lie, in the belief of which, Oh that we could
+train our rulers!--at any rate let us make the attempt with the rest of the
+world.  What I am going to tell is only another version of the legend of
+Cadmus; but our unbelieving generation will be slow to accept such a story. 
+The tale must be imparted, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers,
+lastly to the people.  We will inform them that their youth was a dream,
+and that during the time when they seemed to be undergoing their education
+they were really being fashioned in the earth, who sent them up when they
+were ready; and that they must protect and cherish her whose children they
+are, and 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 different natures, and some of them God
+framed to rule, whom he fashioned of gold; others he made of silver, to be
+auxiliaries; others again to be husbandmen and craftsmen, and these were
+formed by him of brass and iron.  But as they are all sprung from a common
+stock, a golden parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden
+son, and then there must be a change of rank; the son of the rich must
+descend, and the child of the artisan rise, in the social scale; for an
+oracle says 'that the State will come to an end if governed by a man of
+brass or iron.'  Will our citizens ever 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 rulers, and
+look about and pitch their camp in a high place, which will be safe against
+enemies from without, and likewise 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.
+
+1.  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, sometimes altering the text from design;
+more than once quoting or alluding to Homer inaccurately, after the manner
+of the early logographers turning the Iliad into prose, and delighting to
+draw far-fetched inferences from his words, or to make ludicrous
+applications of them.  He does not, like Heracleitus, get into a rage with
+Homer and Archilochus (Heracl.), but uses their words and expressions as
+vehicles of a higher truth; not on a system like Theagenes of Rhegium or
+Metrodorus, or in later times the Stoics, but as fancy may dictate.  And
+the conclusions drawn from them are sound, although the premises are
+fictitious.  These fanciful appeals to Homer add a charm to Plato's style,
+and at the same time they have the effect of a satire on the follies of
+Homeric interpretation.  To us (and probably to himself), although they
+take the form of arguments, they are really figures of speech.  They may be
+compared with modern citations from Scripture, which have often a great
+rhetorical power even when the original meaning of the words is entirely
+lost sight of.  The real, like the Platonic Socrates, as we gather from the
+Memorabilia of Xenophon, was fond of making similar adaptations.  Great in
+all ages and countries, in religion as well as in law and literature, has
+been the art of interpretation.
+
+2.  'The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style.' 
+Notwithstanding the fascination which the word 'classical' exercises over
+us, we can hardly maintain that this rule is observed in all the Greek
+poetry which has come down to us.  We cannot deny that the thought often
+exceeds the power of lucid expression in Aeschylus and Pindar; or that
+rhetoric gets the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet Euripides. 
+Only perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the two; in him
+alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a Greek statue, in
+which there is nothing to add or to take away; at least this is true of
+single plays or of large portions of them.  The connection in the Tragic
+Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not unfrequently a tangled thread
+which in an age before logic the poet was unable to draw out.  Many
+thoughts and feelings mingled in his mind, and he had no power of
+disengaging or arranging them.  For there is a subtle influence of logic
+which requires to be transferred from prose to poetry, just as the music
+and perfection of language are infused by poetry into prose.  In all ages
+the poet has been a bad judge of his own meaning (Apol.); for he does not
+see that the word which is full of associations to his own mind is
+difficult and unmeaning to that of another; or that the sequence which is
+clear to himself is puzzling to others.  There are many passages in some of
+our greatest modern poets which are far too obscure; in which there is no
+proportion between style and subject, in which any half-expressed figure,
+any harsh construction, any distorted collocation of words, any remote
+sequence of ideas is admitted; and there is no voice 'coming sweetly from
+nature,' or music adding the expression of feeling to thought.  As if there
+could be poetry without beauty, or beauty without ease and clearness.  The
+obscurities of early Greek poets arose necessarily out of the state of
+language and logic which existed in their age.  They are not examples to be
+followed by us; for the use of language ought in every generation to become
+clearer and clearer.  Like Shakespere, they were great in spite, not in
+consequence, of their imperfections of expression.  But there is no reason
+for returning to the necessary obscurity which prevailed in the infancy of
+literature.  The English poets of the last century were certainly not
+obscure; and we have no excuse for losing what they had gained, or for
+going back to the earlier or transitional age which preceded them.  The
+thought of our own times has not out-stripped language; a want of Plato's
+'art of measuring' is the rule cause of the disproportion between them.
+
+3.  In the third book of the Republic a nearer approach is made to a theory
+of art than anywhere else in Plato.  His views may be summed up as
+follows:--True art is not fanciful and imitative, but simple and ideal,--
+the expression of the highest moral energy, whether in action or repose. 
+To live among works of plastic art which are of this noble and simple
+character, or to listen to such strains, is the best of influences,--the
+true Greek atmosphere, in which youth should be brought up.  That is the
+way to create in them a natural good taste, which will have a feeling of
+truth and beauty in all things.  For though the poets are to be expelled,
+still art is recognized as another aspect of reason--like love in the
+Symposium, extending over the same sphere, but confined to the preliminary
+education, and acting through the power of habit; and this conception of
+art is not limited to strains of music or the forms of plastic art, but
+pervades all nature and has a wide kindred in the world.  The Republic of
+Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an artistic as well as a political
+side.
+
+There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only in two or
+three passages does he even allude to them (Rep.; Soph.).  He is not lost
+in rapture at the great works of Phidias, the Parthenon, the Propylea, the
+statues of Zeus or Athene.  He would probably have regarded any abstract
+truth of number or figure as higher than the greatest of them.  Yet it is
+hard to suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to inspire in youth,
+did not pass into his own mind from the works of art which he saw around
+him.  We are living upon the fragments of them, and find in a few broken
+stones the standard of truth and beauty.  But in Plato this feeling has no
+expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the object of art; he seems to
+deny that wisdom can take an external form (Phaedrus); he does not
+distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts.  Whether or no, like some
+writers, he felt more than he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that
+the greatest perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost
+entire silence about them.  In one very striking passage he tells us that a
+work of art, like the State, is a whole; and this conception of a whole and
+the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be regarded, if not as
+the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating principles of Greek art (Xen.
+Mem.; and Sophist).
+
+4.  Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better
+not be in robust health; and should have known what illness is in his own
+person.  But the judge ought to have had no similar experience of evil; he
+is to be a good man who, having passed his youth in innocence, became
+acquainted late in life with the vices of others.  And therefore, according
+to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man according to
+Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy.  The bad, on the
+other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no knowledge of virtue.  It may
+be doubted, however, whether this train of reflection is well founded.  In
+a remarkable passage of the Laws it is acknowledged that the evil may form
+a correct estimate of the good.  The union of gentleness and courage in
+Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox, yet was afterwards ascertained to
+be a truth.  And Plato might also have found that the intuition of evil may
+be consistent with the abhorrence of it.  There is a directness of aim in
+virtue which gives an insight into vice.  And the knowledge of character is
+in some degree a natural sense independent of any special experience of
+good or evil.
+
+5.  One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-Greek and
+also very different from anything which existed at all in his age of the
+world, is the transposition of ranks.  In the Spartan state there had been
+enfranchisement of Helots and degradation of citizens under special
+circumstances.  And in the ancient Greek aristocracies, merit was certainly
+recognized as one of the elements on which government was based.  The
+founders of states were supposed to be their benefactors, who were raised
+by their great actions above the ordinary level of humanity; at a later
+period, the services of warriors and legislators were held to entitle them
+and their descendants to the privileges of citizenship and to the first
+rank in the state.  And although the existence of an ideal aristocracy is
+slenderly proven from the remains of early Greek history, and we have a
+difficulty in ascribing such a character, however the idea may be defined,
+to any actual Hellenic state--or indeed to any state which has ever existed
+in the world--still the rule of the best was certainly the aspiration of
+philosophers, who probably accommodated a good deal their views of
+primitive history to their own notions of good government.  Plato further
+insists on applying to the guardians of his state a series of tests by
+which all those who fell short of a fixed standard were either removed from
+the governing body, or not admitted to it; and this 'academic' discipline
+did to a certain extent prevail in Greek states, especially in Sparta.  He
+also indicates that the system of caste, which existed in a great part of
+the ancient, and is by no means extinct in the modern European world,
+should be set aside from time to time in favour of merit.  He is aware how
+deeply the greater part of mankind resent any interference with the order
+of society, and therefore he proposes his novel idea in the form of what he
+himself calls a 'monstrous fiction.'  (Compare the ceremony of preparation
+for the two 'great waves' in Book v.)  Two principles are indicated by him: 
+first, that there is a distinction of ranks dependent on circumstances
+prior to the individual:  second, that this distinction is and ought to be
+broken through by personal qualities.  He adapts mythology like the Homeric
+poems to the wants of the state, making 'the Phoenician tale' the vehicle
+of his ideas.  Every Greek state had a myth respecting its own origin; the
+Platonic republic may also have a tale of earthborn men.  The gravity and
+verisimilitude with which the tale is told, and the analogy of Greek
+tradition, are a sufficient verification of the 'monstrous falsehood.' 
+Ancient poetry had spoken of a gold and silver and brass and iron age
+succeeding one another, but Plato supposes these differences in the natures
+of men to exist together in a single state.  Mythology supplies a figure
+under which the lesson may be taught (as Protagoras says, 'the myth is more
+interesting'), and also enables Plato to touch lightly on new principles
+without going into details.  In this passage he shadows forth a general
+truth, but he does not tell us by what steps the transposition of ranks is
+to be effected.  Indeed throughout the Republic he allows the lower ranks
+to fade into the distance.  We do not know whether they are to carry arms,
+and whether in the fifth book they are or are not included in the
+communistic regulations respecting property and marriage.  Nor is there any
+use in arguing strictly either from a few chance words, or from the silence
+of Plato, or in drawing inferences which were beyond his vision. 
+Aristotle, in his criticism on the position of the lower classes, does not
+perceive that the poetical creation is 'like the air, invulnerable,' and
+cannot be penetrated by the shafts of his logic (Pol.).
+
+6.  Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the highest degree
+fanciful and ideal, and which suggest to him many reflections, are to be
+found in the third book of the Republic:  first, the great power of music,
+so much beyond any influence which is experienced by us in modern times,
+when the art or science has been far more developed, and has found the
+secret of harmony, as well as of melody; secondly, the indefinite and
+almost absolute control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the
+body.
+
+In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we may also
+observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to us, at the present
+day.  With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt by a few only, there
+seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pythagorean reverence for numbers and
+numerical proportion to which Aristotle is a stranger.  Intervals of sound
+and number are to him sacred things which have a law of their own, not
+dependent on the variations of sense.  They rise above sense, and become a
+connecting link with the world of ideas.  But it is evident that Plato is
+describing what to him appears to be also a fact.  The power of a simple
+and characteristic melody on the impressible mind of the Greek is more than
+we can easily appreciate.  The effect of national airs may bear some
+comparison with it.  And, besides all this, there is a confusion between
+the harmony of musical notes and the harmony of soul and body, which is so
+potently inspired by them.
+
+The second paradox leads up to some curious and interesting questions--How
+far can the mind control the body?  Is the relation between them one of
+mutual antagonism or of mutual harmony?  Are they two or one, and is either
+of them the cause of the other?  May we not at times drop the opposition
+between them, and the mode of describing them, which is so familiar to us,
+and yet hardly conveys any precise meaning, and try to view this composite
+creature, man, in a more simple manner?  Must we not at any rate admit that
+there is in human nature a higher and a lower principle, divided by no
+distinct line, which at times break asunder and take up arms against one
+another?  Or again, they are reconciled and move together, either
+unconsciously in the ordinary work of life, or consciously in the pursuit
+of some noble aim, to be attained not without an effort, and for which
+every thought and nerve are strained.  And then the body becomes the good
+friend or ally, or servant or instrument of the mind.  And the mind has
+often a wonderful and almost superhuman power of banishing disease and
+weakness and calling out a hidden strength.  Reason and the desires, the
+intellect and the senses are brought into harmony and obedience so as to
+form a single human being.  They are ever parting, ever meeting; and the
+identity or diversity of their tendencies or operations is for the most
+part unnoticed by us.  When the mind touches the body through the
+appetites, we acknowledge the responsibility of the one to the other. 
+There is a tendency in us which says 'Drink.'  There is another which says,
+'Do not drink; it is not good for you.'  And we all of us know which is the
+rightful superior.  We are also responsible for our health, although into
+this sphere there enter some elements of necessity which may be beyond our
+control.  Still even in the management of health, care and thought,
+continued over many years, may make us almost free agents, if we do not
+exact too much of ourselves, and if we acknowledge that all human freedom
+is limited by the laws of nature and of mind.
+
+We are disappointed to find that Plato, in the general condemnation which
+he passes on the practice of medicine prevailing in his own day,
+depreciates the effects of diet.  He would like to have diseases of a
+definite character and capable of receiving a definite treatment.  He is
+afraid of invalidism interfering with the business of life.  He does not
+recognize that time is the great healer both of mental and bodily
+disorders; and that remedies which are gradual and proceed little by little
+are safer than those which produce a sudden catastrophe.  Neither does he
+see that there is no way in which the mind can more surely influence the
+body than by the control of eating and drinking; or any other action or
+occasion of human life on which the higher freedom of the will can be more
+simple or truly asserted.
+
+7.  Lesser matters of style may be remarked.
+
+(1) The affected ignorance of music, which is Plato's way of expressing
+that he is passing lightly over the subject.
+
+(2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book, he proceeds
+with the construction of the State.
+
+(3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality, and then again as
+a work of imagination only; these are the arts by which he sustains the
+reader's interest.
+
+(4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire expulsion of the
+poets in Book X.
+
+(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the
+valetudinarian, the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides, the
+manner in which the image of the gold and silver citizens is taken up into
+the subject, and the argument from the practice of Asclepius, should not
+escape notice.
+
+BOOK IV.  Adeimantus said:  'Suppose a person to argue, Socrates, that you
+make your citizens miserable, and this by their own free-will; they are the
+lords of the city, and yet instead of having, like other men, lands and
+houses and money of their own, they live as mercenaries and are always
+mounting guard.'  You may add, I replied, that they receive no pay but only
+their food, and have no money to spend on a journey or a mistress.  'Well,
+and what answer do you give?'  My answer is, that our guardians may or may
+not be the happiest of men,--I should not be surprised to find in the long-
+run that they were,--but this is not the aim of our constitution, which was
+designed for the good of the whole and not of any one part.  If I went to a
+sculptor and blamed him for having painted the eye, which is the noblest
+feature of the face, not purple but black, he would reply:  'The eye must
+be an eye, and you should look at the statue as a whole.'  'Now I can well
+imagine a fool's paradise, in which everybody is eating and drinking,
+clothed in purple and fine linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their
+wheel at hand, that they may work a little when they please; and cobblers
+and all the other classes of a State lose their distinctive character.  And
+a State may get on without cobblers; but when the guardians degenerate into
+boon companions, then the ruin is complete.  Remember that we are not
+talking of peasants keeping holiday, but of a State in which every man is
+expected to do his own work.  The happiness resides not in this or that
+class, but in the State as a whole.  I have another remark to make:--A
+middle condition is best for artisans; they should have money enough to buy
+tools, and not enough to be independent of business.  And will not the same
+condition be best for our citizens?  If they are poor, they will be mean;
+if rich, luxurious and lazy; and in neither case contented.  'But then how
+will our poor city be able to go to war against an enemy who has money?' 
+There may be a difficulty in fighting against one enemy; against two there
+will be none.  In the first place, the contest will be carried on by
+trained warriors against well-to-do citizens:  and is not a regular athlete
+an easy match for two stout opponents at least?  Suppose also, that before
+engaging we send ambassadors to one of the two cities, saying, 'Silver and
+gold we have not; do you help us and take our share of the spoil;'--who
+would fight against the lean, wiry dogs, when they might join with them in
+preying upon the fatted sheep?  'But if many states join their resources,
+shall we not be in danger?'  I am amused to hear you use the word 'state'
+of any but our own State.  They are 'states,' but not 'a state'--many in
+one.  For in every state there are two hostile nations, rich and poor,
+which you may set one against the other.  But our State, while she remains
+true to her principles, will be in very deed the mightiest of Hellenic
+states.
+
+To the size of the state there is no limit but the necessity of unity; it
+must be neither too large nor too small to be one.  This is a matter of
+secondary importance, like the principle of transposition which was
+intimated in the parable of the earthborn men.  The meaning there implied
+was that every man should do that for which he was fitted, and be at one
+with himself, and then the whole city would be united.  But all these
+things are secondary, if education, which is the great matter, be duly
+regarded.  When the wheel has once been set in motion, the speed is always
+increasing; and each generation improves upon the preceding, both in
+physical and moral qualities.  The care of the governors should be directed
+to preserve music and gymnastic from innovation; alter the songs of a
+country, Damon says, and you will soon end by altering its laws.  The
+change appears innocent at first, and begins in play; but the evil soon
+becomes serious, working secretly upon the characters of individuals, then
+upon social and commercial relations, and lastly upon the institutions of a
+state; and there is ruin and confusion everywhere.  But if education
+remains in the established form, there will be no danger.  A restorative
+process will be always going on; the spirit of law and order will raise up
+what has fallen down.  Nor will any regulations be needed for the lesser
+matters of life--rules of deportment or fashions of dress.  Like invites
+like for good or for evil.  Education will correct deficiencies and supply
+the power of self-government.  Far be it from us to enter into the
+particulars of legislation; let the guardians take care of education, and
+education will take care of all other things.
+
+But without education they may patch and mend as they please; they will
+make no progress, any more than a patient who thinks to cure himself by
+some favourite remedy and will not give up his luxurious mode of living. 
+If you tell such persons that they must first alter their habits, then they
+grow angry; they are charming people.  'Charming,--nay, the very reverse.' 
+Evidently these gentlemen are not in your good graces, nor the state which
+is like them.  And such states there are which first ordain under penalty
+of death that no one shall alter the constitution, and then suffer
+themselves to be flattered into and out of anything; and he who indulges
+them and fawns upon them, is their leader and saviour.  'Yes, the men are
+as bad as the states.'  But do you not admire their cleverness?  'Nay, some
+of them are stupid enough to believe what the people tell them.'  And when
+all the world is telling a man that he is six feet high, and he has no
+measure, how can he believe anything else?  But don't get into a passion: 
+to see our statesmen trying their nostrums, and fancying that they can cut
+off at a blow the Hydra-like rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. 
+Minute enactments are superfluous in good states, and are useless in bad
+ones.
+
+And now what remains of the work of legislation?  Nothing for us; but to
+Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the greatest of all
+things--that is to say, religion.  Only our ancestral deity sitting upon
+the centre and navel of the earth will be trusted by us if we have any
+sense, in an affair of such magnitude.  No foreign god shall be supreme in
+our realms...
+
+Here, as Socrates would say, let us 'reflect on' (Greek) what has preceded: 
+thus far we have spoken not of the happiness of the citizens, but only of
+the well-being of the State.  They may be the happiest of men, but our
+principal aim in founding the State was not to make them happy.  They were
+to be guardians, not holiday-makers.  In this pleasant manner is presented
+to us the famous question both of ancient and modern philosophy, touching
+the relation of duty to happiness, of right to utility.
+
+First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas.  The
+utilitarian principle is valuable as a corrective of error, and shows to us
+a side of ethics which is apt to be neglected.  It may be admitted further
+that right and utility are co-extensive, and that he who makes the
+happiness of mankind his object has one of the highest and noblest motives
+of human action.  But utility is not the historical basis of morality; nor
+the aspect in which moral and religious ideas commonly occur to the mind. 
+The greatest happiness of all is, as we believe, the far-off result of the
+divine government of the universe.  The greatest happiness of the
+individual is certainly to be found in a life of virtue and goodness.  But
+we seem to be more assured of a law of right than we can be of a divine
+purpose, that 'all mankind should be saved;' and we infer the one from the
+other.  And the greatest happiness of the individual may be the reverse of
+the greatest happiness in the ordinary sense of the term, and may be
+realised in a life of pain, or in a voluntary death.  Further, the word
+'happiness' has several ambiguities; it may mean either pleasure or an
+ideal life, happiness subjective or objective, in this world or in another,
+of ourselves only or of our neighbours and of all men everywhere.  By the
+modern founder of Utilitarianism the self-regarding and disinterested
+motives of action are included under the same term, although they are
+commonly opposed by us as benevolence and self-love.  The word happiness
+has not the definiteness or the sacredness of 'truth' and 'right'; it does
+not equally appeal to our higher nature, and has not sunk into the
+conscience of mankind.  It is associated too much with the comforts and
+conveniences of life; too little with 'the goods of the soul which we
+desire for their own sake.'  In a great trial, or danger, or temptation, or
+in any great and heroic action, it is scarcely thought of.  For these
+reasons 'the greatest happiness' principle is not the true foundation of
+ethics.  But though not the first principle, it is the second, which is
+like unto it, and is often of easier application.  For the larger part of
+human actions are neither right nor wrong, except in so far as they tend to
+the happiness of mankind (Introd. to Gorgias and Philebus).
+
+The same question reappears in politics, where the useful or expedient
+seems to claim a larger sphere and to have a greater authority.  For
+concerning political measures, we chiefly ask:  How will they affect the
+happiness of mankind?  Yet here too we may observe that what we term
+expediency is merely the law of right limited by the conditions of human
+society.  Right and truth are the highest aims of government as well as of
+individuals; and we ought not to lose sight of them because we cannot
+directly enforce them.  They appeal to the better mind of nations; and
+sometimes they are too much for merely temporal interests to resist.  They
+are the watchwords which all men use in matters of public policy, as well
+as in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be said to depend
+upon them.  In the most commercial and utilitarian states of society the
+power of ideas remains.  And all the higher class of statesmen have in them
+something of that idealism which Pericles is said to have gathered from the
+teaching of Anaxagoras.  They recognise that the true leader of men must be
+above the motives of ambition, and that national character is of greater
+value than material comfort and prosperity.  And this is the order of
+thought in Plato; first, he expects his citizens to do their duty, and then
+under favourable circumstances, that is to say, in a well-ordered State,
+their happiness is assured.  That he was far from excluding the modern
+principle of utility in politics is sufficiently evident from other
+passages; in which 'the most beneficial is affirmed to be the most
+honourable', and also 'the most sacred'.
+
+We may note
+
+(1) The manner in which the objection of Adeimantus here, is designed to
+draw out and deepen the argument of Socrates.
+
+(2) The conception of a whole as lying at the foundation both of politics
+and of art, in the latter supplying the only principle of criticism, which,
+under the various names of harmony, symmetry, measure, proportion, unity,
+the Greek seems to have applied to works of art.
+
+(3) The requirement that the State should be limited in size, after the
+traditional model of a Greek state; as in the Politics of Aristotle, the
+fact that the cities of Hellas were small is converted into a principle.
+
+(4) The humorous pictures of the lean dogs and the fatted sheep, of the
+light active boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen at least, of the
+'charming' patients who are always making themselves worse; or again, the
+playful assumption that there is no State but our own; or the grave irony
+with which the statesman is excused who believes that he is six feet high
+because he is told so, and having nothing to measure with is to be pardoned
+for his ignorance--he is too amusing for us to be seriously angry with him.
+
+(5) The light and superficial manner in which religion is passed over when
+provision has been made for two great principles,--first, that religion
+shall be based on the highest conception of the gods, secondly, that the
+true national or Hellenic type shall be maintained...
+
+Socrates proceeds:  But where amid all this is justice?  Son of Ariston,
+tell me where.  Light a candle and search the city, and get your brother
+and the rest of our friends to help in seeking for her.  'That won't do,'
+replied Glaucon, 'you yourself promised to make the search and talked about
+the impiety of deserting justice.'  Well, I said, I will lead the way, but
+do you follow.  My notion is, that our State being perfect will contain all
+the four virtues--wisdom, courage, temperance, justice.  If we eliminate
+the three first, the unknown remainder will be justice.
+
+First then, of wisdom:  the State which we have called into being will be
+wise because politic.  And policy is one among many kinds of skill,--not
+the skill of the carpenter, or of the worker in metal, or of the
+husbandman, but the skill of him who advises about the interests of the
+whole State.  Of such a kind is the skill of the guardians, who are a small
+class in number, far smaller than the blacksmiths; but in them is
+concentrated the wisdom of the State.  And if this small ruling class have
+wisdom, then the whole State will be wise.
+
+Our second virtue is courage, which we have no difficulty in finding in
+another class--that of soldiers.  Courage may be defined as a sort of
+salvation--the never-failing salvation of the opinions which law and
+education have prescribed concerning dangers.  You know the way in which
+dyers first prepare the white ground and then lay on the dye of purple or
+of any other colour.  Colours dyed in this way become fixed, and no soap or
+lye will ever wash them out.  Now the ground is education, and the laws are
+the colours; and if the ground is properly laid, neither the soap of
+pleasure nor the lye of pain or fear will ever wash them out.  This power
+which preserves right opinion about danger I would ask you to call
+'courage,' adding the epithet 'political' or 'civilized' in order to
+distinguish it from mere animal courage and from a higher courage which may
+hereafter be discussed.
+
+Two virtues remain; temperance and justice.  More than the preceding
+virtues temperance suggests the idea of harmony.  Some light is thrown upon
+the nature of this virtue by the popular description of a man as 'master of
+himself'--which has an absurd sound, because the master is also the
+servant.  The expression really means that the better principle in a man
+masters the worse.  There are in cities whole classes--women, slaves and
+the like--who correspond to the worse, and a few only to the better; and in
+our State the former class are held under control by the latter.  Now to
+which of these classes does temperance belong?  'To both of them.'  And our
+State if any will be the abode of temperance; and we were right in
+describing this virtue as a harmony which is diffused through the whole,
+making the dwellers in the city to be of one mind, and attuning the upper
+and middle and lower classes like the strings of an instrument, whether you
+suppose them to differ in wisdom, strength or wealth.
+
+And now we are near the spot; let us draw in and surround the cover and
+watch with all our eyes, lest justice should slip away and escape.  Tell
+me, if you see the thicket move first.  'Nay, I would have you lead.'  Well
+then, offer up a prayer and follow.  The way is dark and difficult; but we
+must push on.  I begin to see a track.  'Good news.'  Why, Glaucon, our
+dulness of scent is quite ludicrous!  While we are straining our eyes into
+the distance, justice is tumbling out at our feet.  We are as bad as people
+looking for a thing which they have in their hands.  Have you forgotten our
+old principle of the division of labour, or of every man doing his own
+business, concerning which we spoke at the foundation of the State--what
+but this was justice?  Is there any other virtue remaining which can
+compete with wisdom and temperance and courage in the scale of political
+virtue?  For 'every one having his own' is the great object of government;
+and the great object of trade is that every man should do his own business.
+Not that there is much harm in a carpenter trying to be a cobbler, or a
+cobbler transforming himself into a carpenter; but great evil may arise
+from the cobbler leaving his last and turning into a guardian or
+legislator, or when a single individual is trainer, warrior, legislator,
+all in one.  And this evil is injustice, or every man doing another's
+business.  I do not say that as yet we are in a condition to arrive at a
+final conclusion.  For the definition which we believe to hold good in
+states has still to be tested by the individual.  Having read the large
+letters we will now come back to the small.  From the two together a
+brilliant light may be struck out...
+
+Socrates proceeds to discover the nature of justice by a method of
+residues.  Each of the first three virtues corresponds to one of the three
+parts of the soul and one of the three classes in the State, although the
+third, temperance, has more of the nature of a harmony than the first two.
+If there be a fourth virtue, that can only be sought for in the relation of
+the three parts in the soul or classes in the State to one another.  It is
+obvious and simple, and for that very reason has not been found out.  The
+modern logician will be inclined to object that ideas cannot be separated
+like chemical substances, but that they run into one another and may be
+only different aspects or names of the same thing, and such in this
+instance appears to be the case.  For the definition here given of justice
+is verbally the same as one of the definitions of temperance given by
+Socrates in the Charmides, which however is only provisional, and is
+afterwards rejected.  And so far from justice remaining over when the other
+virtues are eliminated, the justice and temperance of the Republic can with
+difficulty be distinguished.  Temperance appears to be the virtue of a part
+only, and one of three, whereas justice is a universal virtue of the whole
+soul.  Yet on the other hand temperance is also described as a sort of
+harmony, and in this respect is akin to justice.  Justice seems to differ
+from temperance in degree rather than in kind; whereas temperance is the
+harmony of discordant elements, justice is the perfect order by which all
+natures and classes do their own business, the right man in the right
+place, the division and co-operation of all the citizens.  Justice, again,
+is a more abstract notion than the other virtues, and therefore, from
+Plato's point of view, the foundation of them, to which they are referred
+and which in idea precedes them.  The proposal to omit temperance is a mere
+trick of style intended to avoid monotony.
+
+There is a famous question discussed in one of the earlier Dialogues of
+Plato (Protagoras; Arist. Nic. Ethics), 'Whether the virtues are one or
+many?'  This receives an answer which is to the effect that there are four
+cardinal virtues (now for the first time brought together in ethical
+philosophy), and one supreme over the rest, which is not like Aristotle's
+conception of universal justice, virtue relative to others, but the whole
+of virtue relative to the parts.  To this universal conception of justice
+or order in the first education and in the moral nature of man, the still
+more universal conception of the good in the second education and in the
+sphere of speculative knowledge seems to succeed.  Both might be equally
+described by the terms 'law,' 'order,' 'harmony;' but while the idea of
+good embraces 'all time and all existence,' the conception of justice is
+not extended beyond man.
+
+...Socrates is now going to identify the individual and the State.  But
+first he must prove that there are three parts of the individual soul.  His
+argument is as follows:--Quantity makes no difference in quality.  The word
+'just,' whether applied to the individual or to the State, has the same
+meaning.  And the term 'justice' implied that the same three principles in
+the State and in the individual were doing their own business.  But are
+they really three or one?  The question is difficult, and one which can
+hardly be solved by the methods which we are now using; but the truer and
+longer way would take up too much of our time.  'The shorter will satisfy
+me.'  Well then, you would admit that the qualities of states mean the
+qualities of the individuals who compose them?  The Scythians and Thracians
+are passionate, our own race intellectual, and the Egyptians and
+Phoenicians covetous, because the individual members of each have such and
+such a character; the difficulty is to determine whether the several
+principles are one or three; whether, that is to say, we reason with one
+part of our nature, desire with another, are angry with another, or whether
+the whole soul comes into play in each sort of action.  This enquiry,
+however, requires a very exact definition of terms.  The same thing in the
+same relation cannot be affected in two opposite ways.  But there is no
+impossibility in a man standing still, yet moving his arms, or in a top
+which is fixed on one spot going round upon its axis.  There is no
+necessity to mention all the possible exceptions; let us provisionally
+assume that opposites cannot do or be or suffer opposites in the same
+relation.  And to the class of opposites belong assent and dissent, desire
+and avoidance.  And one form of desire is thirst and hunger:  and here
+arises a new point--thirst is thirst of drink, hunger is hunger of food;
+not of warm drink or of a particular kind of food, with the single
+exception of course that the very fact of our desiring anything implies
+that it is good.  When relative terms have no attributes, their
+correlatives have no attributes; when they have attributes, their
+correlatives also have them.  For example, the term 'greater' is simply
+relative to 'less,' and knowledge refers to a subject of knowledge.  But on
+the other hand, a particular knowledge is of a particular subject.  Again,
+every science has a distinct character, which is defined by an object;
+medicine, for example, is the science of health, although not to be
+confounded with health.  Having cleared our ideas thus far, let us return
+to the original instance of thirst, which has a definite object--drink. 
+Now the thirsty soul may feel two distinct impulses; the animal one saying
+'Drink;' the rational one, which says 'Do not drink.'  The two impulses are
+contradictory; and therefore we may assume that they spring from distinct
+principles in the soul.  But is passion a third principle, or akin to
+desire?  There is a story of a certain Leontius which throws some light on
+this question.  He was coming up from the Piraeus outside the north wall,
+and he passed a spot where there were dead bodies lying by the executioner.
+He felt a longing desire to see them and also an abhorrence of them; at
+first he turned away and shut his eyes, then, suddenly tearing them open,
+he said,--'Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair sight.'  Now is there
+not here a third principle which is often found to come to the assistance
+of reason against desire, but never of desire against reason?  This is
+passion or spirit, of the separate existence of which we may further
+convince ourselves by putting the following case:--When a man suffers
+justly, if he be of a generous nature he is not indignant at the hardships
+which he undergoes:  but when he suffers unjustly, his indignation is his
+great support; hunger and thirst cannot tame him; the spirit within him
+must do or die, until the voice of the shepherd, that is, of reason,
+bidding his dog bark no more, is heard within.  This shows that passion is
+the ally of reason.  Is passion then the same with reason?  No, for the
+former exists in children and brutes; and Homer affords a proof of the
+distinction between them when he says, 'He smote his breast, and thus
+rebuked his soul.'
+
+And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able to infer that
+the virtues of the State and of the individual are the same.  For wisdom
+and courage and justice in the State are severally the wisdom and courage
+and justice in the individuals who form the State.  Each of the three
+classes will do the work of its own class in the State, and each part in
+the individual soul; reason, the superior, and passion, the inferior, will
+be harmonized by the influence of music and gymnastic.  The counsellor and
+the warrior, the head and the arm, will act together in the town of
+Mansoul, and keep the desires in proper subjection.  The courage of the
+warrior is that quality which preserves a right opinion about dangers in
+spite of pleasures and pains.  The wisdom of the counsellor is that small
+part of the soul which has authority and reason.  The virtue of temperance
+is the friendship of the ruling and the subject principles, both in the
+State and in the individual.  Of justice we have already spoken; and the
+notion already given of it may be confirmed by common instances.  Will the
+just state or the just individual steal, lie, commit adultery, or be guilty
+of impiety to gods and men?  'No.'  And is not the reason of this that the
+several principles, whether in the state or in the individual, do their own
+business?  And justice is the quality which makes just men and just states.
+Moreover, our old division of labour, which required that there should be
+one man for one use, was a dream or anticipation of what was to follow; and
+that dream has now been realized in justice, which begins by binding
+together the three chords of the soul, and then acts harmoniously in every
+relation of life.  And injustice, which is the insubordination and
+disobedience of the inferior elements in the soul, is the opposite of
+justice, and is inharmonious and unnatural, being to the soul what disease
+is to the body; for in the soul as well as in the body, good or bad actions
+produce good or bad habits.  And virtue is the health and beauty and well-
+being of the soul, and vice is the disease and weakness and deformity of
+the soul.
+
+Again the old question returns upon us:  Is justice or injustice the more
+profitable?  The question has become ridiculous.  For injustice, like
+mortal disease, makes life not worth having.  Come up with me to the hill
+which overhangs the city and look down upon the single form of virtue, and
+the infinite forms of vice, among which are four special ones,
+characteristic both of states and of individuals.  And the state which
+corresponds to the single form of virtue is that which we have been
+describing, wherein reason rules under one of two names--monarchy and
+aristocracy.  Thus there are five forms in all, both of states and of
+souls...
+
+In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate faculties, Plato
+takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of faculties.  And the
+criterion which he proposes is difference in the working of the faculties.
+The same faculty cannot produce contradictory effects.  But the path of
+early reasoners is beset by thorny entanglements, and he will not proceed a
+step without first clearing the ground.  This leads him into a tiresome
+digression, which is intended to explain the nature of contradiction. 
+First, the contradiction must be at the same time and in the same relation.
+Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced into either of the terms in
+which the contradictory proposition is expressed:  for example, thirst is
+of drink, not of warm drink.  He implies, what he does not say, that if, by
+the advice of reason, or by the impulse of anger, a man is restrained from
+drinking, this proves that thirst, or desire under which thirst is
+included, is distinct from anger and reason.  But suppose that we allow the
+term 'thirst' or 'desire' to be modified, and say an 'angry thirst,' or a
+'revengeful desire,' then the two spheres of desire and anger overlap and
+become confused.  This case therefore has to be excluded.  And still there
+remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term 'good,' which is
+always implied in the object of desire.  These are the discussions of an
+age before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should remember that
+they are necessary to the clearing up of ideas in the first development of
+the human faculties.
+
+The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of the soul
+into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as far as
+we know, was first made by him, and has been retained by Aristotle and
+succeeding ethical writers.  The chief difficulty in this early analysis of
+the mind is to define exactly the place of the irascible faculty (Greek),
+which may be variously described under the terms righteous indignation,
+spirit, passion.  It is the foundation of courage, which includes in Plato
+moral courage, the courage of enduring pain, and of surmounting
+intellectual difficulties, as well as of meeting dangers in war.  Though
+irrational, it inclines to side with the rational:  it cannot be aroused by
+punishment when justly inflicted:  it sometimes takes the form of an
+enthusiasm which sustains a man in the performance of great actions.  It is
+the 'lion heart' with which the reason makes a treaty.  On the other hand
+it is negative rather than positive; it is indignant at wrong or falsehood,
+but does not, like Love in the Symposium and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision
+of Truth or Good.  It is the peremptory military spirit which prevails in
+the government of honour.  It differs from anger (Greek), this latter term
+having no accessory notion of righteous indignation.  Although Aristotle
+has retained the word, yet we may observe that 'passion' (Greek) has with
+him lost its affinity to the rational and has become indistinguishable from
+'anger' (Greek).  And to this vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws
+seems to revert, though not always.  By modern philosophy too, as well as
+in our ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion are employed
+almost exclusively in a bad sense; there is no connotation of a just or
+reasonable cause by which they are aroused.  The feeling of 'righteous
+indignation' is too partial and accidental to admit of our regarding it as
+a separate virtue or habit.  We are tempted also to doubt whether Plato is
+right in supposing that an offender, however justly condemned, could be
+expected to acknowledge the justice of his sentence; this is the spirit of
+a philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal.
+
+We may observe how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle's famous thesis, that
+'good actions produce good habits.'  The words 'as healthy practices
+(Greek) produce health, so do just practices produce justice,' have a sound
+very like the Nicomachean Ethics.  But we note also that an incidental
+remark in Plato has become a far-reaching principle in Aristotle, and an
+inseparable part of a great Ethical system.
+
+There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by 'the longer
+way':  he seems to intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not be
+satisfied with arguing from the principle of contradiction.  In the sixth
+and seventh books (compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given us a sketch
+of such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final revelation of the
+idea of good, he is put off with the declaration that he has not yet
+studied the preliminary sciences.  How he would have filled up the sketch,
+or argued about such questions from a higher point of view, we can only
+conjecture.  Perhaps he hoped to find some a priori method of developing
+the parts out of the whole; or he might have asked which of the ideas
+contains the other ideas, and possibly have stumbled on the Hegelian
+identity of the 'ego' and the 'universal.'  Or he may have imagined that
+ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous to the construction of
+figures and numbers in the mathematical sciences.  The most certain and
+necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to this he was always
+seeking to refer all knowledge or opinion, just as in modern times we seek
+to rest them on the opposite pole of induction and experience.  The
+aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended to pass beyond the limits
+of human thought and language:  they seem to have reached a height at which
+they are 'moving about in worlds unrealized,' and their conceptions,
+although profoundly affecting their own minds, become invisible or
+unintelligible to others.  We are not therefore surprized to find that
+Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained his doctrine of ideas; or that
+his school in a later generation, like his contemporaries Glaucon and
+Adeimantus, were unable to follow him in this region of speculation.  In
+the Sophist, where he is refuting the scepticism which maintained either
+that there was no such thing as predication, or that all might be
+predicated of all, he arrives at the conclusion that some ideas combine
+with some, but not all with all.  But he makes only one or two steps
+forward on this path; he nowhere attains to any connected system of ideas,
+or even to a knowledge of the most elementary relations of the sciences to
+one another.
+
+BOOK V.  I was going to enumerate the four forms of vice or decline in
+states, when Polemarchus--he was sitting a little farther from me than
+Adeimantus--taking him by the coat and leaning towards him, said something
+in an undertone, of which I only caught the words, 'Shall we let him off?' 
+'Certainly not,' said Adeimantus, raising his voice.  Whom, I said, are you
+not going to let off?  'You,' he said.  Why?  'Because we think that you
+are not dealing fairly with us in omitting women and children, of whom you
+have slily disposed under the general formula that friends have all things
+in common.'  And was I not right?  'Yes,' he replied, 'but there are many
+sorts of communism or community, and we want to know which of them is
+right.  The company, as you have just heard, are resolved to have a further
+explanation.'  Thrasymachus said, 'Do you think that we have come hither to
+dig for gold, or to hear you discourse?'  Yes, I said; but the discourse
+should be of a reasonable length.  Glaucon added, 'Yes, Socrates, and there
+is reason in spending the whole of life in such discussions; but pray,
+without more ado, tell us how this community is to be carried out, and how
+the interval between birth and education is to be filled up.'  Well, I
+said, the subject has several difficulties--What is possible? is the first
+question.  What is desirable? is the second.  'Fear not,' he replied, 'for
+you are speaking among friends.'  That, I replied, is a sorry consolation;
+I shall destroy my friends as well as myself.  Not that I mind a little
+innocent laughter; but he who kills the truth is a murderer.  'Then,' said
+Glaucon, laughing, 'in case you should murder us we will acquit you
+beforehand, and you shall be held free from the guilt of deceiving us.'
+
+Socrates proceeds:--The guardians of our state are to be watch-dogs, as we
+have already said.  Now dogs are not divided into hes and shes--we do not
+take the masculine gender out to hunt and leave the females at home to look
+after their puppies.  They have the same employments--the only difference
+between them is that the one sex is stronger and the other weaker.  But if
+women are to have the same employments as men, they must have the same
+education--they must be taught music and gymnastics, and the art of war.  I
+know that a great joke will be made of their riding on horseback and
+carrying weapons; the sight of the naked old wrinkled women showing their
+agility in the palaestra will certainly not be a vision of beauty, and may
+be expected to become a famous jest.  But we must not mind the wits; there
+was a time when they might have laughed at our present gymnastics.  All is
+habit:  people have at last found out that the exposure is better than the
+concealment of the person, and now they laugh no more.  Evil only should be
+the subject of ridicule.
+
+The first question is, whether women are able either wholly or partially to
+share in the employments of men.  And here we may be charged with
+inconsistency in making the proposal at all.  For we started originally
+with the division of labour; and the diversity of employments was based on
+the difference of natures.  But is there no difference between men and
+women?  Nay, are they not wholly different?  THERE was the difficulty,
+Glaucon, which made me unwilling to speak of family relations.  However,
+when a man is out of his depth, whether in a pool or in an ocean, he can
+only swim for his life; and we must try to find a way of escape, if we can.
+
+The argument is, that different natures have different uses, and the
+natures of men and women are said to differ.  But this is only a verbal
+opposition.  We do not consider that the difference may be purely nominal
+and accidental; for example, a bald man and a hairy man are opposed in a
+single point of view, but you cannot infer that because a bald man is a
+cobbler a hairy man ought not to be a cobbler.  Now why is such an
+inference erroneous?  Simply because the opposition between them is partial
+only, like the difference between a male physician and a female physician,
+not running through the whole nature, like the difference between a
+physician and a carpenter.  And if the difference of the sexes is only that
+the one beget and the other bear children, this does not prove that they
+ought to have distinct educations.  Admitting that women differ from men in
+capacity, do not men equally differ from one another?  Has not nature
+scattered all the qualities which our citizens require indifferently up and
+down among the two sexes? and even in their peculiar pursuits, are not
+women often, though in some cases superior to men, ridiculously enough
+surpassed by them?  Women are the same in kind as men, and have the same
+aptitude or want of aptitude for medicine or gymnastic or war, but in a
+less degree.  One woman will be a good guardian, another not; and the good
+must be chosen to be the colleagues of our guardians.  If however their
+natures are the same, the inference is that their education must also be
+the same; there is no longer anything unnatural or impossible in a woman
+learning music and gymnastic.  And the education which we give them will be
+the very best, far superior to that of cobblers, and will train up the very
+best women, and nothing can be more advantageous to the State than this. 
+Therefore let them strip, clothed in their chastity, and share in the toils
+of war and in the defence of their country; he who laughs at them is a fool
+for his pains.
+
+The first wave is past, and the argument is compelled to admit that men and
+women have common duties and pursuits.  A second and greater wave is
+rolling in--community of wives and children; is this either expedient or
+possible?  The expediency I do not doubt; I am not so sure of the
+possibility.  'Nay, I think that a considerable doubt will be entertained
+on both points.'  I meant to have escaped the trouble of proving the first,
+but as you have detected the little stratagem I must even submit.  Only
+allow me to feed my fancy like the solitary in his walks, with a dream of
+what might be, and then I will return to the question of what can be.
+
+In the first place our rulers will enforce the laws and make new ones where
+they are wanted, and their allies or ministers will obey.  You, as
+legislator, have already selected the men; and now you shall select the
+women.  After the selection has been made, they will dwell in common houses
+and have their meals in common, and will be brought together by a necessity
+more certain than that of mathematics.  But they cannot be allowed to live
+in licentiousness; that is an unholy thing, which the rulers are determined
+to prevent.  For the avoidance of this, holy marriage festivals will be
+instituted, and their holiness will be in proportion to their usefulness. 
+And here, Glaucon, I should like to ask (as I know that you are a breeder
+of birds and animals), Do you not take the greatest care in the mating? 
+'Certainly.'  And there is no reason to suppose that less care is required
+in the marriage of human beings.  But then our rulers must be skilful
+physicians of the State, for they will often need a strong dose of
+falsehood in order to bring about desirable unions between their subjects.
+The good must be paired with the good, and the bad with the bad, and the
+offspring of the one must be reared, and of the other destroyed; in this
+way the flock will be preserved in prime condition.  Hymeneal festivals
+will be celebrated at times fixed with an eye to population, and the brides
+and bridegrooms will meet at them; and by an ingenious system of lots the
+rulers will contrive that the brave and the fair come together, and that
+those of inferior breed are paired with inferiors--the latter will ascribe
+to chance what is really the invention of the rulers.  And when children
+are born, the offspring of the brave and fair will be carried to an
+enclosure in a certain part of the city, and there attended by suitable
+nurses; the rest will be hurried away to places unknown.  The mothers will
+be brought to the fold and will suckle the children; care however must be
+taken that none of them recognise their own offspring; and if necessary
+other nurses may also be hired.  The trouble of watching and getting up at
+night will be transferred to attendants.  'Then the wives of our guardians
+will have a fine easy time when they are having children.'  And quite right
+too, I said, that they should.
+
+The parents ought to be in the prime of life, which for a man may be
+reckoned at thirty years--from twenty-five, when he has 'passed the point
+at which the speed of life is greatest,' to fifty-five; and at twenty years
+for a woman--from twenty to forty.  Any one above or below those ages who
+partakes in the hymeneals shall be guilty of impiety; also every one who
+forms a marriage connexion at other times without the consent of the
+rulers.  This latter regulation applies to those who are within the
+specified ages, after which they may range at will, provided they avoid the
+prohibited degrees of parents and children, or of brothers and sisters,
+which last, however, are not absolutely prohibited, if a dispensation be
+procured.  'But how shall we know the degrees of affinity, when all things
+are common?'  The answer is, that brothers and sisters are all such as are
+born seven or nine months after the espousals, and their parents those who
+are then espoused, and every one will have many children and every child
+many parents.
+
+Socrates proceeds:  I have now to prove that this scheme is advantageous
+and also consistent with our entire polity.  The greatest good of a State
+is unity; the greatest evil, discord and distraction.  And there will be
+unity where there are no private pleasures or pains or interests--where if
+one member suffers all the members suffer, if one citizen is touched all
+are quickly sensitive; and the least hurt to the little finger of the State
+runs through the whole body and vibrates to the soul.  For the true State,
+like an individual, is injured as a whole when any part is affected.  Every
+State has subjects and rulers, who in a democracy are called rulers, and in
+other States masters:  but in our State they are called saviours and
+allies; and the subjects who in other States are termed slaves, are by us
+termed nurturers and paymasters, and those who are termed comrades and
+colleagues in other places, are by us called fathers and brothers.  And
+whereas in other States members of the same government regard one of their
+colleagues as a friend and another as an enemy, in our State no man is a
+stranger to another; for every citizen is connected with every other by
+ties of blood, and these names and this way of speaking will have a
+corresponding reality--brother, father, sister, mother, repeated from
+infancy in the ears of children, will not be mere words.  Then again the
+citizens will have all things in common, in having common property they
+will have common pleasures and pains.
+
+Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one mind; or
+lawsuits about property when men have nothing but their bodies which they
+call their own; or suits about violence when every one is bound to defend
+himself?  The permission to strike when insulted will be an 'antidote' to
+the knife and will prevent disturbances in the State.  But no younger man
+will strike an elder; reverence will prevent him from laying hands on his
+kindred, and he will fear that the rest of the family may retaliate. 
+Moreover, our citizens will be rid of the lesser evils of life; there will
+be no flattery of the rich, no sordid household cares, no borrowing and not
+paying.  Compared with the citizens of other States, ours will be Olympic
+victors, and crowned with blessings greater still--they and their children
+having a better maintenance during life, and after death an honourable
+burial.  Nor has the happiness of the individual been sacrificed to the
+happiness of the State; our Olympic victor has not been turned into a
+cobbler, but he has a happiness beyond that of any cobbler.  At the same
+time, if any conceited youth begins to dream of appropriating the State to
+himself, he must be reminded that 'half is better than the whole.'  'I
+should certainly advise him to stay where he is when he has the promise of
+such a brave life.'
+
+But is such a community possible?--as among the animals, so also among men;
+and if possible, in what way possible?  About war there is no difficulty;
+the principle of communism is adapted to military service.  Parents will
+take their children to look on at a battle, just as potters' boys are
+trained to the business by looking on at the wheel.  And to the parents
+themselves, as to other animals, the sight of their young ones will prove a
+great incentive to bravery.  Young warriors must learn, but they must not
+run into danger, although a certain degree of risk is worth incurring when
+the benefit is great.  The young creatures should be placed under the care
+of experienced veterans, and they should have wings--that is to say, swift
+and tractable steeds on which they may fly away and escape.  One of the
+first things to be done is to teach a youth to ride.
+
+Cowards and deserters shall be degraded to the class of husbandmen;
+gentlemen who allow themselves to be taken prisoners, may be presented to
+the enemy.  But what shall be done to the hero?  First of all he shall be
+crowned by all the youths in the army; secondly, he shall receive the right
+hand of fellowship; and thirdly, do you think that there is any harm in his
+being kissed?  We have already determined that he shall have more wives
+than others, in order that he may have as many children as possible.  And
+at a feast he shall have more to eat; we have the authority of Homer for
+honouring brave men with 'long chines,' which is an appropriate compliment,
+because meat is a very strengthening thing.  Fill the bowl then, and give
+the best seats and meats to the brave--may they do them good!  And he who
+dies in battle will be at once declared to be of the golden race, and will,
+as we believe, become one of Hesiod's guardian angels.  He shall be
+worshipped after death in the manner prescribed by the oracle; and not only
+he, but all other benefactors of the State who die in any other way, shall
+be admitted to the same honours.
+
+The next question is, How shall we treat our enemies?  Shall Hellenes be
+enslaved?  No; for there is too great a risk of the whole race passing
+under the yoke of the barbarians.  Or shall the dead be despoiled? 
+Certainly not; for that sort of thing is an excuse for skulking, and has
+been the ruin of many an army.  There is meanness and feminine malice in
+making an enemy of the dead body, when the soul which was the owner has
+fled--like a dog who cannot reach his assailants, and quarrels with the
+stones which are thrown at him instead.  Again, the arms of Hellenes should
+not be offered up in the temples of the Gods; they are a pollution, for
+they are taken from brethren.  And on similar grounds there should be a
+limit to the devastation of Hellenic territory--the houses should not be
+burnt, nor more than the annual produce carried off.  For war is of two
+kinds, civil and foreign; the first of which is properly termed 'discord,'
+and only the second 'war;' and war between Hellenes is in reality civil
+war--a quarrel in a family, which is ever to be regarded as unpatriotic and
+unnatural, and ought to be prosecuted with a view to reconciliation in a
+true phil-Hellenic spirit, as of those who would chasten but not utterly
+enslave.  The war is not against a whole nation who are a friendly
+multitude of men, women, and children, but only against a few guilty
+persons; when they are punished peace will be restored.  That is the way in
+which Hellenes should war against one another--and against barbarians, as
+they war against one another now.
+
+'But, my dear Socrates, you are forgetting the main question:  Is such a
+State possible?  I grant all and more than you say about the blessedness of
+being one family--fathers, brothers, mothers, daughters, going out to war
+together; but I want to ascertain the possibility of this ideal State.' 
+You are too unmerciful.  The first wave and the second wave I have hardly
+escaped, and now you will certainly drown me with the third.  When you see
+the towering crest of the wave, I expect you to take pity.  'Not a whit.'
+
+Well, then, we were led to form our ideal polity in the search after
+justice, and the just man answered to the just State.  Is this ideal at all
+the worse for being impracticable?  Would the picture of a perfectly
+beautiful man be any the worse because no such man ever lived?  Can any
+reality come up to the idea?  Nature will not allow words to be fully
+realized; but if I am to try and realize the ideal of the State in a
+measure, I think that an approach may be made to the perfection of which I
+dream by one or two, I do not say slight, but possible changes in the
+present constitution of States.  I would reduce them to a single one--the
+great wave, as I call it.  Until, then, kings are philosophers, or
+philosophers are kings, cities will never cease from ill:  no, nor the
+human race; nor will our ideal polity ever come into being.  I know that
+this is a hard saying, which few will be able to receive.  'Socrates, all
+the world will take off his coat and rush upon you with sticks and stones,
+and therefore I would advise you to prepare an answer.'  You got me into
+the scrape, I said.  'And I was right,' he replied; 'however, I will stand
+by you as a sort of do-nothing, well-meaning ally.'  Having the help of
+such a champion, I will do my best to maintain my position.  And first, I
+must explain of whom I speak and what sort of natures these are who are to
+be philosophers and rulers.  As you are a man of pleasure, you will not
+have forgotten how indiscriminate lovers are in their attachments; they
+love all, and turn blemishes into beauties.  The snub-nosed youth is said
+to have a winning grace; the beak of another has a royal look; the
+featureless are faultless; the dark are manly, the fair angels; the sickly
+have a new term of endearment invented expressly for them, which is 'honey-
+pale.'  Lovers of wine and lovers of ambition also desire the objects of
+their affection in every form.  Now here comes the point:--The philosopher
+too is a lover of knowledge in every form; he has an insatiable curiosity. 
+'But will curiosity make a philosopher?  Are the lovers of sights and
+sounds, who let out their ears to every chorus at the Dionysiac festivals,
+to be called philosophers?'  They are not true philosophers, but only an
+imitation.  'Then how are we to describe the true?'
+
+You would acknowledge the existence of abstract ideas, such as justice,
+beauty, good, evil, which are severally one, yet in their various
+combinations appear to be many.  Those who recognize these realities are
+philosophers; whereas the other class hear sounds and see colours, and
+understand their use in the arts, but cannot attain to the true or waking
+vision of absolute justice or beauty or truth; they have not the light of
+knowledge, but of opinion, and what they see is a dream only.  Perhaps he
+of whom we say the last will be angry with us; can we pacify him without
+revealing the disorder of his mind?  Suppose we say that, if he has
+knowledge we rejoice to hear it, but knowledge must be of something which
+is, as ignorance is of something which is not; and there is a third thing,
+which both is and is not, and is matter of opinion only.  Opinion and
+knowledge, then, having distinct objects, must also be distinct faculties.
+And by faculties I mean powers unseen and distinguishable only by the
+difference in their objects, as opinion and knowledge differ, since the one
+is liable to err, but the other is unerring and is the mightiest of all our
+faculties.  If being is the object of knowledge, and not-being of
+ignorance, and these are the extremes, opinion must lie between them, and
+may be called darker than the one and brighter than the other.  This
+intermediate or contingent matter is and is not at the same time, and
+partakes both of existence and of non-existence.  Now I would ask my good
+friend, who denies abstract beauty and justice, and affirms a many
+beautiful and a many just, whether everything he sees is not in some point
+of view different--the beautiful ugly, the pious impious, the just unjust? 
+Is not the double also the half, and are not heavy and light relative terms
+which pass into one another?  Everything is and is not, as in the old
+riddle--'A man and not a man shot and did not shoot a bird and not a bird
+with a stone and not a stone.'  The mind cannot be fixed on either
+alternative; and these ambiguous, intermediate, erring, half-lighted
+objects, which have a disorderly movement in the region between being and
+not-being, are the proper matter of opinion, as the immutable objects are
+the proper matter of knowledge.  And he who grovels in the world of sense,
+and has only this uncertain perception of things, is not a philosopher, but
+a lover of opinion only...
+
+The fifth book is the new beginning of the Republic, in which the community
+of property and of family are first maintained, and the transition is made
+to the kingdom of philosophers.  For both of these Plato, after his manner,
+has been preparing in some chance words of Book IV, which fall unperceived
+on the reader's mind, as they are supposed at first to have fallen on the
+ear of Glaucon and Adeimantus.  The 'paradoxes,' as Morgenstern terms them,
+of this book of the Republic will be reserved for another place; a few
+remarks on the style, and some explanations of difficulties, may be briefly
+added.
+
+First, there is the image of the waves, which serves for a sort of scheme
+or plan of the book.  The first wave, the second wave, the third and
+greatest wave come rolling in, and we hear the roar of them.  All that can
+be said of the extravagance of Plato's proposals is anticipated by himself.
+Nothing is more admirable than the hesitation with which he proposes the
+solemn text, 'Until kings are philosophers,' etc.; or the reaction from the
+sublime to the ridiculous, when Glaucon describes the manner in which the
+new truth will be received by mankind.
+
+Some defects and difficulties may be noted in the execution of the
+communistic plan.  Nothing is told us of the application of communism to
+the lower classes; nor is the table of prohibited degrees capable of being
+made out.  It is quite possible that a child born at one hymeneal festival
+may marry one of its own brothers or sisters, or even one of its parents,
+at another.  Plato is afraid of incestuous unions, but at the same time he
+does not wish to bring before us the fact that the city would be divided
+into families of those born seven and nine months after each hymeneal
+festival.  If it were worth while to argue seriously about such fancies, we
+might remark that while all the old affinities are abolished, the newly
+prohibited affinity rests not on any natural or rational principle, but
+only upon the accident of children having been born in the same month and
+year.  Nor does he explain how the lots could be so manipulated by the
+legislature as to bring together the fairest and best.  The singular
+expression which is employed to describe the age of five-and-twenty may
+perhaps be taken from some poet.
+
+In the delineation of the philosopher, the illustrations of the nature of
+philosophy derived from love are more suited to the apprehension of
+Glaucon, the Athenian man of pleasure, than to modern tastes or feelings. 
+They are partly facetious, but also contain a germ of truth.  That science
+is a whole, remains a true principle of inductive as well as of
+metaphysical philosophy; and the love of universal knowledge is still the
+characteristic of the philosopher in modern as well as in ancient times.
+
+At the end of the fifth book Plato introduces the figment of contingent
+matter, which has exercised so great an influence both on the Ethics and
+Theology of the modern world, and which occurs here for the first time in
+the history of philosophy.  He did not remark that the degrees of knowledge
+in the subject have nothing corresponding to them in the object.  With him
+a word must answer to an idea; and he could not conceive of an opinion
+which was an opinion about nothing.  The influence of analogy led him to
+invent 'parallels and conjugates' and to overlook facts.  To us some of his
+difficulties are puzzling only from their simplicity:  we do not perceive
+that the answer to them 'is tumbling out at our feet.'  To the mind of
+early thinkers, the conception of not-being was dark and mysterious; they
+did not see that this terrible apparition which threatened destruction to
+all knowledge was only a logical determination.  The common term under
+which, through the accidental use of language, two entirely different ideas
+were included was another source of confusion.  Thus through the ambiguity
+of (Greek) Plato, attempting to introduce order into the first chaos of
+human thought, seems to have confused perception and opinion, and to have
+failed to distinguish the contingent from the relative.  In the Theaetetus
+the first of these difficulties begins to clear up; in the Sophist the
+second; and for this, as well as for other reasons, both these dialogues
+are probably to be regarded as later than the Republic.
+
+BOOK VI.  Having determined that the many have no knowledge of true being,
+and have no clear patterns in their minds of justice, beauty, truth, and
+that philosophers have such patterns, we have now to ask whether they or
+the many shall be rulers in our State.  But who can doubt that philosophers
+should be chosen, if they have the other qualities which are required in a
+ruler?  For they are lovers of the knowledge of the eternal and of all
+truth; they are haters of falsehood; their meaner desires are absorbed in
+the interests of knowledge; they are spectators of all time and all
+existence; and in the magnificence of their contemplation the life of man
+is as nothing to them, nor is death fearful.  Also they are of a social,
+gracious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance.  They
+learn and remember easily; they have harmonious, well-regulated minds;
+truth flows to them sweetly by nature.  Can the god of Jealousy himself
+find any fault with such an assemblage of good qualities?
+
+Here Adeimantus interposes:--'No man can answer you, Socrates; but every
+man feels that this is owing to his own deficiency in argument.  He is
+driven from one position to another, until he has nothing more to say, just
+as an unskilful player at draughts is reduced to his last move by a more
+skilled opponent.  And yet all the time he may be right.  He may know, in
+this very instance, that those who make philosophy the business of their
+lives, generally turn out rogues if they are bad men, and fools if they are
+good.  What do you say?'  I should say that he is quite right.  'Then how
+is such an admission reconcileable with the doctrine that philosophers
+should be kings?'
+
+I shall answer you in a parable which will also let you see how poor a hand
+I am at the invention of allegories.  The relation of good men to their
+governments is so peculiar, that in order to defend them I must take an
+illustration from the world of fiction.  Conceive the captain of a ship,
+taller by a head and shoulders than any of the crew, yet a little deaf, a
+little blind, and rather ignorant of the seaman's art.  The sailors want to
+steer, although they know nothing of the art; and they have a theory that
+it cannot be learned.  If the helm is refused them, they drug the captain's
+posset, bind him hand and foot, and take possession of the ship.  He who
+joins in the mutiny is termed a good pilot and what not; they have no
+conception that the true pilot must observe the winds and the stars, and
+must be their master, whether they like it or not;--such an one would be
+called by them fool, prater, star-gazer.  This is my parable; which I will
+beg you to interpret for me to those gentlemen who ask why the philosopher
+has such an evil name, and to explain to them that not he, but those who
+will not use him, are to blame for his uselessness.  The philosopher should
+not beg of mankind to be put in authority over them.  The wise man should
+not seek the rich, as the proverb bids, but every man, whether rich or
+poor, must knock at the door of the physician when he has need of him.  Now
+the pilot is the philosopher--he whom in the parable they call star-gazer,
+and the mutinous sailors are the mob of politicians by whom he is rendered
+useless.  Not that these are the worst enemies of philosophy, who is far
+more dishonoured by her own professing sons when they are corrupted by the
+world.  Need I recall the original image of the philosopher?  Did we not
+say of him just now, that he loved truth and hated falsehood, and that he
+could not rest in the multiplicity of phenomena, but was led by a sympathy
+in his own nature to the contemplation of the absolute?  All the virtues as
+well as truth, who is the leader of them, took up their abode in his soul. 
+But as you were observing, if we turn aside to view the reality, we see
+that the persons who were thus described, with the exception of a small and
+useless class, are utter rogues.
+
+The point which has to be considered, is the origin of this corruption in
+nature.  Every one will admit that the philosopher, in our description of
+him, is a rare being.  But what numberless causes tend to destroy these
+rare beings!  There is no good thing which may not be a cause of evil--
+health, wealth, strength, rank, and the virtues themselves, when placed
+under unfavourable circumstances.  For as in the animal or vegetable world
+the strongest seeds most need the accompaniment of good air and soil, so
+the best of human characters turn out the worst when they fall upon an
+unsuitable soil; whereas weak natures hardly ever do any considerable good
+or harm; they are not the stuff out of which either great criminals or
+great heroes are made.  The philosopher follows the same analogy:  he is
+either the best or the worst of all men.  Some persons say that the
+Sophists are the corrupters of youth; but is not public opinion the real
+Sophist who is everywhere present--in those very persons, in the assembly,
+in the courts, in the camp, in the applauses and hisses of the theatre re-
+echoed by the surrounding hills?  Will not a young man's heart leap amid
+these discordant sounds? and will any education save him from being carried
+away by the torrent?  Nor is this all.  For if he will not yield to
+opinion, there follows the gentle compulsion of exile or death.  What
+principle of rival Sophists or anybody else can overcome in such an unequal
+contest?  Characters there may be more than human, who are exceptions--God
+may save a man, but not his own strength.  Further, I would have you
+consider that the hireling Sophist only gives back to the world their own
+opinions; he is the keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter or
+anger him, and observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts.  Good is
+what pleases him, evil what he dislikes; truth and beauty are determined
+only by the taste of the brute.  Such is the Sophist's wisdom, and such is
+the condition of those who make public opinion the test of truth, whether
+in art or in morals.  The curse is laid upon them of being and doing what
+it approves, and when they attempt first principles the failure is
+ludicrous.  Think of all this and ask yourself whether the world is more
+likely to be a believer in the unity of the idea, or in the multiplicity of
+phenomena.  And the world if not a believer in the idea cannot be a
+philosopher, and must therefore be a persecutor of philosophers.  There is
+another evil:--the world does not like to lose the gifted nature, and so
+they flatter the young (Alcibiades) into a magnificent opinion of his own
+capacity; the tall, proper youth begins to expand, and is dreaming of
+kingdoms and empires.  If at this instant a friend whispers to him, 'Now
+the gods lighten thee; thou art a great fool' and must be educated--do you
+think that he will listen?  Or suppose a better sort of man who is
+attracted towards philosophy, will they not make Herculean efforts to spoil
+and corrupt him?  Are we not right in saying that the love of knowledge, no
+less than riches, may divert him?  Men of this class (Critias) often become
+politicians--they are the authors of great mischief in states, and
+sometimes also of great good.  And thus philosophy is deserted by her
+natural protectors, and others enter in and dishonour her.  Vulgar little
+minds see the land open and rush from the prisons of the arts into her
+temple.  A clever mechanic having a soul coarse as his body, thinks that he
+will gain caste by becoming her suitor.  For philosophy, even in her fallen
+estate, has a dignity of her own--and he, like a bald little blacksmith's
+apprentice as he is, having made some money and got out of durance, washes
+and dresses himself as a bridegroom and marries his master's daughter. 
+What will be the issue of such marriages?  Will they not be vile and
+bastard, devoid of truth and nature?  'They will.'  Small, then, is the
+remnant of genuine philosophers; there may be a few who are citizens of
+small states, in which politics are not worth thinking of, or who have been
+detained by Theages' bridle of ill health; for my own case of the oracular
+sign is almost unique, and too rare to be worth mentioning.  And these few
+when they have tasted the pleasures of philosophy, and have taken a look at
+that den of thieves and place of wild beasts, which is human life, will
+stand aside from the storm under the shelter of a wall, and try to preserve
+their own innocence and to depart in peace.  'A great work, too, will have
+been accomplished by them.'  Great, yes, but not the greatest; for man is a
+social being, and can only attain his highest development in the society
+which is best suited to him.
+
+Enough, then, of the causes why philosophy has such an evil name.  Another
+question is, Which of existing states is suited to her?  Not one of them;
+at present she is like some exotic seed which degenerates in a strange
+soil; only in her proper state will she be shown to be of heavenly growth.
+'And is her proper state ours or some other?'  Ours in all points but one,
+which was left undetermined.  You may remember our saying that some living
+mind or witness of the legislator was needed in states.  But we were afraid
+to enter upon a subject of such difficulty, and now the question recurs and
+has not grown easier:--How may philosophy be safely studied?  Let us bring
+her into the light of day, and make an end of the inquiry.
+
+In the first place, I say boldly that nothing can be worse than the present
+mode of study.  Persons usually pick up a little philosophy in early youth,
+and in the intervals of business, but they never master the real
+difficulty, which is dialectic.  Later, perhaps, they occasionally go to a
+lecture on philosophy.  Years advance, and the sun of philosophy, unlike
+that of Heracleitus, sets never to rise again.  This order of education
+should be reversed; it should begin with gymnastics in youth, and as the
+man strengthens, he should increase the gymnastics of his soul.  Then, when
+active life is over, let him finally return to philosophy.  'You are in
+earnest, Socrates, but the world will be equally earnest in withstanding
+you--no more than Thrasymachus.'  Do not make a quarrel between
+Thrasymachus and me, who were never enemies and are now good friends
+enough.  And I shall do my best to convince him and all mankind of the
+truth of my words, or at any rate to prepare for the future when, in
+another life, we may again take part in similar discussions.  'That will be
+a long time hence.'  Not long in comparison with eternity.  The many will
+probably remain incredulous, for they have never seen the natural unity of
+ideas, but only artificial juxtapositions; not free and generous thoughts,
+but tricks of controversy and quips of law;--a perfect man ruling in a
+perfect state, even a single one they have not known.  And we foresaw that
+there was no chance of perfection either in states or individuals until a
+necessity was laid upon philosophers--not the rogues, but those whom we
+called the useless class--of holding office; or until the sons of kings
+were inspired with a true love of philosophy.  Whether in the infinity of
+past time there has been, or is in some distant land, or ever will be
+hereafter, an ideal such as we have described, we stoutly maintain that
+there has been, is, and will be such a state whenever the Muse of
+philosophy rules.  Will you say that the world is of another mind?  O, my
+friend, do not revile the world!  They will soon change their opinion if
+they are gently entreated, and are taught the true nature of the
+philosopher.  Who can hate a man who loves him?  Or be jealous of one who
+has no jealousy?  Consider, again, that the many hate not the true but the
+false philosophers--the pretenders who force their way in without
+invitation, and are always speaking of persons and not of principles, which
+is unlike the spirit of philosophy.  For the true philosopher despises
+earthly strife; his eye is fixed on the eternal order in accordance with
+which he moulds himself into the Divine image (and not himself only, but
+other men), and is the creator of the virtues private as well as public. 
+When mankind see that the happiness of states is only to be found in that
+image, will they be angry with us for attempting to delineate it? 
+'Certainly not.  But what will be the process of delineation?'  The artist
+will do nothing until he has made a tabula rasa; on this he will inscribe
+the constitution of a state, glancing often at the divine truth of nature,
+and from that deriving the godlike among men, mingling the two elements,
+rubbing out and painting in, until there is a perfect harmony or fusion of
+the divine and human.  But perhaps the world will doubt the existence of
+such an artist.  What will they doubt?  That the philosopher is a lover of
+truth, having a nature akin to the best?--and if they admit this will they
+still quarrel with us for making philosophers our kings?  'They will be
+less disposed to quarrel.'  Let us assume then that they are pacified. 
+Still, a person may hesitate about the probability of the son of a king
+being a philosopher.  And we do not deny that they are very liable to be
+corrupted; but yet surely in the course of ages there might be one
+exception--and one is enough.  If one son of a king were a philosopher, and
+had obedient citizens, he might bring the ideal polity into being.  Hence
+we conclude that our laws are not only the best, but that they are also
+possible, though not free from difficulty.
+
+I gained nothing by evading the troublesome questions which arose
+concerning women and children.  I will be wiser now and acknowledge that we
+must go to the bottom of another question:  What is to be the education of
+our guardians?  It was agreed that they were to be lovers of their country,
+and were to be tested in the refiner's fire of pleasures and pains, and
+those who came forth pure and remained fixed in their principles were to
+have honours and rewards in life and after death.  But at this point, the
+argument put on her veil and turned into another path.  I hesitated to make
+the assertion which I now hazard,--that our guardians must be philosophers.
+You remember all the contradictory elements, which met in the philosopher--
+how difficult to find them all in a single person!  Intelligence and spirit
+are not often combined with steadiness; the stolid, fearless, nature is
+averse to intellectual toil.  And yet these opposite elements are all
+necessary, and therefore, as we were saying before, the aspirant must be
+tested in pleasures and dangers; and also, as we must now further add, in
+the highest branches of knowledge.  You will remember, that when we spoke
+of the virtues mention was made of a longer road, which you were satisfied
+to leave unexplored.  'Enough seemed to have been said.'  Enough, my
+friend; but what is enough while anything remains wanting?  Of all men the
+guardian must not faint in the search after truth; he must be prepared to
+take the longer road, or he will never reach that higher region which is
+above the four virtues; and of the virtues too he must not only get an
+outline, but a clear and distinct vision.  (Strange that we should be so
+precise about trifles, so careless about the highest truths!)  'And what
+are the highest?'  You to pretend unconsciousness, when you have so often
+heard me speak of the idea of good, about which we know so little, and
+without which though a man gain the world he has no profit of it!  Some
+people imagine that the good is wisdom; but this involves a circle,--the
+good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has to do with the good.  According to
+others the good is pleasure; but then comes the absurdity that good is bad,
+for there are bad pleasures as well as good.  Again, the good must have
+reality; a man may desire the appearance of virtue, but he will not desire
+the appearance of good.  Ought our guardians then to be ignorant of this
+supreme principle, of which every man has a presentiment, and without which
+no man has any real knowledge of anything?  'But, Socrates, what is this
+supreme principle, knowledge or pleasure, or what?  You may think me
+troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating the
+doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.'  Can I say what I do
+not know?  'You may offer an opinion.'  And will the blindness and
+crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light and
+certainty of science?  'I will only ask you to give such an explanation of
+the good as you have given already of temperance and justice.'  I wish that
+I could, but in my present mood I cannot reach to the height of the
+knowledge of the good.  To the parent or principal I cannot introduce you,
+but to the child begotten in his image, which I may compare with the
+interest on the principal, I will.  (Audit the account, and do not let me
+give you a false statement of the debt.)  You remember our old distinction
+of the many beautiful and the one beautiful, the particular and the
+universal, the objects of sight and the objects of thought?  Did you ever
+consider that the objects of sight imply a faculty of sight which is the
+most complex and costly of our senses, requiring not only objects of sense,
+but also a medium, which is light; without which the sight will not
+distinguish between colours and all will be a blank?  For light is the
+noble bond between the perceiving faculty and the thing perceived, and the
+god who gives us light is the sun, who is the eye of the day, but is not to
+be confounded with the eye of man.  This eye of the day or sun is what I
+call the child of the good, standing in the same relation to the visible
+world as the good to the intellectual.  When the sun shines the eye sees,
+and in the intellectual world where truth is, there is sight and light. 
+Now that which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the
+cause of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and
+standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light. O
+inconceivable height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above truth! 
+('You cannot surely mean pleasure,' he said.  Peace, I replied.)  And this
+idea of good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and the author not
+of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than either in dignity and
+power.  'That is a reach of thought more than human; but, pray, 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 intelligible;
+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 knowledge in either
+sphere.  The lower portion of the lower or visible sphere will consist of
+shadows and reflections, and its upper and smaller portion will contain
+real objects in the world of nature or of art.  The sphere of the
+intelligible will also have two divisions,--one of mathematics, 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, the perception of shadows--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 convince
+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 anticipation 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 philosopher 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
+acknowledged 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
+'separate the limbs of science without breaking them' (Phaedr.).  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.).  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), 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 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 conclusions 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 arithmetical 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 instance,
+may be regarded as implying a reflection upon the Socratic mode of
+reasoning.  And here, as elsewhere, 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 experience proves philosophers to be
+either useless or rogues.  Contrary to all expectation Socrates has no
+hesitation 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 elsewhere, 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 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; and that the finer nature is more likely to
+suffer from alien conditions.  We too observe that there are some kinds of
+excellence which spring from a peculiar delicacy of constitution; as is
+evidently true of the poetical and imaginative temperament, which often
+seems to depend on impressions, and hence can only breathe or live in a
+certain atmosphere.  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, he has an insight which is terrible
+into the follies and weaknesses of his fellow-men.  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.  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 themselves 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 overpowered by
+public opinion, and what efforts the rest of mankind will make to get
+possession of them.  The world, the church, their own profession, any
+political or party organization, are always carrying them off their legs
+and teaching them to apply high and holy names to their 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
+intervals.  The question is asked,--Why are the citizens of states so
+hostile 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 confusion, 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
+considered:  1st, the nature of the longer and more circuitous way, which
+is contrasted with the shorter and more imperfect method of Book IV; 2nd,
+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
+
+1.  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 meaning.  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, he argues from
+experience and the common use of language.  But at the end of the sixth
+book he conceives another and more perfect method, in which all ideas are
+only steps or grades or moments of thought, forming a connected 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 process.  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 principles and
+becomes imperceptibly one with them.  But Plato erroneously 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 philosophy.  Anticipations or
+divinations, or prophetic glimpses of truths whether concerning man or
+nature, seem to stand in the same relation to ancient philosophy which
+hypotheses bear to modern inductive science.  These 'guesses at truth' were
+not made at random; they arose from a superficial impression of
+uniformities and first principles in nature which the genius of the Greek,
+contemplating the expanse of heaven and earth, seemed to recognize in the
+distance.  Nor can we deny that in ancient times knowledge must have stood
+still, and the human mind been deprived of the very instruments 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).  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.
+
+3.  There is no difficulty in seeing that Plato's divisions of knowledge
+are based, first, on the fundamental antithesis of sensible 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 require 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 Pythagorean
+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 his
+philosophy.  He had observed the use of mathematics in education; 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.).  For metaphysical and moral
+philosophy has no connexion with mathematics; 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 reference 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 (Timaeus) to make four terms instead of
+three, although the objects perceived 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 (cp. for the use of the word faith or belief,
+(Greek), Timaeus), contrasting equally with the vagueness of the perception
+of shadows (Greek) and the higher certainty of understanding (Greek) and
+reason (Greek).
+
+The difference between understanding and mind or reason (Greek) 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 subordinate
+ideas.  Those ideas are called both images and hypotheses--images because
+they are clothed in sense, hypotheses because they are assumptions only,
+until they are brought into connexion with the idea of good.
+
+The general meaning of the passage, 'Noble, then, is the bond which links
+together sight...And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible...' so far as
+the thought contained in it admits of being translated into the terms of
+modern philosophy, may be described or explained as follows:--There is a
+truth, one and self-existent, to which by the help of a ladder let down
+from above, the human intelligence may ascend.  This unity is like the sun
+in the heavens, the light by which all things are seen, the being by which
+they are created and sustained.  It is the IDEA of good.  And the steps of
+the ladder leading up to this highest or universal existence are the
+mathematical sciences, which also contain in themselves an element of the
+universal.  These, too, we see in a new manner when we connect them with
+the idea of good.  They then cease to be hypotheses or pictures, and become
+essential parts of a higher truth which is at once their first principle
+and their final cause.
+
+We cannot give any more precise meaning to this remarkable passage, but we
+may trace in it several rudiments or vestiges of thought which are common
+to us and to Plato:  such as (1) the unity and correlation of the sciences,
+or rather of science, for in Plato's time they were not yet parted off or
+distinguished; (2) the existence of a Divine Power, or life or idea or
+cause or reason, not yet conceived or no longer conceived as in the Timaeus
+and elsewhere under the form of a person; (3) the recognition of the
+hypothetical and conditional character of the mathematical sciences, and in
+a measure of every science when isolated from the rest; (4) the conviction
+of a truth which is invisible, and of a law, though hardly a law of nature,
+which permeates the intellectual rather than the visible world.
+
+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 internal oracle, or demonic sign,
+of Socrates, which here, as always in Plato, is only prohibitory; the
+remark that the salvation of any remnant of good in the present evil state
+of the world is due to God only; the reference to a future state of
+existence, which is unknown to Glaucon in the tenth book, and in which the
+discussions of Socrates and his disciples would be resumed; the surprise in
+the answers; the fanciful irony of Socrates, where he pretends that he can
+only describe the strange position of the philosopher in a figure of
+speech; the original observation 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 figure
+of 'the great beast' followed by the expression of good-will towards the
+common people who would not have rejected the philosopher if they had known
+him; 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; the
+comparison of philosophy to a deserted maiden who marries beneath her--are
+some of the most interesting characteristics of the sixth book.
+
+Yet a few more words may be added, on the old theme, which was so oft
+discussed in the Socratic circle, of which we, like Glaucon and Adeimantus,
+would fain, if possible, have a clearer notion.  Like them, we are
+dissatisfied when we are told that the idea of good can only be revealed to
+a student of the mathematical sciences, and we are inclined to think that
+neither we nor they could have been led along that path to any satisfactory
+goal.  For we have learned that differences of quantity cannot pass into
+differences of quality, and that the mathematical sciences can never rise
+above themselves into the sphere of our higher thoughts, although they may
+sometimes furnish symbols and expressions of them, and may train the mind
+in habits of abstraction and self-concentration.  The illusion which was
+natural to an ancient philosopher has ceased to be an illusion to us.  But
+if the process by which we are supposed to arrive at the idea of good be
+really imaginary, may not the idea itself be also a mere abstraction?  We
+remark, first, that in all ages, and especially in primitive philosophy,
+words such as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted an extraordinary
+influence over the minds of men.  The meagreness or negativeness of their
+content has been in an inverse ratio to their power.  They have become the
+forms under which all things were comprehended.  There was a need or
+instinct in the human soul which they satisfied; they were not ideas, but
+gods, and to this new mythology the men of a later generation began to
+attach the powers and associations of the elder deities.
+
+The idea of good is one of those sacred words or forms of thought, which
+were beginning to take the place of the old mythology.  It meant unity, in
+which all time and all existence were gathered up.  It was the truth of all
+things, and also the light in which they shone forth, and became evident to
+intelligences human and divine.  It was the cause of all things, the power
+by which they were brought into being.  It was the universal reason
+divested of a human personality.  It was the life as well as the light of
+the world, all knowledge and all power were comprehended in it.  The way to
+it was through the mathematical sciences, and these too were dependent on
+it.  To ask whether God was the maker of it, or made by it, would be like
+asking whether God could be conceived apart from goodness, or goodness
+apart from God.  The God of the Timaeus is not really at variance with the
+idea of good; they are aspects of the same, differing only as the personal
+from the impersonal, or the masculine from the neuter, the one being the
+expression or language of mythology, the other of philosophy.
+
+This, or something like this, is the meaning of the idea of good as
+conceived by Plato.  Ideas of number, order, harmony, development may also
+be said to enter into it.  The paraphrase which has just been given of it
+goes beyond the actual words of Plato.  We have perhaps arrived at the
+stage of philosophy which enables us to understand what he is aiming at,
+better than he did himself.  We are beginning to realize what he saw darkly
+and at a distance.  But if he could have been told that this, or some
+conception of the same kind, but higher than this, was the truth at which
+he was aiming, and the need which he sought to supply, he would gladly have
+recognized that more was contained in his own thoughts than he himself
+knew.  As his words are few and his manner reticent and tentative, so must
+the style of his interpreter be.  We should not approach his meaning more
+nearly by attempting to define it further.  In translating him into the
+language of modern thought, we might insensibly lose the spirit of ancient
+philosophy.  It is remarkable that although Plato speaks of the idea of
+good as the first principle of truth and being, it is nowhere mentioned in
+his writings except in this passage.  Nor did it retain any hold upon the
+minds of his disciples in a later generation; it was probably
+unintelligible to them.  Nor does the mention of it in Aristotle appear to
+have any reference to this or any other passage in his extant writings.
+
+BOOK VII.  And now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or
+unenlightenment of our nature:--Imagine human beings living in an
+underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from
+childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the
+den.  At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners
+a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over
+which marionette players show their puppets.  Behind the wall appear 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 are
+talking and others silent.  'A strange parable,' he said, 'and strange
+captives.'  They are ourselves, I replied; and they see only the shadows of
+the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den; 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.  Suppose 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!  But 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, and if they find
+anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put
+him to death, if they can catch him.  Now the cave or den is the world of
+sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to knowledge, 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 understanding 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.  But
+blindness is of two 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 between 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 puzzled soul looking 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 cut away from him those leaden weights of pleasure
+and desire which bind his soul to earth, his intelligence 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?  We must
+choose out therefore the natures who are most likely to ascend to the light
+and knowledge of the good; but we must not allow them to remain in the
+region of light; they must be forced down again among the captives in the
+den to partake of their labours and honours.  'Will they not think this a
+hardship?'  You should remember 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 have
+been trained by us to be the rulers and kings of our hive, and therefore we
+must insist on your descending into 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 far better than those who quarrel about the shadows,
+whose knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours is a 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 philosophy, 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?  The change is effected by philosophy; it 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.  Nothing remains to us but that universal or
+primary science of which all the arts and sciences are partakers, I mean
+number or calculation.  'Very true.'  Including the art of war?  'Yes,
+certainly.'  Then there is something ludicrous about Palamedes in the
+tragedy, coming in and saying that he had invented number, and had counted
+the ranks and set them in order.  For if Agamemnon could not count his feet
+(and without 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
+regarded 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 without number cannot further distinguish them.  Or
+again, suppose two objects to be relatively great 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; we are
+thus led on to the distinction between the visible and intelligible.  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.  All number has also an elevating
+effect; 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.  And to our higher
+purpose no science can be better adapted; but it must be pursued in the
+spirit of a philosopher, not of a shopkeeper.  It is concerned, not with
+visible objects, but with abstract truth; for numbers are pure
+abstractions--the true arithmetician indignantly denies that his unit is
+capable of division.  When you divide, he insists that you are only
+multiplying; his 'one' is not material or resolvable into fractions, but an
+unvarying and absolute equality; and this proves 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 general ability, or equally improving to a stupid person.
+
+Let our second branch of education be geometry.  'I can easily see,'
+replied Glaucon, 'that the skill of the general will be doubled by his
+knowledge of geometry.'  That is a small matter; the use of geometry, to
+which I refer, is the assistance given by it in the contemplation 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 pursuing these studies, as any
+one who is the least of a mathematician is 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 necessary at once
+for husbandry, navigation, military tactics.'  I like your way of giving
+useful reasons for everything in order to make friends of the world.  And
+there is a difficulty in proving to mankind that education is not only
+useful information but a purification of the eye of the soul, which is
+better than the bodily eye, for by this alone is truth seen.  Now, will you
+appeal to mankind in general or to the philosopher? 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 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 conceited and
+impatient.  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; 'but do I understand you now to begin
+with plane geometry, and to place next geometry of solids, and thirdly,
+astronomy, or the motion of solids?'  Yes, I said; my hastiness has only
+hindered us.
+
+'Very good, and now 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 lie on his back on land or on 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
+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 intellect.
+
+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 empirics
+who are always twisting and torturing the strings of the lyre, and
+quarrelling about the tempers of the strings; I am referring rather to the
+Pythagorean harmonists, who are almost equally in error.  For 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, I replied, which is only
+useful if pursued with a view to the good.
+
+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 business.' 
+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.  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 dialectical 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 contemplate 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.
+
+'So far, I agree with 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 human needs and
+opinions; and the mathematical sciences are but a dream or hypothesis of
+true being, and never analyse their own principles.  Dialectic alone rises
+to the principle which is above hypotheses, 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, perception of shadows--which make a proportion--
+being:becoming::intellect:opinion--and science:belief::understanding:
+perception 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 good.  To him who is not a dialectician life is
+but a sleepy dream; and many a man is in his grave before his is well waked
+up.  And would you have the future rulers of your ideal State 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, good-looking, and of noble manners, but now they
+must also have natural ability which education will improve; that is to
+say, they must be quick at learning, capable of mental toil, retentive,
+solid, diligent natures, who combine intellectual with moral virtues; not
+lame and one-sided, diligent in bodily exercise and indolent in mind, or
+conversely; not a maimed soul, which hates falsehood and yet
+unintentionally is always wallowing 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; and they will be the saviours of our State;
+disciples of another sort would only make philosophy more ridiculous than
+she is at present.  Forgive my enthusiasm; I am becoming excited; but when
+I see her trampled underfoot, 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
+selection 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; 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
+should be at first 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, a
+selection must be made of the more promising disciples, with whom a new
+epoch of education will begin.  The sciences which they have hitherto
+learned in fragments will now be brought into relation with each other and
+with true being; for the power of combining them is the test of speculative
+and dialectical ability.  And afterwards 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 dialectic 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 informed 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
+exercised a 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 require
+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; 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 does not run on in this way; he will argue and
+not merely contradict, and adds new honour to philosophy by the sobriety of
+his conduct.  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 command 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 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 receive such worship as the Pythian oracle approves.
+
+'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 when there shall arise
+philosopher-kings, one or more, who will despise earthly vanities, and will
+be the servants of justice only.  'And how will they begin their work?' 
+Their first act will be to send away into the country all those who are
+more than ten years of age, and to proceed with 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 allegory, in this, as in
+other passages, following the order which he prescribes 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 process begins with the contemplation of the real stars, and
+not mere reflections 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 divisions 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 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 then
+seeks to combine the universals which he has disengaged from sense, not
+perceiving that the correlation of them has no other basis but the common
+use of language.  He never understands that abstractions, as Hegel says,
+are 'mere abstractions'--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 apart from facts has enlarged the mind, and played a
+great part in the education of the human race.  Plato appreciated the value
+of this faculty, and saw that it might be quickened by the study of number
+and relation.  All things in which there is opposition or proportion are
+suggestive of reflection.  The mere impression of sense evokes no power of
+thought or of mind, but when sensible objects ask to be compared and
+distinguished, then philosophy begins.  The science of arithmetic first
+suggests such distinctions.  The 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, such as we employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such as
+the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics,
+e.g. his distinction between arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the
+Ethics (Book V), or between numerical and proportional equality in the
+Politics.
+
+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 application 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 recognize 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 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 fallen into
+the error of supposing that he can construct the heavens a priori by
+mathematical problems, and determine the principles of harmony irrespective
+of the adaptation of sounds 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 or vibrations on which they must
+ultimately rest, was overlooked by him.  The modern predecessors of Newton
+fell into errors 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 consider 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 acknowledging 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 ancient Pythagorean notions.  There is no
+reason to suppose that he is speaking of the ideal numbers; 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
+phenomena, gave them a kind of sacredness in the eyes of an ancient
+philosopher.  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.'  It is worthy of remark that the old Pythagorean
+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 philosophy in the Platonic
+idea of good, which is the source and measure of all things, and yet only
+an abstraction (Philebus).
+
+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
+indistinguishable 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
+impressions 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 Pythagoreans,
+whom he proposes to consult as in the previous discussion on music he was
+to consult Damon--they are acknowledged to be masters in the art, but are
+altogether 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 intervals 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 den
+or cave represents the narrow sphere of politics or law (compare the
+description of the philosopher and lawyer in the Theaetetus), 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 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 voluntarily 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.
+(Symposium.)
+
+Many illustrations of this part of the Republic may be found in modern
+Politics and in daily life.  For among ourselves, too, there have been two
+sorts of Politicians or Statesmen, whose eyesight has become disordered in
+two different ways.  First, there have been great men who, in the language
+of Burke, 'have been too much given to general maxims,' who, like J.S. Mill
+or Burke himself, have been theorists or philosophers before they were
+politicians, or who, having been students of history, have allowed some
+great historical parallel, such as the English Revolution of 1688, or
+possibly Athenian democracy or Roman Imperialism, to be the medium through
+which they viewed contemporary events.  Or perhaps the long projecting
+shadow of some existing institution may have darkened their vision.  The
+Church of the future, the Commonwealth of the future, the Society of the
+future, have so absorbed their minds, that they are unable to see in their
+true proportions the Politics of to-day.  They have been intoxicated with
+great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest happiness of the
+greatest number, or the brotherhood of humanity, and they no longer care to
+consider how these ideas must be limited in practice or harmonized with the
+conditions of human life.  They are full of light, but the light to them
+has become only a sort of luminous mist or blindness.  Almost every one has
+known some enthusiastic half-educated person, who sees everything at false
+distances, and in erroneous proportions.
+
+With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted another--of those who see
+not far into the distance, but what is near only; who have been engaged all
+their lives in a trade or a profession; who are limited to a set or sect of
+their own.  Men of this kind have no universal except their own interests
+or the interests of their class, no principle but the opinion of persons
+like themselves, no knowledge of affairs beyond what they pick up in the
+streets or at their club.  Suppose them to be sent into a larger world, to
+undertake some higher calling, from being tradesmen to turn generals or
+politicians, from being schoolmasters to become philosophers:--or imagine
+them on a sudden to receive an inward light which reveals to them for the
+first time in their lives a higher idea of God and the existence of a
+spiritual world, by this sudden conversion or change is not their daily
+life likely to be upset; and on the other hand will not many of their old
+prejudices and narrownesses still adhere to them long after they have begun
+to take a more comprehensive view of human things?  From familiar examples
+like these we may learn what Plato meant by the eyesight which is liable to
+two kinds of disorders.
+
+Nor have we any difficulty in drawing a parallel between the young Athenian
+in the fifth century before Christ who became unsettled by new ideas, and
+the student of a modern University who has been the subject of a similar
+'aufklarung.'  We too observe that when young men begin to criticise
+customary beliefs, or to analyse the constitution of human nature, they are
+apt to lose hold of solid principle (Greek).  They are like trees which
+have been frequently transplanted.  The earth about them is loose, and they
+have no roots reaching far into the soil.  They 'light upon every flower,'
+following their own wayward wills, or because the wind blows them.  They
+catch opinions, as diseases are caught--when they are in the air.  Borne
+hither and thither, 'they speedily fall into beliefs' the opposite of those
+in which they were brought up.  They hardly retain the distinction of right
+and wrong; they seem to think one thing as good as another.  They suppose
+themselves to be searching after truth when they are playing the game of
+'follow my leader.'  They fall in love 'at first sight' with paradoxes
+respecting morality, some fancy about art, some novelty or eccentricity in
+religion, and like lovers they are so absorbed for a time in their new
+notion that they can think of nothing else.  The resolution of some
+philosophical or theological question seems to them more interesting and
+important than any substantial knowledge of literature or science or even
+than a good life.  Like the youth in the Philebus, they are ready to
+discourse to any one about a new philosophy.  They are generally the
+disciples of some eminent professor or sophist, whom they rather imitate
+than understand.  They may be counted happy if in later years they retain
+some of the simple truths which they acquired in early education, and which
+they may, perhaps, find to be worth all the rest.  Such is the picture
+which Plato draws and which we only reproduce, partly in his own words, of
+the dangers which beset youth in times of transition, when old opinions are
+fading away and the new are not yet firmly established.  Their condition is
+ingeniously compared by him 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 distinct from the higher philosophical sense which recognizes and
+combines first principles.  The contempt which he expresses for
+distinctions of words, the danger of involuntary falsehood, the apology
+which Socrates makes for his earnestness of speech, are highly
+characteristic 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, in which he expects
+the lie about the earthborn men to be believed in the second generation.)
+
+BOOK 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 to be common, and
+kings are to be philosophers and warriors, and the soldiers of the State
+are to live together, having all things in common; and 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.  'That is
+easily done,' he replied:  'You were speaking of the State which you had
+constructed, and of the individual who answered to this, both of whom you
+affirmed to be good; and you said that of inferior States there were four
+forms and four individuals corresponding to them, which although deficient
+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 of
+what constitutions you were speaking?'  Besides the perfect State there are
+only four of any note in Hellas:--first, the famous Lacedaemonian 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 government.  Now, States are not made of 'oak and
+rock,' but of 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 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.  But whence came
+division?  'Sing, heavenly Muses,' as Homer says;--let them condescend to
+answer us, as if we were children, to whom they put 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 from this law of
+destiny, 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 rulers because 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 perfect squares from all, and
+adding a hundred cubes of three.  This entire number is geometrical and
+contains the rule or law of generation.  When this law is neglected
+marriages will be unpropitious; the inferior offspring who are then born
+will in time become the rulers; the State will decline, and education fall
+into decay; gymnastic will be preferred to music, and the gold and silver
+and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass--thus division will arise. 
+Such is the Muses' answer to our question.  'And a true answer, of course:
+--but what more have they 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 will take to trade and moneymaking, and the others, having the true
+riches and not caring for money, will resist them:  the contest will end in
+a compromise; they will agree to have private property, and will enslave
+their fellow-citizens who were once their friends and nurturers.  But they
+will retain their warlike character, and will be chiefly occupied in
+fighting and exercising rule.  Thus arises timocracy, which is intermediate
+between aristocracy and oligarchy.
+
+The new form of government resembles the ideal in obedience to rulers and
+contempt for trade, and having common 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 philosopher; 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 this 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.'  In that respect,
+perhaps, but not in others.  He is self-asserting and ill-educated, yet
+fond of literature, although not himself a speaker,--fierce with slaves,
+but obedient to rulers, a lover of power and honour, which he hopes to gain
+by deeds of arms,--fond, too, of gymnastics and of hunting.  As he advances
+in years he grows avaricious, for he has lost philosophy, which is the only
+saviour and guardian of men.  His origin is as follows:--His father is a
+good man dwelling in an ill-ordered State, who has retired from politics in
+order that he may lead a quiet life.  His mother is angry at her loss of
+precedence among other women; she is disgusted at her husband's
+selfishness, and she expatiates to her son on the unmanliness and indolence
+of his father.  The old family servant takes up the tale, and says to the
+youth:--'When you grow up you must be more of a man than your father.'  All
+the world are agreed that he who minds his own business is an idiot, while
+a busybody is highly honoured and esteemed.  The young man compares this
+spirit with his father's words and ways, and as he is naturally well
+disposed, although he has suffered from evil influences, he rests at a
+middle point and becomes ambitious and a lover of honour.
+
+And now let us set another city over against another man.  The next form of
+government is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the rich only; nor is it
+difficult to see how such a State arises.  The decline begins with the
+possession of gold and silver; illegal modes of expenditure are invented;
+one draws another on, and the multitude are infected; riches outweigh
+virtue; 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, who do not shrink from violence in order to effect their purposes.
+
+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 destitute.  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 of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by
+nature with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of
+them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words,
+there are paupers and there are rogues.  These are never far apart; and in
+oligarchical cities, where nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler,
+you will find abundance of both.  And this evil state of society originates
+in bad education and bad government.
+
+Like State, like man,--the change in the latter begins with the
+representative 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 thus
+receives, makes him cautious; he leaves politics, represses his pride, and
+saves pence.  Avarice is enthroned as his bosom's lord, and assumes the
+style of the Great King; the rational and spirited elements sit humbly on
+the ground at either side, 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.  The man is mean, saving, toiling,
+the slave of one passion which is the master of the rest:  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.  If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the power
+to defraud, he will soon prove that he is not without the will, and that
+his passions are only restrained by fear and not by reason.  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 keeps his money and loses
+the victory.
+
+Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the
+oligarchical man.  Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an
+oligarchy; and they encourage expensive habits in order that they may gain
+by the ruin of extravagant youth.  Thus men of family often lose their
+property or rights of citizenship; but they remain in the city, full of
+hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for revolution. 
+The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them; he passes by, and
+leaves his sting--that is, his money--in some other 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 the evil is either to limit a man in his use of his property,
+or to insist that he shall lend at his own risk.  But the ruling class do
+not want remedies; they care only for money, and are 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 sturdy pauper finds that in the hour of danger he
+is not despised; he sees the rich man 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, or with none at all, the city
+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 embroidery 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 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.
+Observe, too, how grandly Democracy sets her foot upon all our fine
+theories of education,--how little she cares for the training of her
+statesmen!  The only qualification which she demands 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 I ought to explain 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 necessary 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, is 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 miserly bringing up, gets a taste of the drone's honey; he
+meets with wild companions, who introduce him to every new pleasure.  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
+oligarchical principle; and the two factions 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 gets
+possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul, which they find void
+and unguarded by true words and works.  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 individual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of
+the castle and permit no one to enter,--there is a battle, and they gain
+the victory; and straightway making alliance with the desires, they banish
+modesty, which they call folly, and send temperance over the border.  When
+the house has been swept and garnished, they dress up the exiled vices,
+and, crowning them with garlands, bring them back under new names. 
+Insolence they call good breeding, anarchy freedom, waste magnificence,
+impudence courage.  Such is the process by which the youth passes from the
+necessary pleasures to the unnecessary.  After a while he divides his time
+impartially between them; and perhaps, when he gets older and the violence
+of passion has abated, he restores some of the exiles and lives in a sort
+of equilibrium, indulging first one pleasure and then another; and if
+reason comes and tells him that some pleasures are good and honourable, and
+others bad and vile, he shakes his head and says that he can make no
+distinction between them.  Thus he lives in the fancy of the hour;
+sometimes he takes to drink, and then he turns abstainer; he practises in
+the gymnasium or he does nothing at all; then again he would be a
+philosopher or a politician; 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 as democracy
+springs from oligarchy.  Both arise from excess; the one from excess of
+wealth, the other from excess of freedom.  'The great natural good of
+life,' 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 demands the strong wine of freedom, and
+unless her rulers give her a plentiful draught, punishes and insults them;
+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 extends even to the animals.  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 are on a level
+with their masters and mistresses, and there is no difference between men
+and women.  Nay, the very animals in a democratic 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.  'That has often been my
+experience.'  At last 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 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; for there is a law of
+contraries; 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, whom we compared
+to drones with and without stings.  These two classes are to the State what
+phlegm and bile are to the human body; and the State-physician, or
+legislator, must get rid of them, just as the bee-master keeps the drones
+out of the hive.  Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but they are
+more numerous and more dangerous than in the oligarchy; there they are
+inert and 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 individuals, who can be squeezed when the
+drones have need of their possessions; there is moreover a third class, who
+are the labourers and the artisans, and they make up the mass of the
+people.  When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but they cannot be
+brought together unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich
+are made to supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part
+themselves, giving a taste only to the mob.  Their victims attempt to
+resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and so 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,
+which tells how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other
+victims will turn into a wolf.  Even so the protector, who tastes human
+blood, and slays some and exiles others with or without law, who hints at
+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; and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by lawful 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.  Now let the rich man
+make to himself wings, for he will never run away again if he does not do
+so then.  And the Great Protector, having crushed all his rivals, stands
+proudly erect in the chariot of State, a full-blown tyrant:  Let us enquire
+into the nature of his happiness.
+
+In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon 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.  He is thus enabled to
+depress the poor by heavy taxes, and so keep them at work; and he can get
+rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy.  Then comes
+unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to oppose him. 
+The consequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the State; but,
+unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get rid of the high-
+spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no choice between death and
+a life of shame and dishonour.  And the more hated he is, the more he will
+require trusty guards; but how will he obtain them?  'They will come
+flocking like birds--for pay.'  Will he not rather obtain them on the spot? 
+He will take the slaves from their owners and make them his body-guard;
+these are his trusted friends, who admire and look up to him.  Are not the
+tragic poets wise who magnify and exalt the tyrant, and say that he is wise
+by association with the wise?  And are not their praises of tyranny alone a
+sufficient reason why we should exclude them from our State?  They may go
+to other cities, and gather the mob about them with fine words, and change
+commonwealths into tyrannies and democracies, receiving honours and rewards
+for their services; but the higher they and their 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 companions, 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 bids him and his riotous
+crew begone, then will the parent know what a monster he has been
+nurturing, 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.'  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 servitude...
+
+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 States, 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 ages, 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'; or again, as he afterwards says in the
+Laws, '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 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.  But there is obviously no connection
+between the manner in which the timocratic 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
+historical 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 succeeded
+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 government 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
+Athens, 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 fluctuation 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 constitution 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 governments of the
+Sicilian States, which alternated 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
+delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives of
+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 today 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 in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of
+democracy which he also sees reflected in social life.  To him democracy is
+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).  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 harmonizing the passions, and training them in virtue; in the timocracy
+and the timocratic man the constitution, whether of the State or of the
+individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly, upon the love of
+honour; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue, has
+superseded all the rest.  In the second stage of decline the virtues have
+altogether disappeared, and the love of gain has succeeded to them; in the 
+third stage, or democracy, the various passions are allowed to have free
+play, and the virtues and vices are impartially cultivated.  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 fanciful
+allusions; the use of metaphorical language is carried to a greater extent
+than anywhere else in Plato.  We may remark,
+
+(1), the description of the two nations in one, which become more and more
+divided in the Greek Republics, as in feudal times, and perhaps also in our
+own;
+
+(2), the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean formula as
+equality among unequals;
+
+(3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic of
+liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the tyrant;
+
+(4), 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:  in
+modern times we may be said to have almost, if not quite, solved the first
+of these difficulties, but hardly the second.
+
+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 parricide; the representation
+of the tyrant's life as an obscene dream; the rhetorical surprise of a more
+miserable than the most miserable of men in Book IX; the hint to the poets
+that if they are the friends of tyrants there is no place for them in a
+constitutional State, and that they are too clever not to see the propriety
+of their own expulsion; the continuous image of the drones who are of two
+kinds, swelling at last into the monster drone having wings (Book IX),--are
+among Plato's happiest touches.
+
+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.).  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.), and would have been ridiculous to any reader
+of the Republic who was acquainted with Greek mathematics.  As little
+reason is there for supposing that Plato intentionally used obscure
+expressions; the obscurity 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.  (Compare Cratylus; Protag.)
+
+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 (Greek) describes a solid figure.  (Pol.--'He only says that
+nothing is abiding, but that all things change in a certain cycle; and that
+the origin of the change is a base of numbers which are in the ratio of
+4:3; and this when combined with a figure of five gives two harmonies; he
+means when the number of this figure becomes solid.')  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
+hypotenuse (9 + 16 = 25).
+
+Plato begins by speaking of a perfect or cyclical number (Tim.), 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 revolutions 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 in certain
+proportions; these he converts into figures, and finds in them when they
+have been raised to the third power certain elements of number, 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; nor is any intimation given that the first or divine number
+represents the period of the world, the second the period of the state, or
+of the human race as Zeller supposes; nor is the divine number afterwards
+mentioned (Arist.).  The second is the number of generations or births, and
+presides over them in the same mysterious manner in which the stars preside
+over them, or in which, according to the Pythagoreans, opportunity,
+justice, marriage, are represented by some number or figure.  This is
+probably the number 216.
+
+The explanation given in the text supposes the two harmonies to make up the
+number 8000.  This explanation derives a certain plausibility from the
+circumstance that 8000 is the ancient number of the Spartan citizens
+(Herod.), and would be what Plato might have called 'a number which nearly
+concerns the population of a city'; the mysterious disappearance of the
+Spartan population may possibly have suggested to him the first cause of
+his decline of States.  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 respectively to the three orders in the
+State or parts of the soul, the four virtues, the five forms of government.
+The harmony of the musical scale, which is elsewhere used as a symbol of
+the harmony of the state, is also indicated.  For the numbers 3, 4, 5,
+which represent the sides of the Pythagorean triangle, also denote the
+intervals of the scale.
+
+The terms used in the statement of the problem may be explained as follows.
+A perfect number (Greek), as already stated, is one which is equal to the
+sum of its divisors.  Thus 6, which is the first perfect or cyclical
+number, = 1 + 2 + 3.  The words (Greek), 'terms' or 'notes,' and (Greek),
+'intervals,' are applicable to music as well as to number and figure. 
+(Greek) is the 'base' on which the whole calculation depends, or the
+'lowest term' from which it can be worked out.  The words (Greek) have been
+variously translated--'squared and cubed' (Donaldson), 'equalling and
+equalled in power' (Weber), 'by involution and evolution,' i.e. by raising
+the power and extracting the root (as in the translation).  Numbers are
+called 'like and unlike' (Greek) when the factors or the sides of the
+planes and cubes which they represent are or are not in the same ratio: 
+e.g. 8 and 27 = 2 cubed and 3 cubed; and conversely.  'Waxing' (Greek)
+numbers, called also 'increasing' (Greek), are those which are exceeded by
+the sum of their divisors:  e.g. 12 and 18 are less than 16 and 21. 
+'Waning' (Greek) numbers, called also 'decreasing' (Greek) are those which
+succeed the sum of their divisors:  e.g. 8 and 27 exceed 7 and 13.  The
+words translated 'commensurable and agreeable to one another' (Greek) seem
+to be different ways of describing the same relation, with more or less
+precision.  They are equivalent to 'expressible in terms having the same
+relation to one another,' like the series 8, 12, 18, 27, each of which
+numbers is in the relation of (1 and 1/2) to the preceding.  The 'base,' or
+'fundamental number, which has 1/3 added to it' (1 and 1/3) = 4/3 or a
+musical fourth.  (Greek) is a 'proportion' of numbers as of musical notes,
+applied either to the parts or factors of a single number or to the
+relation of one number to another.  The first harmony is a 'square' number
+(Greek); the second harmony is an 'oblong' number (Greek), i.e. a number
+representing a figure of which the opposite sides only are equal.  (Greek)
+= 'numbers squared from' or 'upon diameters'; (Greek) = 'rational,' i.e.
+omitting fractions, (Greek), 'irrational,' i.e. including fractions; e.g.
+49 is a square of the rational diameter of a figure the side of which = 5:
+50, of an irrational diameter of the same.  For several of the explanations
+here given and for a good deal besides I am indebted to an excellent
+article on the Platonic Number by Dr. Donaldson (Proc. of the Philol.
+Society).
+
+The conclusions which he draws from these data are summed up by him as
+follows.  Having assumed that the number of the perfect or divine cycle is
+the number of the world, and the number of the imperfect cycle the number
+of the state, he proceeds:  'The period of the world is defined by the
+perfect number 6, that of the state by the cube of that number or 216,
+which is the product of the last pair of terms in the Platonic Tetractys (a
+series of seven terms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27); and if we take this as the
+basis of our computation, we shall have two cube numbers (Greek), viz. 8
+and 27; and the mean proportionals between these, viz. 12 and 18, will
+furnish three intervals and four terms, and these terms and intervals stand
+related to one another in the sesqui-altera ratio, i.e. each term is to the
+preceding as 3/2.  Now if we remember that the number 216 = 8 x 27 = 3
+cubed + 4 cubed + 5 cubed, and 3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared, we must
+admit that this number implies the numbers 3, 4, 5, to which musicians
+attach so much importance.  And if we combine the ratio 4/3 with the number
+5, or multiply the ratios of the sides by the hypotenuse, we shall by first
+squaring and then cubing obtain two expressions, which denote the ratio of
+the two last pairs of terms in the Platonic Tetractys, the former
+multiplied by the square, the latter by the cube of the number 10, the sum
+of the first four digits which constitute the Platonic Tetractys.'  The two
+(Greek) he elsewhere explains as follows:  'The first (Greek) is (Greek),
+in other words (4/3 x 5) all squared = 100 x 2 squared over 3 squared.  The
+second (Greek), a cube of the same root, is described as 100 multiplied
+(alpha) by the rational diameter of 5 diminished by unity, i.e., as shown
+above, 48: (beta) by two incommensurable diameters, i.e. the two first
+irrationals, or 2 and 3:  and (gamma) by the cube of 3, or 27.  Thus we
+have (48 + 5 + 27) 100 = 1000 x 2 cubed.  This second harmony is to be the
+cube of the number of which the former harmony is the square, and therefore
+must be divided by the cube of 3.  In other words, the whole expression
+will be:  (1), for the first harmony, 400/9:  (2), for the second harmony,
+8000/27.'
+
+The reasons which have inclined me to agree with Dr. Donaldson and also
+with Schleiermacher in supposing that 216 is the Platonic number of births
+are:  (1) that it coincides with the description of the number given in the
+first part of the passage (Greek...):  (2) that the number 216 with its
+permutations would have been familiar to a Greek mathematician, though
+unfamiliar to us:  (3) that 216 is the cube of 6, and also the sum of 3
+cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed, the numbers 3, 4, 5 representing the Pythagorean
+triangle, of which the sides when squared equal the square of the
+hypotenuse (9 + 16 = 25):  (4) that it is also the period of the
+Pythagorean Metempsychosis:  (5) the three ultimate terms or bases (3, 4,
+5) of which 216 is composed answer to the third, fourth, fifth in the
+musical scale:  (6) that the number 216 is the product of the cubes of 2
+and 3, which are the two last terms in the Platonic Tetractys:  (7) that
+the Pythagorean triangle is said by Plutarch (de Is. et Osir.), Proclus
+(super prima Eucl.), and Quintilian (de Musica) to be contained in this
+passage, so that the tradition of the school seems to point in the same
+direction:  (8) that the Pythagorean triangle is called also the figure of
+marriage (Greek).
+
+But though agreeing with Dr. Donaldson thus far, I see no reason for
+supposing, as he does, that the first or perfect number is the world, the
+human or imperfect number the state; nor has he given any proof that the
+second harmony is a cube.  Nor do I think that (Greek) can mean 'two
+incommensurables,' which he arbitrarily assumes to be 2 and 3, but rather,
+as the preceding clause implies, (Greek), i.e. two square numbers based
+upon irrational diameters of a figure the side of which is 5 = 50 x 2.
+
+The greatest objection to the translation is the sense given to the words
+(Greek), 'a base of three with a third added to it, multiplied by 5.'  In
+this somewhat forced manner Plato introduces once more the numbers of the
+Pythagorean triangle.  But the coincidences in the numbers which follow are
+in favour of the explanation.  The first harmony of 400, as has been
+already remarked, probably represents the rulers; the second and oblong
+harmony of 7600, the people.
+
+And here we take leave of the difficulty.  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 is represented or presided
+over by a perfect or cyclical number; human generation is imperfect, and
+represented or presided over by an imperfect number or series of numbers. 
+The number 5040, which is the number of the citizens in the Laws, is
+expressly based by him on utilitarian grounds, namely, the convenience of
+the number for division; it is also made up of the first seven digits
+multiplied by one another.  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
+exactness to be attributed to the problem, the number of the tyrant in Book
+IX (729 = 365 x 2), and the slight correction of the error in the number
+5040/12 (Laws), 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 he knows the great influence which 'the little
+matter of 1, 2, 3' exercises upon education.  He 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 is he, 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 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. 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, who encouraged the saving desires and repressed the
+ornamental and expensive ones; presently the youth 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 that 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, and 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 puts an end to every true or modest
+thought or wish.  Love, like drunkenness and madness, is a tyranny; 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?  'Nay, that you must tell me.'  Well then, I
+fancy that he will live amid revelries and harlotries, and love will be the
+lord and master of the house.  Many desires require much money, and so he
+spends all that he has and borrows more; and when he has nothing the young
+ravens are still in the nest in which they were hatched, crying for food. 
+Love urges them on; and they must be gratified by force or fraud, or if
+not, they become painful and troublesome; and as the new pleasures succeed
+the old ones, so will the son take possession of the goods of his parents;
+if they show signs of refusing, he will defraud and deceive them; and if
+they openly resist, what then?  'I can only say, that I should not much
+like to be in their place.'  But, O heavens, Adeimantus, to think that for
+some new-fangled and unnecessary love he will give up his old father and
+mother, best and dearest of friends, or enslave them to the fancies of the
+hour!  Truly a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother!  When
+there is no more to be got out of them, he turns burglar or pickpocket, or
+robs a temple.  Love overmasters the thoughts of his youth, and he becomes
+in sober reality the monster that he was sometimes in sleep.  He waxes
+strong in all violence and lawlessness; and is ready for any deed of daring
+that will supply the wants of his rabble-rout.  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, footpads, cut-purses, man-stealers of the
+community; or if they are able to speak, they turn false-witnesses and
+informers.  'No small catalogue of crimes truly, even if the perpetrators
+are few.'  Yes, I said; but small and great are relative terms, and no
+crimes which are committed by them approach those of the tyrant, whom this
+class, growing strong and numerous, create out of themselves.  If the
+people yield, well and good, but, if they resist, then, as before he beat
+his father and mother, so now he beats his fatherland and motherland, and
+places his mercenaries over them.  Such men in their early days live with
+flatterers, and they themselves flatter others, in order to gain their
+ends; but they soon discard their followers when they have no longer any
+need of them; they are always either masters or servants,--the joys of
+friendship are unknown to them.  And they are utterly treacherous and
+unjust, if the nature of justice be at all understood by us.  They realize
+our dream; and he who is the most of a tyrant by nature, and leads the life
+of a tyrant for 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.  But which is the happier?  Great and terrible as the tyrant may
+appear enthroned amid 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 panic-
+struck by the vain pomp of tyranny?  I will suppose that he is one who has
+lived with him, and has seen him in family life, or perhaps in the hour of
+trouble and danger.
+
+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 applies to the man as well as to the
+State; for his soul is full of meanness and slavery, and the better part is
+enslaved to the worse.  He cannot do what he would, and his mind is full of
+confusion; he is the very reverse of a freeman.  The State will be poor and
+full of misery and sorrow; and the man's soul will also be poor and full of
+sorrows, and he will be 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;' conjecture
+is out of place in an enquiry of this nature.  He is like a wealthy owner
+of slaves, only he has more of them than any private individual.  You will
+say, 'The owners of slaves are not generally in any fear of them.'  But
+why?  Because the whole city is in a league which protects the individual. 
+Suppose however that one of these owners and his household is carried off
+by a god into a wilderness, where there are no freemen to help him--will he
+not be in an agony of terror?--will he not be compelled to flatter his
+slaves and to promise them many things sore against his will?  And suppose
+the same god who carried him off were to surround him with neighbours who
+declare that no man ought 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 a captive soul, who is
+tormented by a swarm of passions which he cannot indulge; living indoors
+always like a woman, and jealous of those who can go out and see 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; the meanest of
+slaves and the most abject of flatterers; wanting all things, and never
+able to satisfy his desires; 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, a misery to himself and to others. 
+And so let us have a final trial and proclamation; need we hire a herald,
+or shall I proclaim the result?  'Made the proclamation yourself.'  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.  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 includes ambition, party-feeling, love of
+reputation.  Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of truth,
+and careless of money and reputation.  In accordance with the difference of
+men's natures, one of these three principles is in the ascendant, and they
+have their several pleasures corresponding to them.  Interrogate now the
+three natures, and each one will be found praising his own pleasures and
+depreciating those of others.  The money-maker will contrast the vanity of
+knowledge with the solid advantages of wealth.  The ambitious man will
+despise knowledge which brings no honour; whereas the philosopher will
+regard only the fruition of truth, and will call other pleasures necessary
+rather than good.  Now, how shall we decide between them?  Is there any
+better criterion 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; 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 standard is only 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 rational part of
+the soul, and a life passed in such pleasure is the pleasantest.  He who
+has a right to judge judges thus.  Next comes the life of ambition, and, in
+the third place, that of money-making.
+
+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; on the other hand, when he is in an ecstasy of pleasure, 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 reliefs of pain, and have not only their reactions when they
+depart, but their anticipations before they come.  They can be best
+described in a simile.  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, 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 existence is truer than of that which has less.  The invariable
+and immortal has a more real existence than the variable and mortal, and
+has a corresponding measure of knowledge and truth.  The soul, again, 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.  They are like fatted beasts, full of gluttony and sensuality,
+and ready to kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they
+are not filled with true being, and their vessel is leaky (Gorgias).  Their
+pleasures are mere shadows of pleasure, mixed with pain, coloured and
+intensified by contrast, and therefore intensely desired; and men go
+fighting about them, as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the
+shadow of Helen at Troy, because they know not the truth.
+
+The same may be said of the passionate element:--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 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 3 x 3,
+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 difference 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 (365 x 2 = 730);
+and is therefore concerned with human life.  This is the interval between a
+good and bad man in happiness only:  what must be the difference between
+them in comeliness of life 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 know the nature of justice and injustice, let us make an image of
+the soul, which will personify his words.  First of all, fashion a
+multitudinous beast, having a ring of heads of all manner of animals, tame
+and wild, and able to produce and change them at pleasure.  Suppose now
+another form of a lion, and another of a man; the second smaller than the
+first, the third than the second; join them together and cover them with a
+human skin, in which they are completely concealed.  When this has been
+done, let us tell the supporter of injustice that he is feeding up the
+beasts and starving the man.  The maintainer of justice, on the other hand,
+is trying to strengthen 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.
+
+But now, let us reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally in error.
+Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the
+God in man; the ignoble, that which subjects the man to the beast?  And 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 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, while 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 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 in themselves; 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?  If he had been punished, the
+brute within him would have been silenced, and the gentler element
+liberated; and he would have united temperance, justice, and wisdom in his
+soul--a union better far than any combination of bodily gifts.  The man of
+understanding will honour knowledge above all; in the next place he will
+keep under his body, not only for the sake of health and strength, but in
+order to attain the most perfect harmony of body and soul.  In the
+acquisition of riches, too, he will aim at order and harmony; he will not
+desire 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 reason he will only accept such honours as will make him a better man;
+any others he will decline.  'In that case,' said he, 'he will never be a
+politician.'  Yes, but he will, in his own city; though probably not in his
+native country, unless by some divine accident.  'You 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 wishes 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 noticeable points in the 9th Book of the Republic are:--(1) the
+account of pleasure; (2) the number of the interval which divides the king
+from the tyrant; (3) the pattern which is in heaven.
+
+1.  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
+pleasures of smell, and also the pleasures of hope and anticipation.  In
+the previous book 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 (Greek).  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 reason.  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
+further technical distinctions.  Both in Plato and Aristotle we note the
+illusion under which the ancients fell of regarding the transience of
+pleasure as a proof of its unreality, and of confounding 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 (Introduction 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 immeasurable,
+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.), 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 philosophical 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; just as persons in our own day are apt to fancy that a statement is
+verified when it has been only thrown into an abstract form.  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 similar 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,
+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 9th 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.  ('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 imitation.  I
+do not mind telling you in confidence that all poetry is an outrage on the
+understanding, unless the hearers have that balm of knowledge which heals
+error.  I have loved Homer ever since I was a boy, and even now he appears
+to me to be the great 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, will
+you explain what is imitation, for really I do not understand?  'How likely
+then that I should understand!'  That might very well be, for the duller
+often sees better than the keener eye.  '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, who makes not only
+vessels but plants and animals, himself, the earth and heaven, and things
+in heaven and 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
+reflection of the sun, and the earth, or anything else--there now you have
+made them.  'Yes, but only in appearance.'  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 need we wonder 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. 
+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 is rather the imitator of what
+the other two make; he has to do with a creation which is thrice removed
+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 other artist, although he knows nothing of
+their arts; and this with sufficient skill to deceive children or simple
+people.  Suppose now that somebody came to us and told us, how he had met a
+man who knew all that everybody knows, and better than anybody:--should we
+not infer him to be a simpleton who, having no discernment of truth and
+falsehood, had 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 they 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.'
+
+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 removed 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 invention attributed to you, as there is to Thales and Anacharsis?  Or
+is there any Homeric way of life, such as the Pythagorean was, in which you
+instructed men, and which is called after you?  'No, indeed; and Creophylus
+(Flesh-child) was even 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, but could this ever have happened if
+Homer had really been the educator of Hellas?  Would he not have had many
+devoted followers?  If Protagoras and Prodicus can persuade their
+contemporaries that no one can manage house or State without them, is it
+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 men have compelled them to stay where they were, or 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 delineate any art in the colours of language, 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 appearance.  The painter
+paints, and the artificer makes a bridle and reins, but neither understands
+the use of them--the knowledge 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; 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:  Objects are differently 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
+save our bewildered minds 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.  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.  'In the latter case.'  Feeling would lead him to indulge
+his sorrow, but reason and law control him and enjoin patience; since he
+cannot know whether his affliction is good or evil, and no human thing is
+of any great consequence, while sorrow is certainly a hindrance to good
+counsel.  For when we stumble, we should not, like children, make an
+uproar; we should take the measures which reason prescribes, not raising 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 no experience of her.  Thus the poet is like the painter
+in two ways:  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
+some passage in which a hero laments his sufferings at tedious length, you
+know that we sympathize with him and praise the poet; and yet in our own
+sorrows such an exhibition of feeling is regarded as effeminate and unmanly
+(Ion).  Now, ought a man to feel pleasure in seeing another do what he
+hates and abominates in himself?  Is he not giving 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 the inevitable
+consequence is that 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; 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 all life should
+be regulated by his precepts, we may allow the excellence of their
+intentions, and agree with them in thinking Homer a great poet and
+tragedian.  But we shall continue to prohibit 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 grounds for expelling poetry; but lest she should charge us
+with discourtesy, let us also make an apology to her.  We will remind her
+that there is an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, of which
+there are many traces in the writings of the poets, such as the saying of
+'the she-dog, yelping at her mistress,' and 'the philosophers who are ready
+to circumvent Zeus,' and 'the philosophers who are paupers.'  Nevertheless
+we bear her no ill-will, and will gladly allow her to return upon condition
+that she makes a defence of herself in verse; and her supporters who are
+not poets may speak in prose.  We confess her charms; but if she cannot
+show that she is useful as well as delightful, like rational lovers, we
+must renounce our love, 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--no
+less than the good or evil of a 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 things greater still?'  Not, perhaps, in this brief span of
+life:  but should an immortal being care about anything short of eternity?
+'I do not understand what you mean?'  Do you not know that the soul is
+immortal?  'Surely you are not prepared to prove that?'  Indeed I am. 
+'Then let me hear this argument, of which you make so light.'
+
+You would admit that everything has an element of good and of evil.  In all
+things there is an inherent corruption; and if this cannot destroy them,
+nothing else will.  The soul too has her own corrupting principles, which
+are injustice, 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, brought
+any nearer to death.  Nothing which was not destroyed from within ever
+perished by external affection of evil.  The body, which is one thing,
+cannot be destroyed by food, which is another, unless the badness of the
+food is communicated to the body.  Neither can the soul, which is one
+thing, be corrupted by the body, which is another, unless she herself is
+infected.  And as no bodily evil can infect the soul, neither can any
+bodily evil, whether disease or violence, or any other destroy the soul,
+unless it can be shown to render her unholy and unjust.  But no one will
+ever prove that the souls of men become more unjust when they die.  If a
+person has the audacity to say the contrary, 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 rather believe that the injustice which murders
+others may tend to quicken and stimulate the life of the unjust.'  You are
+quite right.  If sin which is her own natural and inherent evil cannot
+destroy the soul, hardly will anything else destroy her.  But the soul
+which cannot be destroyed either by internal or external evil must be
+immortal and everlasting.  And 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, and so behold justice and
+injustice in their own nature, she must be viewed by the light of reason
+pure as at birth, or as she is reflected in philosophy when holding
+converse with the divine and immortal and eternal.  In her present
+condition we see her only like the sea-god Glaucus, bruised and maimed in
+the sea which is the world, and covered with shells and stones which are
+incrusted upon her from the entertainments of earth.
+
+Thus far, as the argument required, we have said nothing of the rewards and
+honours which the poets attribute to justice; we have contented ourselves
+with showing that justice in herself is best for the soul in herself, even
+if a man should put on a Gyges' ring and have the helmet of Hades too.  And
+now you shall repay me what you borrowed; 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 since 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 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 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 breaks
+down before he reaches the goal, and slinks away in dishonour; 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 bear rule in the city, they marry and give in marriage to whom
+they will; and the evils which you attributed to the unfortunate just, do
+really fall in the end on the unjust, although, as you implied, their
+sufferings are better veiled in silence.
+
+But all the blessings of this present life are as nothing when compared
+with those which await good men after death.  'I should like to hear about
+them.'  Come, then, and I will tell you the story of Er, the son of
+Armenius, a valiant man.  He was supposed to have died in battle, but ten
+days afterwards his body was found untouched by corruption and sent home
+for burial.  On the twelfth day he was placed on the funeral pyre and there
+he came to life again, and told what he had seen in the world below.  He
+said that his soul went with a great company to a place, in which there
+were two chasms near together in the earth beneath, and two corresponding
+chasms 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, while
+the unjust, having the seal behind, were bidden to descend by the way on
+the left hand.  Him they told to look and listen, as he was to be their
+messenger to men from the world below.  And he beheld and saw the souls
+departing after judgment at either chasm; some who came from earth, were
+worn and travel-stained; others, who came from heaven, were clean and
+bright.  They seemed glad to meet and rest awhile in the meadow; here they
+discoursed with one another of what they had seen in the other world. 
+Those who came from earth wept at the remembrance of their sorrows, but the
+spirits from above spoke of glorious sights and heavenly bliss.  He said
+that for every evil deed they were punished tenfold--now the journey was of
+a thousand years' duration, because the life of man was reckoned as a
+hundred years--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?  (This Ardiaeus was a cruel tyrant, who had
+murdered his father, and his elder brother, a thousand years before.) 
+Another spirit answered, 'He comes not hither, and will never come.  And I
+myself,' he added, 'actually saw this terrible sight.  At the entrance of
+the chasm, as we were about to reascend, Ardiaeus appeared, and some other
+sinners--most of whom had been tyrants, but not all--and just as they
+fancied that they were returning to life, the chasm gave a roar, and then
+wild, fiery-looking men who knew the meaning of the sound, seized him and
+several 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 like wool, 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.
+
+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 line of light, in
+colour like a rainbow, only brighter and clearer.  One day more brought
+them to the place, and they saw that this was the column of light which
+binds together the whole universe.  The ends of the column were fastened to
+heaven, and from them hung 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.  The whorl was in form 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.  The outermost had the rim
+broadest, and the inner whorls were smaller and smaller, and had their rims
+narrower.  The largest (the fixed stars) was spangled--the seventh (the
+sun) was brightest--the eighth (the 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 circles; Lachesis in turn putting forth her hand from time to time to
+guide both of them.  On their arrival the pilgrims went to Lachesis, and
+there was an interpreter who arranged them, and taking from her knees lots,
+and samples of lives, got up into a pulpit and said:  'Mortal souls, hear
+the words 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 of 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.  Here, 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 knowledge 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 happiness 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 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.  Like many another, he 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.  But if a man had followed philosophy
+while upon earth, and had been moderately fortunate in his lot, he might
+not only be happy here, but his pilgrimage both from and to this world
+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 previous 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 taking 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 sought the lot of a private man, which lay
+neglected and despised, and when he found it he went away rejoicing, and
+said that if he had been first instead of last, his choice would have been
+the same.  Men, too, were seen passing into animals, and wild and tame
+animals changing into one another.
+
+When all the souls had chosen they went to Lachesis, who sent with 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 plain of Forgetfulness 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 found himself 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
+Forgetfulness, 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 analyzed, 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 especially 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 inseparably associated with the impurities
+of the old Hellenic mythology; 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
+circumstances 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, 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 Aeschylus and Sophocles in the generation which followed them. 
+Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs), 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 Aeschylus and the noble
+and gentle Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their
+'theology' (Rep.), these 'minor poets' must have been contemptible and
+intolerable.  There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a
+sense of the decline and decay both in literature and 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 (Laws).
+
+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 characters
+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 is the slave of his art, not the master of it.
+Taking this view Plato is more decided in his expulsion of the dramatic
+than of the epic poets, though he must have known that 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 weak or
+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 measure;
+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 ennoble 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 (Rembrandt), 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?'  (Statesman.)
+
+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 giving expression to them; and
+that they often gain strength when pent up within our own breast.  It is
+not every indulgence of the feelings which is 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
+utterance in the words of poets.  Every one would acknowledge that there
+have been times when they were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or
+by the sublimity of architecture or by the peacefulness of nature.  Plato
+has himself admitted, 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.  He himself 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.)  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, were the
+Sophists of their day; and his dislike of the one class is reflected on the
+other.  He regards them both 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
+into the world to convince men'--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).
+
+The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things which 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, etc., than in the class man, horse, bed, etc.;
+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 (Greek) 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 corruption 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, 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 evil the evils and errors of mankind; to him
+they are personified in the rhetoricians, sophists, poets, rulers 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 disposed 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 incapable 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 (Statesman) admits rhetoric to be the handmaiden of
+Politics, and proposes to find in the strain of law (Laws) 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, 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 Mahometans, 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 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 Mahometan 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 thoughts, when they become familiarized to us, are always
+tending to pass into the form of feeling.
+
+Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society.  But
+he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he is protesting against
+the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we might protest against the
+want of serious purpose in modern fiction, against the unseemliness or
+extravagance of some of our poets or 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
+imperceptibly 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 goodness and truth among men:  a strain which should renew
+the youth of the world, and bring back the ages in which the poet was man'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
+civilisation,--which might elicit the simple principles, or, as Plato would
+have called them, the essential forms, of truth and justice 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), be not only written, but lived by us.  A few such strains have been
+heard among men in the tragedies of Aeschylus 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 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.), 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 truth
+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 (Rep.).  It may be compared with those
+other paradoxes 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.)...
+
+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.  Vice is her own proper evil; and if she
+cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be destroyed 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.).  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...
+
+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 (Haug, Avesta).  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 seven orbits of the planets and the fixed stars; this
+is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns on the knees of Necessity;
+the revolutions of the seven orbits contained in the cylinder 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
+spindle; but it is doubtful whether this is the continuation of the column
+of light, from which the pilgrims contemplate the heavens; the words of
+Plato imply that they are connected, but not the same.  The column itself
+is clearly not of adamant.  The spindle (which is of adamant) is fastened
+to the ends of the chains which extend to the middle of the column of
+light--this column is said to hold together the heaven; but whether it
+hangs from the spindle, or is at right angles to it, is not explained.  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, and therefore is necessarily inconsistent
+with itself.  The column of light is 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 or picture of the heavens given in 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 of the whole. 
+The relative thickness of the rims is perhaps designed to express the
+relative distances of the planets.  Plato probably intended to represent
+the earth, from which Er and his companions are viewing the heavens, as
+stationary in place; but whether or not herself revolving, unless this is
+implied in the revolution of the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus).  The
+spectator may 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, may be overcome by the wisdom of man, if he knows how to choose
+aright; there is a worse enemy to man than chance; this enemy is 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 Coleridge says,
+'Common sense is intolerable which is not based on metaphysics,' so Plato
+would have said, 'Habit 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
+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 (Pol.). 
+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 the first choice 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 probability 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:  (1) 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
+(2) the paradoxes of the Republic, as they have been termed by Morgenstern: 
+(a) the community of property ; (b) of families; (c) the rule of
+philosophers; (d) 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 (3) the subject of education as conceived by Plato,
+bringing together in a general view the education of youth and the
+education of after-life; (4) we may note further some essential differences
+between ancient and modern politics which are suggested by the Republic;
+(5) we may compare the Politicus and the Laws; (6) we may observe the
+influence exercised by Plato on his imitators; and (7) take occasion to
+consider the nature and value of political, and (8) of religious ideals.
+
+1.  Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an Hellenic State
+(Book V).  Many of his regulations are characteristically Spartan; such as
+the prohibition of gold and silver, the common meals of the men, the
+military training of the youth, the gymnastic exercises of the women.  The
+life of Sparta was the life of a camp (Laws), enforced even more rigidly in
+time of peace than in war; the citizens of Sparta, like Plato's, were
+forbidden to trade--they were to be soldiers and not shopkeepers.  Nowhere
+else in Greece was the individual so completely subjected to the State; the
+time when he was to marry, the education of his children, the clothes which
+he was to wear, the food which he was to eat, were all 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 between men and youths, or of men with one
+another, as affording incentives to bravery, is also Spartan; in Sparta too
+a nearer approach was made than in any other Greek State to equality of the
+sexes, and to community of property; and 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
+produced 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 common 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 are the only kind of music admitted into the ideal State,
+were the only kind which was permitted at Sparta.  The Spartans, though an
+unpoetical race, were nevertheless lovers of poetry; they had been stirred
+by the Elegiac strains of Tyrtaeus, they had crowded around Hippias to hear
+his recitals of Homer; but in this they resembled the citizens of the
+timocratic rather than of the ideal State.  The council of elder men also
+corresponds to the Spartan gerousia; 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 attached 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 (Greek) of the Spartans
+attracted them, that is to say, not the goodness of their laws, but the
+spirit of order and loyalty which prevailed.  Fascinated by the idea,
+citizens of Athens 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 fond desire of a past which
+never has been, or of a future which never will be,--these are aspirations
+of the human mind which are often felt among ourselves.  Such feelings 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--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 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 harmonized, or of a federation of
+Hellas or the world in which different nations or States 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 myth 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 polis, partly on the actual
+circumstances of Hellas in that age.  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 Pythagoras, like the
+Catholic monastic orders, showed the power which the mind of an individual
+might exercise over his contemporaries, and may have naturally suggested 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; it 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 (Greek), 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 (Greek), were required to submit to a severe training in order
+to prepare the way for the education of the other members of the community.
+Long after the dissolution of the Order, eminent Pythagoreans, such as
+Archytas of Tarentum, retained their political influence over the cities of
+Magna Graecia.  There was much here that was suggestive to the kindred
+spirit of Plato, who had doubtless meditated deeply on the 'way of life of
+Pythagoras' (Rep.) and his followers.  Slight traces of Pythagoreanism are
+to be found in the mystical number of the State, in the number which
+expresses the interval between the king and the tyrant, in the doctrine of
+transmigration, in the music of the spheres, as well as in the great though
+secondary importance ascribed to mathematics in education.
+
+But as in his philosophy, so also in the form of his State, he goes far
+beyond the old Pythagoreans.  He attempts a task really impossible, which
+is to unite the past of Greek history with the future of philosophy,
+analogous to that other impossibility, which has often been the dream of
+Christendom, the attempt to unite the past history of Europe with the
+kingdom of Christ.  Nothing actually existing in the world at all resembles
+Plato's ideal State; nor does he himself imagine that such a State is
+possible.  This he repeats again and again; e.g. in the Republic, or in the
+Laws where, casting a glance back on the Republic, he admits that the
+perfect state of communism and philosophy was impossible in his own age,
+though still to be retained as a pattern.  The same doubt is implied in the
+earnestness with which he argues in the Republic that ideals are none the
+worse because they cannot be realized in fact, and in the chorus of
+laughter, which like a breaking wave will, as he anticipates, greet the
+mention of his proposals; though like other writers of fiction, he uses all
+his art to give reality to his inventions.  When asked how the ideal polity
+can come into being, he answers ironically, 'When one son of a king becomes
+a philosopher'; he designates the fiction of the earth-born men as 'a noble
+lie'; and when the structure is finally complete, he fairly tells you that
+his Republic is a vision only, which in some sense may have reality, but
+not in the vulgar one of a reign of philosophers upon earth.  It has been
+said that Plato flies as well as walks, but this falls short of the truth;
+for he flies and walks at the same time, and is in the air and on firm
+ground in successive instants.
+
+Niebuhr has asked a trifling question, which may be briefly noticed in this
+place--Was Plato a good citizen?  If by this is meant, Was he loyal to
+Athenian institutions?--he can hardly be said to be the friend of
+democracy:  but neither is he the friend of any other existing form of
+government; all of them he regarded as 'states of faction' (Laws); none
+attained to his ideal of a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects, which
+seems indeed more nearly to describe democracy than any other; and the
+worst of them is tyranny.  The truth is, that the question has hardly any
+meaning when applied to a great philosopher whose writings are not meant
+for a particular age and country, but for all time and all mankind.  The
+decline of Athenian politics was probably the motive which led Plato to
+frame an ideal State, and the Republic may be regarded as reflecting the
+departing glory of Hellas.  As well might we complain of St. Augustine,
+whose great work 'The City of God' originated in a similar motive, for not
+being loyal to the Roman Empire.  Even a nearer parallel might be afforded
+by the first Christians, who cannot fairly be charged with being bad
+citizens because, though 'subject to the higher powers,' they were looking
+forward to a city which is in heaven.
+
+2.  The idea of the perfect State is full of paradox when judged of
+according to the ordinary notions of mankind.  The paradoxes of one age
+have been said to become the commonplaces of the next; but the paradoxes of
+Plato are at least as paradoxical to us as they were to his contemporaries. 
+The modern world has either sneered at them as absurd, or denounced them as
+unnatural and immoral; men have been pleased to find in Aristotle's
+criticisms of them the anticipation of their own good sense.  The wealthy
+and cultivated classes have disliked and also dreaded them; they have
+pointed with satisfaction to the failure of efforts to realize them in
+practice.  Yet since they are the thoughts of one of the greatest of human
+intelligences, and of one who had done most to elevate morality and
+religion, they seem to deserve a better treatment at our hands.  We may
+have to address the public, as Plato does poetry, and assure them that we
+mean no harm to existing institutions.  There are serious errors which have
+a side of truth and which therefore may fairly demand a careful
+consideration:  there are truths mixed with error of which we may indeed
+say, 'The half is better than the whole.'  Yet 'the half' may be an
+important contribution to the study of human nature.
+
+(a)  The first paradox is the community of goods, which is mentioned
+slightly at the end of the third Book, and seemingly, as Aristotle
+observes, is confined to the guardians; at least no mention is made of the
+other classes.  But the omission is not of any real significance, and
+probably arises out of the plan of the work, which prevents the writer from
+entering into details.
+
+Aristotle censures the community of property much in the spirit of modern
+political economy, as tending to repress industry, and as doing away with
+the spirit of benevolence.  Modern writers almost refuse to consider the
+subject, which is supposed to have been long ago settled by the common
+opinion of mankind.  But it must be remembered that the sacredness of
+property is a notion far more fixed in modern than in ancient times.  The
+world has grown older, and is therefore more conservative.  Primitive
+society offered many examples of land held in common, either by a tribe or
+by a township, and such may probably have been the original form of landed
+tenure.  Ancient legislators had invented various modes of dividing and
+preserving the divisions of land among the citizens; according to Aristotle
+there were nations who held the land in common and divided the produce, and
+there were others who divided the land and stored the produce in common. 
+The evils of debt and the inequality of property were far greater in
+ancient than in modern times, and the accidents to which property was
+subject from war, or revolution, or taxation, or other legislative
+interference, were also greater.  All these circumstances gave property a
+less fixed and sacred character.  The early Christians are believed to have
+held their property in common, and the principle is sanctioned by the words
+of Christ himself, and has been maintained as a counsel of perfection in
+almost all ages of the Church.  Nor have there been wanting instances of
+modern enthusiasts who have made a religion of communism; in every age of
+religious excitement notions like Wycliffe's 'inheritance of grace' have
+tended to prevail.  A like spirit, but fiercer and more violent, has
+appeared in politics.  'The preparation of the Gospel of peace' soon
+becomes the red flag of Republicanism.
+
+We can hardly judge what effect Plato's views would have upon his own
+contemporaries; they would perhaps have seemed to them only an exaggeration
+of the Spartan commonwealth.  Even modern writers would acknowledge that
+the right of private property is based on expediency, and may be interfered
+with in a variety of ways for the public good.  Any other mode of vesting
+property which was found to be more advantageous, would in time acquire the
+same basis of right; 'the most useful,' in Plato's words, 'would be the
+most sacred.'  The lawyers and ecclesiastics of former ages would have
+spoken of property as a sacred institution.  But they only meant by such
+language to oppose the greatest amount of resistance to any invasion of the
+rights of individuals and of the Church.
+
+When we consider the question, without any fear of immediate application to
+practice, in the spirit of Plato's Republic, are we quite sure that the
+received notions of property are the best?  Is the distribution of wealth
+which is customary in civilized countries the most favourable that can be
+conceived for the education and development of the mass of mankind?  Can
+'the spectator of all time and all existence' be quite convinced that one
+or two thousand years hence, great changes will not have taken place in the
+rights of property, or even that the very notion of property, beyond what
+is necessary for personal maintenance, may not have disappeared?  This was
+a distinction familiar to Aristotle, though likely to be laughed at among
+ourselves.  Such a change would not be greater than some other changes
+through which the world has passed in the transition from ancient to modern
+society, for example, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, or the
+abolition of slavery in America and the West Indies; and not so great as
+the difference which separates the Eastern village community from the
+Western world.  To accomplish such a revolution in the course of a few
+centuries, would imply a rate of progress not more rapid than has actually
+taken place during the last fifty or sixty years.  The kingdom of Japan
+underwent more change in five or six years than Europe in five or six
+hundred.  Many opinions and beliefs which have been cherished among
+ourselves quite as strongly as the sacredness of property have passed away;
+and the most untenable propositions respecting the right of bequests or
+entail have been maintained with as much fervour as the most moderate. 
+Some one will be heard to ask whether a state of society can be final in
+which the interests of thousands are perilled on the life or character of a
+single person.  And many will indulge the hope that our present condition
+may, after all, be only transitional, and may conduct to a higher, in which
+property, besides ministering to the enjoyment of the few, may also furnish
+the means of the highest culture to all, and will be a greater benefit to
+the public generally, and also more under the control of public authority. 
+There may come a time when the saying, 'Have I not a right to do what I
+will with my own?' will appear to be a barbarous relic of individualism;--
+when the possession of a part may be a greater blessing to each and all
+than the possession of the whole is now to any one.
+
+Such reflections appear visionary to the eye of the practical statesman,
+but they are within the range of possibility to the philosopher.  He can
+imagine that in some distant age or clime, and through the influence of
+some individual, the notion of common property may or might have sunk as
+deep into the heart of a race, and have become as fixed to them, as private
+property is to ourselves.  He knows that this latter institution is not
+more than four or five thousand years old:  may not the end revert to the
+beginning?  In our own age even Utopias affect the spirit of legislation,
+and an abstract idea may exercise a great influence on practical politics.
+
+The objections that would be generally urged against Plato's community of
+property, are the old ones of Aristotle, that motives for exertion would be
+taken away, and that disputes would arise when each was dependent upon all.
+Every man would produce as little and consume as much as he liked.  The
+experience of civilized nations has hitherto been adverse to Socialism. 
+The effort is too great for human nature; men try to live in common, but
+the personal feeling is always breaking in.  On the other hand it may be
+doubted whether our present notions of property are not conventional, for
+they differ in different countries and in different states of society.  We
+boast of an individualism which is not freedom, but rather an artificial
+result of the industrial state of modern Europe.  The individual is
+nominally free, but he is also powerless in a world bound hand and foot in
+the chains of economic necessity.  Even if we cannot expect the mass of
+mankind to become disinterested, at any rate we observe in them a power of
+organization which fifty years ago would never have been suspected.  The
+same forces which have revolutionized the political system of Europe, may
+effect a similar change in the social and industrial relations of mankind.
+And if we suppose the influence of some good as well as neutral motives
+working in the community, there will be no absurdity in expecting that the
+mass of mankind having power, and becoming enlightened about the higher
+possibilities of human life, when they learn how much more is attainable
+for all than is at present the possession of a favoured few, may pursue the
+common interest with an intelligence and persistency which mankind have
+hitherto never seen.
+
+Now that the world has once been set in motion, and is no longer held fast
+under the tyranny of custom and ignorance; now that criticism has pierced
+the veil of tradition and the past no longer overpowers the present,--the
+progress of civilization may be expected to be far greater and swifter than
+heretofore.  Even at our present rate of speed the point at which we may
+arrive in two or three generations is beyond the power of imagination to
+foresee.  There are forces in the world which work, not in an arithmetical,
+but in a geometrical ratio of increase.  Education, to use the expression
+of Plato, moves like a wheel with an ever-multiplying rapidity.  Nor can we
+say how great may be its influence, when it becomes universal,--when it has
+been inherited by many generations,--when it is freed from the trammels of
+superstition and rightly adapted to the wants and capacities of different
+classes of men and women.  Neither do we know how much more the co-
+operation of minds or of hands may be capable of accomplishing, whether in
+labour or in study.  The resources of the natural sciences are not half-
+developed as yet; the soil of the earth, instead of growing more barren,
+may become many times more fertile than hitherto; the uses of machinery far
+greater, and also more minute than at present.  New secrets of physiology
+may be revealed, deeply affecting human nature in its innermost recesses.
+The standard of health may be raised and the lives of men prolonged by
+sanitary and medical knowledge.  There may be peace, there may be leisure,
+there may be innocent refreshments of many kinds.  The ever-increasing
+power of locomotion may join the extremes of earth.  There may be
+mysterious workings of the human mind, such as occur only at great crises
+of history.  The East and the West may meet together, and all nations may
+contribute their thoughts and their experience to the common stock of
+humanity.  Many other elements enter into a speculation of this kind.  But
+it is better to make an end of them.  For such reflections appear to the
+majority far-fetched, and to men of science, commonplace.
+
+(b) Neither to the mind of Plato nor of Aristotle did the doctrine of
+community of property present at all the same difficulty, or appear to be
+the same violation of the common Hellenic sentiment, as the community of
+wives and children.  This paradox he prefaces by another proposal, that the
+occupations of men and women shall be the same, and that to this end they
+shall have a common training and education.  Male and female animals have
+the same pursuits--why not also the two sexes of man?
+
+But have we not here fallen into a contradiction? for we were saying that
+different natures should have different pursuits.  How then can men and
+women have the same?  And is not the proposal inconsistent with our notion
+of the division of labour?--These objections are no sooner raised than
+answered; for, according to Plato, there is no organic difference between
+men and women, but only the accidental one that men beget and women bear
+children.  Following the analogy of the other animals, he contends that all
+natural gifts are scattered about indifferently among both sexes, though
+there may be a superiority of degree on the part of the men.  The objection
+on the score of decency to their taking part in the same gymnastic
+exercises, is met by Plato's assertion that the existing feeling is a
+matter of habit.
+
+That Plato should have emancipated himself from the ideas of his own
+country and from the example of the East, shows a wonderful independence of
+mind.  He is conscious that women are half the human race, in some respects
+the more important half (Laws); and for the sake both of men and women he
+desires to raise the woman to a higher level of existence.  He brings, not
+sentiment, but philosophy to bear upon a question which both in ancient and
+modern times has been chiefly regarded in the light of custom or feeling. 
+The Greeks had noble conceptions of womanhood in the goddesses Athene and
+Artemis, and in the heroines Antigone and Andromache.  But these ideals had
+no counterpart in actual life.  The Athenian woman was in no way the equal
+of her husband; she was not the entertainer of his guests or the mistress
+of his house, but only his housekeeper and the mother of his children.  She
+took no part in military or political matters; nor is there any instance in
+the later ages of Greece of a woman becoming famous in literature.  'Hers
+is the greatest glory who has the least renown among men,' is the
+historian's conception of feminine excellence.  A very different ideal of
+womanhood is held up by Plato to the world; she is to be the companion of
+the man, and to share with him in the toils of war and in the cares of
+government.  She is to be similarly trained both in bodily and mental
+exercises.  She is to lose as far as possible the incidents of maternity
+and the characteristics of the female sex.
+
+The modern antagonist of the equality of the sexes would argue that the
+differences between men and women are not confined to the single point
+urged by Plato; that sensibility, gentleness, grace, are the qualities of
+women, while energy, strength, higher intelligence, are to be looked for in
+men.  And the criticism is just:  the differences affect the whole nature,
+and are not, as Plato supposes, confined to a single point.  But neither
+can we say how far these differences are due to education and the opinions
+of mankind, or physically inherited from the habits and opinions of former
+generations.  Women have been always taught, not exactly that they are
+slaves, but that they are in an inferior position, which is also supposed
+to have compensating advantages; and to this position they have conformed.
+It is also true that the physical form may easily change in the course of
+generations through the mode of life; and the weakness or delicacy, which
+was once a matter of opinion, may become a physical fact.  The
+characteristics of sex vary greatly in different countries and ranks of
+society, and at different ages in the same individuals.  Plato may have
+been right in denying that there was any ultimate difference in the sexes
+of man other than that which exists in animals, because all other
+differences may be conceived to disappear in other states of society, or
+under different circumstances of life and training.
+
+The first wave having been passed, we proceed to the second--community of
+wives and children.  'Is it possible?  Is it desirable?'  For as Glaucon
+intimates, and as we far more strongly insist, 'Great doubts may be
+entertained about both these points.'  Any free discussion of the question
+is impossible, and mankind are perhaps right in not allowing the ultimate
+bases of social life to be examined.  Few of us can safely enquire into the
+things which nature hides, any more than we can dissect our own bodies. 
+Still, the manner in which Plato arrived at his conclusions should be
+considered.  For here, as Mr. Grote has remarked, is a wonderful thing,
+that one of the wisest and best of men should have entertained ideas of
+morality which are wholly at variance with our own.  And if we would do
+Plato justice, we must examine carefully the character of his proposals.
+First, we may observe that the relations of the sexes supposed by him are
+the reverse of licentious:  he seems rather to aim at an impossible
+strictness.  Secondly, he conceives the family to be the natural enemy of
+the state; and he entertains the serious hope that an universal brotherhood
+may take the place of private interests--an aspiration which, although not
+justified by experience, has possessed many noble minds.  On the other
+hand, there is no sentiment or imagination in the connections which men and
+women are supposed by him to form; human beings return to the level of the
+animals, neither exalting to heaven, nor yet abusing the natural instincts. 
+All that world of poetry and fancy which the passion of love has called
+forth in modern literature and romance would have been banished by Plato. 
+The arrangements of marriage in the Republic are directed to one object--
+the improvement of the race.  In successive generations a great development
+both of bodily and mental qualities might be possible.  The analogy of
+animals tends to show that mankind can within certain limits receive a
+change of nature.  And as in animals we should commonly choose the best for
+breeding, and destroy the others, so there must be a selection made of the
+human beings whose lives are worthy to be preserved.
+
+We start back horrified from this Platonic ideal, in the belief, first,
+that the higher feelings of humanity are far too strong to be crushed out;
+secondly, that if the plan could be carried into execution we should be
+poorly recompensed by improvements in the breed for the loss of the best
+things in life.  The greatest regard for the weakest and meanest of human
+beings--the infant, the criminal, the insane, the idiot, truly seems to us
+one of the noblest results of Christianity.  We have learned, though as yet
+imperfectly, that the individual man has an endless value in the sight of
+God, and that we honour Him when we honour the darkened and disfigured
+image of Him (Laws).  This is the lesson which Christ taught in a parable
+when He said, 'Their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is
+in heaven.'  Such lessons are only partially realized in any age; they were
+foreign to the age of Plato, as they have very different degrees of
+strength in different countries or ages of the Christian world.  To the
+Greek the family was a religious and customary institution binding the
+members together by a tie inferior in strength to that of friendship, and
+having a less solemn and sacred sound than that of country.  The
+relationship which existed on the lower level of custom, Plato imagined
+that he was raising to the higher level of nature and reason; while from
+the modern and Christian point of view we regard him as sanctioning murder
+and destroying the first principles of morality.
+
+The great error in these and similar speculations is that the difference
+between man and the animals is forgotten in them.  The human being is
+regarded with the eye of a dog- or bird-fancier, or at best of a slave-
+owner; the higher or human qualities are left out.  The breeder of animals
+aims chiefly at size or speed or strength; in a few cases at courage or
+temper; most often the fitness of the animal for food is the great
+desideratum.  But mankind are not bred to be eaten, nor yet for their
+superiority in fighting or in running or in drawing carts.  Neither does
+the improvement of the human race consist merely in the increase of the
+bones and flesh, but in the growth and enlightenment of the mind.  Hence
+there must be 'a marriage of true minds' as well as of bodies, of
+imagination and reason as well as of lusts and instincts.  Men and women
+without feeling or imagination are justly called brutes; yet Plato takes
+away these qualities and puts nothing in their place, not even the desire
+of a noble offspring, since parents are not to know their own children. 
+The most important transaction of social life, he who is the idealist
+philosopher converts into the most brutal.  For the pair are to have no
+relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their children
+are not theirs, but the state's; nor is any tie of affection to unite them. 
+Yet here the analogy of the animals might have saved Plato from a gigantic
+error, if he had 'not lost sight of his own illustration.'  For the 'nobler
+sort of birds and beasts' nourish and protect their offspring and are
+faithful to one another.
+
+An eminent physiologist thinks it worth while 'to try and place life on a
+physical basis.'  But should not life rest on the moral rather than upon
+the physical?  The higher comes first, then the lower, first the human and
+rational, afterwards the animal.  Yet they are not absolutely divided; and
+in times of sickness or moments of self-indulgence they seem to be only
+different aspects of a common human nature which includes them both. 
+Neither is the moral the limit of the physical, but the expansion and
+enlargement of it,--the highest form which the physical is capable of
+receiving.  As Plato would say, the body does not take care of the body,
+and still less of the mind, but the mind takes care of both.  In all human
+action not that which is common to man and the animals is the
+characteristic element, but that which distinguishes him from them.  Even
+if we admit the physical basis, and resolve all virtue into health of body
+'la facon que notre sang circule,' still on merely physical grounds we must
+come back to ideas.  Mind and reason and duty and conscience, under these
+or other names, are always reappearing.  There cannot be health of body
+without health of mind; nor health of mind without the sense of duty and
+the love of truth (Charm).
+
+That the greatest of ancient philosophers should in his regulations about
+marriage have fallen into the error of separating body and mind, does
+indeed appear surprising.  Yet the wonder is not so much that Plato should
+have entertained ideas of morality which to our own age are revolting, but
+that he should have contradicted himself to an extent which is hardly
+credible, falling in an instant from the heaven of idealism into the
+crudest animalism.  Rejoicing in the newly found gift of reflection, he
+appears to have thought out a subject about which he had better have
+followed the enlightened feeling of his own age.  The general sentiment of
+Hellas was opposed to his monstrous fancy.  The old poets, and in later
+time the tragedians, showed no want of respect for the family, on which
+much of their religion was based.  But the example of Sparta, and perhaps
+in some degree the tendency to defy public opinion, seems to have misled
+him.  He will make one family out of all the families of the state.  He
+will select the finest specimens of men and women and breed from these
+only.
+
+Yet because the illusion is always returning (for the animal part of human
+nature will from time to time assert itself in the disguise of philosophy
+as well as of poetry), and also because any departure from established
+morality, even where this is not intended, is apt to be unsettling, it may
+be worth while to draw out a little more at length the objections to the
+Platonic marriage.  In the first place, history shows that wherever
+polygamy has been largely allowed the race has deteriorated.  One man to
+one woman is the law of God and nature.  Nearly all the civilized peoples
+of the world at some period before the age of written records, have become
+monogamists; and the step when once taken has never been retraced.  The
+exceptions occurring among Brahmins or Mahometans or the ancient Persians,
+are of that sort which may be said to prove the rule.  The connexions
+formed between superior and inferior races hardly ever produce a noble
+offspring, because they are licentious; and because the children in such
+cases usually despise the mother and are neglected by the father who is
+ashamed of them.  Barbarous nations when they are introduced by Europeans
+to vice die out; polygamist peoples either import and adopt children from
+other countries, or dwindle in numbers, or both.  Dynasties and
+aristocracies which have disregarded the laws of nature have decreased in
+numbers and degenerated in stature; 'mariages de convenance' leave their
+enfeebling stamp on the offspring of them (King Lear).  The marriage of
+near relations, or the marrying in and in of the same family tends
+constantly to weakness or idiocy in the children, sometimes assuming the
+form as they grow older of passionate licentiousness.  The common
+prostitute rarely has any offspring.  By such unmistakable evidence is the
+authority of morality asserted in the relations of the sexes:  and so many
+more elements enter into this 'mystery' than are dreamed of by Plato and
+some other philosophers.
+
+Recent enquirers have indeed arrived at the conclusion that among primitive
+tribes there existed a community of wives as of property, and that the
+captive taken by the spear was the only wife or slave whom any man was
+permitted to call his own.  The partial existence of such customs among
+some of the lower races of man, and the survival of peculiar ceremonies in
+the marriages of some civilized nations, are thought to furnish a proof of
+similar institutions having been once universal.  There can be no question
+that the study of anthropology has considerably changed our views
+respecting the first appearance of man upon the earth.  We know more about
+the aborigines of the world than formerly, but our increasing knowledge
+shows above all things how little we know.  With all the helps which
+written monuments afford, we do but faintly realize the condition of man
+two thousand or three thousand years ago.  Of what his condition was when
+removed to a distance 200,000 or 300,000 years, when the majority of
+mankind were lower and nearer the animals than any tribe now existing upon
+the earth, we cannot even entertain conjecture.  Plato (Laws) and Aristotle
+(Metaph.) may have been more right than we imagine in supposing that some
+forms of civilisation were discovered and lost several times over.  If we
+cannot argue that all barbarism is a degraded civilization, neither can we
+set any limits to the depth of degradation to which the human race may sink
+through war, disease, or isolation.  And if we are to draw inferences about
+the origin of marriage from the practice of barbarous nations, we should
+also consider the remoter analogy of the animals.  Many birds and animals,
+especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of
+offspring which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive
+theory of marriage.  If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were
+almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue
+from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized
+man.  The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary,--the
+connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social
+life is still more fragmentary and precarious.  Even if we admit that our
+first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still the stages by
+which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of
+China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly
+unknown to us.
+
+Such speculations are apt to be unsettling, because they seem to show that
+an institution which was thought to be a revelation from heaven, is only
+the growth of history and experience.  We ask what is the origin of
+marriage, and we are told that like the right of property, after many wars
+and contests, it has gradually arisen out of the selfishness of barbarians. 
+We stand face to face with human nature in its primitive nakedness.  We are
+compelled to accept, not the highest, but the lowest account of the origin
+of human society.  But on the other hand we may truly say that every step
+in human progress has been in the same direction, and that in the course of
+ages the idea of marriage and of the family has been more and more defined
+and consecrated.  The civilized East is immeasurably in advance of any
+savage tribes; the Greeks and Romans have improved upon the East; the
+Christian nations have been stricter in their views of the marriage
+relation than any of the ancients.  In this as in so many other things,
+instead of looking back with regret to the past, we should look forward
+with hope to the future.  We must consecrate that which we believe to be
+the most holy, and that 'which is the most holy will be the most useful.' 
+There is more reason for maintaining the sacredness of the marriage tie,
+when we see the benefit of it, than when we only felt a vague religious
+horror about the violation of it.  But in all times of transition, when
+established beliefs are being undermined, there is a danger that in the
+passage from the old to the new we may insensibly let go the moral
+principle, finding an excuse for listening to the voice of passion in the
+uncertainty of knowledge, or the fluctuations of opinion.  And there are
+many persons in our own day who, enlightened by the study of anthropology,
+and fascinated by what is new and strange, some using the language of fear,
+others of hope, are inclined to believe that a time will come when through
+the self-assertion of women, or the rebellious spirit of children, by the
+analysis of human relations, or by the force of outward circumstances, the
+ties of family life may be broken or greatly relaxed.  They point to
+societies in America and elsewhere which tend to show that the destruction
+of the family need not necessarily involve the overthrow of all morality. 
+Wherever we may think of such speculations, we can hardly deny that they
+have been more rife in this generation than in any other; and whither they
+are tending, who can predict?
+
+To the doubts and queries raised by these 'social reformers' respecting the
+relation of the sexes and the moral nature of man, there is a sufficient
+answer, if any is needed.  The difference about them and us is really one
+of fact.  They are speaking of man as they wish or fancy him to be, but we
+are speaking of him as he is.  They isolate the animal part of his nature;
+we regard him as a creature having many sides, or aspects, moving between
+good and evil, striving to rise above himself and to become 'a little lower
+than the angels.'  We also, to use a Platonic formula, are not ignorant of
+the dissatisfactions and incompatibilities of family life, of the
+meannesses of trade, of the flatteries of one class of society by another,
+of the impediments which the family throws in the way of lofty aims and
+aspirations.  But we are conscious that there are evils and dangers in the
+background greater still, which are not appreciated, because they are
+either concealed or suppressed.  What a condition of man would that be, in
+which human passions were controlled by no authority, divine or human, in
+which there was no shame or decency, no higher affection overcoming or
+sanctifying the natural instincts, but simply a rule of health!  Is it for
+this that we are asked to throw away the civilization which is the growth
+of ages?
+
+For strength and health are not the only qualities to be desired; there are
+the more important considerations of mind and character and soul.  We know
+how human nature may be degraded; we do not know how by artificial means
+any improvement in the breed can be effected.  The problem is a complex
+one, for if we go back only four steps (and these at least enter into the
+composition of a child), there are commonly thirty progenitors to be taken
+into account.  Many curious facts, rarely admitting of proof, are told us
+respecting the inheritance of disease or character from a remote ancestor.
+We can trace the physical resemblances of parents and children in the same
+family--
+
+'Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat';
+
+but scarcely less often the differences which distinguish children both
+from their parents and from one another.  We are told of similar mental
+peculiarities running in families, and again of a tendency, as in the
+animals, to revert to a common or original stock.  But we have a difficulty
+in distinguishing what is a true inheritance of genius or other qualities,
+and what is mere imitation or the result of similar circumstances.  Great
+men and great women have rarely had great fathers and mothers.  Nothing
+that we know of in the circumstances of their birth or lineage will explain
+their appearance.  Of the English poets of the last and two preceding
+centuries scarcely a descendant remains,--none have ever been
+distinguished.  So deeply has nature hidden her secret, and so ridiculous
+is the fancy which has been entertained by some that we might in time by
+suitable marriage arrangements or, as Plato would have said, 'by an
+ingenious system of lots,' produce a Shakespeare or a Milton.  Even
+supposing that we could breed men having the tenacity of bulldogs, or, like
+the Spartans, 'lacking the wit to run away in battle,' would the world be
+any the better?  Many of the noblest specimens of the human race have been
+among the weakest physically.  Tyrtaeus or Aesop, or our own Newton, would
+have been exposed at Sparta; and some of the fairest and strongest men and
+women have been among the wickedest and worst.  Not by the Platonic device
+of uniting the strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of
+sentiment and morality, nor yet by his other device of combining dissimilar
+natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually passed from the brutality and
+licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage Christian and civilized.
+
+Few persons would deny that we bring into the world an inheritance of
+mental and physical qualities derived first from our parents, or through
+them from some remoter ancestor, secondly from our race, thirdly from the
+general condition of mankind into which we are born.  Nothing is commoner
+than the remark, that 'So and so is like his father or his uncle'; and an
+aged person may not unfrequently note a resemblance in a youth to a long-
+forgotten ancestor, observing that 'Nature sometimes skips a generation.' 
+It may be true also, that if we knew more about our ancestors, these
+similarities would be even more striking to us.  Admitting the facts which
+are thus described in a popular way, we may however remark that there is no
+method of difference by which they can be defined or estimated, and that
+they constitute only a small part of each individual.  The doctrine of
+heredity may seem to take out of our hands the conduct of our own lives,
+but it is the idea, not the fact, which is really terrible to us.  For what
+we have received from our ancestors is only a fraction of what we are, or
+may become.  The knowledge that drunkenness or insanity has been prevalent
+in a family may be the best safeguard against their recurrence in a future
+generation.  The parent will be most awake to the vices or diseases in his
+child of which he is most sensible within himself.  The whole of life may
+be directed to their prevention or cure.  The traces of consumption may
+become fainter, or be wholly effaced:  the inherent tendency to vice or
+crime may be eradicated.  And so heredity, from being a curse, may become a
+blessing.  We acknowledge that in the matter of our birth, as in our nature
+generally, there are previous circumstances which affect us.  But upon this
+platform of circumstances or within this wall of necessity, we have still
+the power of creating a life for ourselves by the informing energy of the
+human will.
+
+There is another aspect of the marriage question to which Plato is a
+stranger.  All the children born in his state are foundlings.  It never
+occurred to him that the greater part of them, according to universal
+experience, would have perished.  For children can only be brought up in
+families.  There is a subtle sympathy between the mother and the child
+which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or by 'strong nurses one or
+more' (Laws).  If Plato's 'pen' was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or
+the foundling hospital of Dublin, more than nine-tenths of his children
+would have perished.  There would have been no need to expose or put out of
+the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of themselves.  So
+emphatically does nature protest against the destruction of the family.
+
+What Plato had heard or seen of Sparta was applied by him in a mistaken way
+to his ideal commonwealth.  He probably observed that both the Spartan men
+and women were superior in form and strength to the other Greeks; and this
+superiority he was disposed to attribute to the laws and customs relating
+to marriage.  He did not consider that the desire of a noble offspring was
+a passion among the Spartans, or that their physical superiority was to be
+attributed chiefly, not to their marriage customs, but to their temperance
+and training.  He did not reflect that Sparta was great, not in consequence
+of the relaxation of morality, but in spite of it, by virtue of a political
+principle stronger far than existed in any other Grecian state.  Least of
+all did he observe that Sparta did not really produce the finest specimens
+of the Greek race.  The genius, the political inspiration of Athens, the
+love of liberty--all that has made Greece famous with posterity, were
+wanting among the Spartans.  They had no Themistocles, or Pericles, or
+Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Socrates, or Plato.  The individual was not
+allowed to appear above the state; the laws were fixed, and he had no
+business to alter or reform them.  Yet whence has the progress of cities
+and nations arisen, if not from remarkable individuals, coming into the
+world we know not how, and from causes over which we have no control? 
+Something too much may have been said in modern times of the value of
+individuality.  But we can hardly condemn too strongly a system which,
+instead of fostering the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and character,
+tends to smother and extinguish them.
+
+Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither
+Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has hitherto been
+able to cope with this most difficult of social problems, and that the side
+from which Plato regarded it is that from which we turn away.  Population
+is the most untameable force in the political and social world.  Do we not
+find, especially in large cities, that the greatest hindrance to the
+amelioration of the poor is their improvidence in marriage?--a small fault
+truly, if not involving endless consequences.  There are whole countries
+too, such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland, in which a right solution of
+the marriage question seems to lie at the foundation of the happiness of
+the community.  There are too many people on a given space, or they marry
+too early and bring into the world a sickly and half-developed offspring;
+or owing to the very conditions of their existence, they become emaciated
+and hand on a similar life to their descendants.  But who can oppose the
+voice of prudence to the 'mightiest passions of mankind' (Laws), especially
+when they have been licensed by custom and religion?  In addition to the
+influences of education, we seem to require some new principles of right
+and wrong in these matters, some force of opinion, which may indeed be
+already heard whispering in private, but has never affected the moral
+sentiments of mankind in general.  We unavoidably lose sight of the
+principle of utility, just in that action of our lives in which we have the
+most need of it.  The influences which we can bring to bear upon this
+question are chiefly indirect.  In a generation or two, education,
+emigration, improvements in agriculture and manufactures, may have provided
+the solution.  The state physician hardly likes to probe the wound:  it is
+beyond his art; a matter which he cannot safely let alone, but which he
+dare not touch:
+
+'We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.'
+
+When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping into
+the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents perhaps
+surviving them, do our minds ever go back silently to that day twenty-five
+or thirty years before on which under the fairest auspices, amid the
+rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom joined
+hands with one another?  In making such a reflection we are not opposing
+physical considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are seeking to
+make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the extravagance
+of sentimentalism on common sense.  The late Dr. Combe is said by his
+biographer to have resisted the temptation to marriage, because he knew
+that he was subject to hereditary consumption.  One who deserved to be
+called a man of genius, a friend of my youth, was in the habit of wearing a
+black ribbon on his wrist, in order to remind him that, being liable to
+outbreaks of insanity, he must not give way to the natural impulses of
+affection:  he died unmarried in a lunatic asylum.  These two little facts
+suggest the reflection that a very few persons have done from a sense of
+duty what the rest of mankind ought to have done under like circumstances,
+if they had allowed themselves to think of all the misery which they were
+about to bring into the world.  If we could prevent such marriages without
+any violation of feeling or propriety, we clearly ought; and the
+prohibition in the course of time would be protected by a 'horror
+naturalis' similar to that which, in all civilized ages and countries, has
+prevented the marriage of near relations by blood.  Mankind would have been
+the happier, if some things which are now allowed had from the beginning
+been denied to them; if the sanction of religion could have prohibited
+practices inimical to health; if sanitary principles could in early ages
+have been invested with a superstitious awe.  But, living as we do far on
+in the world's history, we are no longer able to stamp at once with the
+impress of religion a new prohibition.  A free agent cannot have his
+fancies regulated by law; and the execution of the law would be rendered
+impossible, owing to the uncertainty of the cases in which marriage was to
+be forbidden.  Who can weigh virtue, or even fortune against health, or
+moral and mental qualities against bodily?  Who can measure probabilities
+against certainties?  There has been some good as well as evil in the
+discipline of suffering; and there are diseases, such as consumption, which
+have exercised a refining and softening influence on the character.  Youth
+is too inexperienced to balance such nice considerations; parents do not
+often think of them, or think of them too late.  They are at a distance and
+may probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the
+interests of a home may be the cure of them.  So persons vainly reason when
+their minds are already made up and their fortunes irrevocably linked
+together.  Nor is there any ground for supposing that marriages are to any
+great extent influenced by reflections of this sort, which seem unable to
+make any head against the irresistible impulse of individual attachment.
+
+Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the passions in
+youth, the difficulty of regulating them, and the effects on the whole mind
+and nature which follow from them, the stimulus which is given to them by
+the imagination, without feeling that there is something unsatisfactory in
+our method of treating them.  That the most important influence on human
+life should be wholly left to chance or shrouded in mystery, and instead of
+being disciplined or understood, should be required to conform only to an
+external standard of propriety--cannot be regarded by the philosopher as a
+safe or satisfactory condition of human things.  And still those who have
+the charge of youth may find a way by watchfulness, by affection, by the
+manliness and innocence of their own lives, by occasional hints, by general
+admonitions which every one can apply for himself, to mitigate this
+terrible evil which eats out the heart of individuals and corrupts the
+moral sentiments of nations.  In no duty towards others is there more need
+of reticence and self-restraint.  So great is the danger lest he who would
+be the counsellor of another should reveal the secret prematurely, lest he
+should get another too much into his power; or fix the passing impression
+of evil by demanding the confession of it.
+
+Nor is Plato wrong in asserting that family attachments may interfere with
+higher aims.  If there have been some who 'to party gave up what was meant
+for mankind,' there have certainly been others who to family gave up what
+was meant for mankind or for their country.  The cares of children, the
+necessity of procuring money for their support, the flatteries of the rich
+by the poor, the exclusiveness of caste, the pride of birth or wealth, the
+tendency of family life to divert men from the pursuit of the ideal or the
+heroic, are as lowering in our own age as in that of Plato.  And if we
+prefer to look at the gentle influences of home, the development of the
+affections, the amenities of society, the devotion of one member of a
+family for the good of the others, which form one side of the picture, we
+must not quarrel with him, or perhaps ought rather to be grateful to him,
+for having presented to us the reverse.  Without attempting to defend Plato
+on grounds of morality, we may allow that there is an aspect of the world
+which has not unnaturally led him into error.
+
+We hardly appreciate the power which the idea of the State, like all other
+abstract ideas, exercised over the mind of Plato.  To us the State seems to
+be built up out of the family, or sometimes to be the framework in which
+family and social life is contained.  But to Plato in his present mood of
+mind the family is only a disturbing influence which, instead of filling
+up, tends to disarrange the higher unity of the State.  No organization is
+needed except a political, which, regarded from another point of view, is a
+military one.  The State is all-sufficing for the wants of man, and, like
+the idea of the Church in later ages, absorbs all other desires and
+affections.  In time of war the thousand citizens are to stand like a
+rampart impregnable against the world or the Persian host; in time of peace
+the preparation for war and their duties to the State, which are also their
+duties to one another, take up their whole life and time.  The only other
+interest which is allowed to them besides that of war, is the interest of
+philosophy.  When they are too old to be soldiers they are to retire from
+active life and to have a second novitiate of study and contemplation. 
+There is an element of monasticism even in Plato's communism.  If he could
+have done without children, he might have converted his Republic into a
+religious order.  Neither in the Laws, when the daylight of common sense
+breaks in upon him, does he retract his error.  In the state of which he
+would be the founder, there is no marrying or giving in marriage:  but
+because of the infirmity of mankind, he condescends to allow the law of
+nature to prevail.
+
+(c)  But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even greater
+paradox in reserve, which is summed up in the famous text, 'Until kings are
+philosophers or philosophers are kings, cities will never cease from ill.' 
+And by philosophers he explains himself to mean those who are capable of
+apprehending ideas, especially the idea of good.  To the attainment of this
+higher knowledge the second education is directed.  Through a process of
+training which has already made them good citizens they are now to be made
+good legislators.  We find with some surprise (not unlike the feeling which
+Aristotle in a well-known passage describes the hearers of Plato's lectures
+as experiencing, when they went to a discourse on the idea of good,
+expecting to be instructed in moral truths, and received instead of them
+arithmetical and mathematical formulae) that Plato does not propose for his
+future legislators any study of finance or law or military tactics, but
+only of abstract mathematics, as a preparation for the still more abstract
+conception of good.  We ask, with Aristotle, What is the use of a man
+knowing the idea of good, if he does not know what is good for this
+individual, this state, this condition of society?  We cannot understand
+how Plato's legislators or guardians are to be fitted for their work of
+statesmen by the study of the five mathematical sciences.  We vainly search
+in Plato's own writings for any explanation of this seeming absurdity.
+
+The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to ravish the mind
+with a prophetic consciousness which takes away the power of estimating its
+value.  No metaphysical enquirer has ever fairly criticised his own
+speculations; in his own judgment they have been above criticism; nor has
+he understood that what to him seemed to be absolute truth may reappear in
+the next generation as a form of logic or an instrument of thought.  And
+posterity have also sometimes equally misapprehended the real value of his
+speculations.  They appear to them to have contributed nothing to the stock
+of human knowledge.  The IDEA of good is apt to be regarded by the modern
+thinker as an unmeaning abstraction; but he forgets that this abstraction
+is waiting ready for use, and will hereafter be filled up by the divisions
+of knowledge.  When mankind do not as yet know that the world is subject to
+law, the introduction of the mere conception of law or design or final
+cause, and the far-off anticipation of the harmony of knowledge, are great
+steps onward.  Even the crude generalization of the unity of all things
+leads men to view the world with different eyes, and may easily affect
+their conception of human life and of politics, and also their own conduct
+and character (Tim).  We can imagine how a great mind like that of Pericles
+might derive elevation from his intercourse with Anaxagoras (Phaedr.).  To
+be struggling towards a higher but unattainable conception is a more
+favourable intellectual condition than to rest satisfied in a narrow
+portion of ascertained fact.  And the earlier, which have sometimes been
+the greater ideas of science, are often lost sight of at a later period. 
+How rarely can we say of any modern enquirer in the magnificent language of
+Plato, that 'He is the spectator of all time and of all existence!'
+
+Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these vast
+metaphysical conceptions to practical and political life.  In the first
+enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them everywhere, and to apply them
+in the most remote sphere.  They do not understand that the experience of
+ages is required to enable them to fill up 'the intermediate axioms.' 
+Plato himself seems to have imagined that the truths of psychology, like
+those of astronomy and harmonics, would be arrived at by a process of
+deduction, and that the method which he has pursued in the Fourth Book, of
+inferring them from experience and the use of language, was imperfect and
+only provisional.  But when, after having arrived at the idea of good,
+which is the end of the science of dialectic, he is asked, What is the
+nature, and what are the divisions of the science?  He refuses to answer,
+as if intending by the refusal to intimate that the state of knowledge
+which then existed was not such as would allow the philosopher to enter
+into his final rest.  The previous sciences must first be studied, and
+will, we may add, continue to be studied tell the end of time, although in
+a sense different from any which Plato could have conceived.  But we may
+observe, that while he is aware of the vacancy of his own ideal, he is full
+of enthusiasm in the contemplation of it.  Looking into the orb of light,
+he sees nothing, but he is warmed and elevated.  The Hebrew prophet
+believed that faith in God would enable him to govern the world; the Greek
+philosopher imagined that contemplation of the good would make a
+legislator.  There is as much to be filled up in the one case as in the
+other, and the one mode of conception is to the Israelite what the other is
+to the Greek.  Both find a repose in a divine perfection, which, whether in
+a more personal or impersonal form, exists without them and independently
+of them, as well as within them.
+
+There is no mention of the idea of good in the Timaeus, nor of the divine
+Creator of the world in the Republic; and we are naturally led to ask in
+what relation they stand to one another.  Is God above or below the idea of
+good?  Or is the Idea of Good another mode of conceiving God?  The latter
+appears to be the truer answer.  To the Greek philosopher the perfection
+and unity of God was a far higher conception than his personality, which he
+hardly found a word to express, and which to him would have seemed to be
+borrowed from mythology.  To the Christian, on the other hand, or to the
+modern thinker in general, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attach
+reality to what he terms mere abstraction; while to Plato this very
+abstraction is the truest and most real of all things.  Hence, from a
+difference in forms of thought, Plato appears to be resting on a creation
+of his own mind only.  But if we may be allowed to paraphrase the idea of
+good by the words 'intelligent principle of law and order in the universe,
+embracing equally man and nature,' we begin to find a meeting-point between
+him and ourselves.
+
+The question whether the ruler or statesman should be a philosopher is one
+that has not lost interest in modern times.  In most countries of Europe
+and Asia there has been some one in the course of ages who has truly united
+the power of command with the power of thought and reflection, as there
+have been also many false combinations of these qualities.  Some kind of
+speculative power is necessary both in practical and political life; like
+the rhetorician in the Phaedrus, men require to have a conception of the
+varieties of human character, and to be raised on great occasions above the
+commonplaces of ordinary life.  Yet the idea of the philosopher-statesman
+has never been popular with the mass of mankind; partly because he cannot
+take the world into his confidence or make them understand the motives from
+which he acts; and also because they are jealous of a power which they do
+not understand.  The revolution which human nature desires to effect step
+by step in many ages is likely to be precipitated by him in a single year
+or life.  They are afraid that in the pursuit of his greater aims he may
+disregard the common feelings of humanity, he is too apt to be looking into
+the distant future or back into the remote past, and unable to see actions
+or events which, to use an expression of Plato's 'are tumbling out at his
+feet.'  Besides, as Plato would say, there are other corruptions of these
+philosophical statesmen.  Either 'the native hue of resolution is sicklied
+o'er with the pale cast of thought,' and at the moment when action above
+all things is required he is undecided, or general principles are
+enunciated by him in order to cover some change of policy; or his ignorance
+of the world has made him more easily fall a prey to the arts of others; or
+in some cases he has been converted into a courtier, who enjoys the luxury
+of holding liberal opinions, but was never known to perform a liberal
+action.  No wonder that mankind have been in the habit of calling statesmen
+of this class pedants, sophisters, doctrinaires, visionaries.  For, as we
+may be allowed to say, a little parodying the words of Plato, 'they have
+seen bad imitations of the philosopher-statesman.'  But a man in whom the
+power of thought and action are perfectly balanced, equal to the present,
+reaching forward to the future, 'such a one,' ruling in a constitutional
+state, 'they have never seen.'
+
+But as the philosopher is apt to fail in the routine of political life, so
+the ordinary statesman is also apt to fail in extraordinary crises.  When
+the face of the world is beginning to alter, and thunder is heard in the
+distance, he is still guided by his old maxims, and is the slave of his
+inveterate party prejudices; he cannot perceive the signs of the times;
+instead of looking forward he looks back; he learns nothing and forgets
+nothing; with 'wise saws and modern instances' he would stem the rising
+tide of revolution.  He lives more and more within the circle of his own
+party, as the world without him becomes stronger.  This seems to be the
+reason why the old order of things makes so poor a figure when confronted
+with the new, why churches can never reform, why most political changes are
+made blindly and convulsively.  The great crises in the history of nations
+have often been met by an ecclesiastical positiveness, and a more obstinate
+reassertion of principles which have lost their hold upon a nation.  The
+fixed ideas of a reactionary statesman may be compared to madness; they
+grow upon him, and he becomes possessed by them; no judgement of others is
+ever admitted by him to be weighed in the balance against his own.
+
+(d)  Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to have been a
+confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the individual, and fails to
+distinguish Ethics from Politics.  He thinks that to be most of a state
+which is most like one man, and in which the citizens have the greatest
+uniformity of character.  He does not see that the analogy is partly
+fallacious, and that the will or character of a state or nation is really
+the balance or rather the surplus of individual wills, which are limited by
+the condition of having to act in common.  The movement of a body of men
+can never have the pliancy or facility of a single man; the freedom of the
+individual, which is always limited, becomes still more straitened when
+transferred to a nation.  The powers of action and feeling are necessarily
+weaker and more balanced when they are diffused through a community; whence
+arises the often discussed question, 'Can a nation, like an individual,
+have a conscience?'  We hesitate to say that the characters of nations are
+nothing more than the sum of the characters of the individuals who compose
+them; because there may be tendencies in individuals which react upon one
+another.  A whole nation may be wiser than any one man in it; or may be
+animated by some common opinion or feeling which could not equally have
+affected the mind of a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader
+of genius to perform acts more than human.  Plato does not appear to have
+analysed the complications which arise out of the collective action of
+mankind.  Neither is he capable of seeing that analogies, though specious
+as arguments, may often have no foundation in fact, or of distinguishing
+between what is intelligible or vividly present to the mind, and what is
+true.  In this respect he is far below Aristotle, who is comparatively
+seldom imposed upon by false analogies.  He cannot disentangle the arts
+from the virtues--at least he is always arguing from one to the other.  His
+notion of music is transferred from harmony of sounds to harmony of life: 
+in this he is assisted by the ambiguities of language as well as by the
+prevalence of Pythagorean notions.  And having once assimilated the state
+to the individual, he imagines that he will find the succession of states
+paralleled in the lives of individuals.
+
+Still, through this fallacious medium, a real enlargement of ideas is
+attained.  When the virtues as yet presented no distinct conception to the
+mind, a great advance was made by the comparison of them with the arts; for
+virtue is partly art, and has an outward form as well as an inward
+principle.  The harmony of music affords a lively image of the harmonies of
+the world and of human life, and may be regarded as a splendid illustration
+which was naturally mistaken for a real analogy.  In the same way the
+identification of ethics with politics has a tendency to give definiteness
+to ethics, and also to elevate and ennoble men's notions of the aims of
+government and of the duties of citizens; for ethics from one point of view
+may be conceived as an idealized law and politics; and politics, as ethics
+reduced to the conditions of human society.  There have been evils which
+have arisen out of the attempt to identify them, and this has led to the
+separation or antagonism of them, which has been introduced by modern
+political writers.  But we may likewise feel that something has been lost
+in their separation, and that the ancient philosophers who estimated the
+moral and intellectual wellbeing of mankind first, and the wealth of
+nations and individuals second, may have a salutary influence on the
+speculations of modern times.  Many political maxims originate in a
+reaction against an opposite error; and when the errors against which they
+were directed have passed away, they in turn become errors.
+
+3.  Plato's views of education are in several respects remarkable; like the
+rest of the Republic they are partly Greek and partly ideal, beginning with
+the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and extending to after-life. 
+Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that education is to
+comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for another in which
+education begins again.  This is the continuous thread which runs through
+the Republic, and which more than any other of his ideas admits of an
+application to modern life.
+
+He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is
+disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are one
+and not many.  He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world into his
+scheme of truth.  Nor does he assert in the Republic the involuntariness of
+vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws
+(Protag., Apol., Gorg.).  Nor do the so-called Platonic ideas recovered
+from a former state of existence affect his theory of mental improvement. 
+Still we observe in him the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true
+knowledge must be elicited from within, and is to be sought for in ideas,
+not in particulars of sense.  Education, as he says, will implant a
+principle of intelligence which is better than ten thousand eyes.  The
+paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred notion that all virtue is
+knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the first is seen in the supremacy
+given to justice over the rest; the second in the tendency to absorb the
+moral virtues in the intellectual, and to centre all goodness in the
+contemplation of the idea of good.  The world of sense is still depreciated
+and identified with opinion, though admitted to be a shadow of the true. 
+In the Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice
+arises chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education; the multitude
+are hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do.  A faint allusion to
+the doctrine of reminiscence occurs in the Tenth Book; but Plato's views of
+education have no more real connection with a previous state of existence
+than our own; he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there
+already.  Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel,
+but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.
+
+He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and
+false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the Republic he takes
+no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage counsels about the nursing of
+children and the management of the mothers, and would have an education
+which is even prior to birth.  But in the Republic he begins with the age
+at which the child is capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in
+language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be taught
+the false before he can learn the true.  The modern and ancient
+philosophical world are not agreed about truth and falsehood; the one
+identifies truth almost exclusively with fact, the other with ideas.  This
+is the difference between ourselves and Plato, which is, however, partly a
+difference of words.  For we too should admit that a child must receive
+many lessons which he imperfectly understands; he must be taught some
+things in a figure only, some too which he can hardly be expected to
+believe when he grows older; but we should limit the use of fiction by the
+necessity of the case.  Plato would draw the line differently; according to
+him the aim of early education is not truth as a matter of fact, but truth
+as a matter of principle; the child is to be taught first simple religious
+truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the lesson of
+good manners and good taste.  He would make an entire reformation of the
+old mythology; like Xenophanes and Heracleitus he is sensible of the deep
+chasm which separates his own age from Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and
+invests with an imaginary authority, but only for his own purposes.  The
+lusts and treacheries of the gods are to be banished; the terrors of the
+world below are to be dispelled; the misbehaviour of the Homeric heroes is
+not to be a model for youth.  But there is another strain heard in Homer
+which may teach our youth endurance; and something may be learnt in
+medicine from the simple practice of the Homeric age.  The principles on
+which religion is to be based are two only:  first, that God is true;
+secondly, that he is good.  Modern and Christian writers have often fallen
+short of these; they can hardly be said to have gone beyond them.
+
+The young are to be brought up in happy surroundings, out of the way of
+sights or sounds which may hurt the character or vitiate the taste.  They
+are to live in an atmosphere of health; the breeze is always to be wafting
+to them the impressions of truth and goodness.  Could such an education be
+realized, or if our modern religious education could be bound up with truth
+and virtue and good manners and good taste, that would be the best hope of
+human improvement.  Plato, like ourselves, is looking forward to changes in
+the moral and religious world, and is preparing for them.  He recognizes
+the danger of unsettling young men's minds by sudden changes of laws and
+principles, by destroying the sacredness of one set of ideas when there is
+nothing else to take their place.  He is afraid too of the influence of the
+drama, on the ground that it encourages false sentiment, and therefore he
+would not have his children taken to the theatre; he thinks that the effect
+on the spectators is bad, and on the actors still worse.  His idea of
+education is that of harmonious growth, in which are insensibly learnt the
+lessons of temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in
+equal proportions.  The first principle which runs through all art and
+nature is simplicity; this also is to be the rule of human life.
+
+The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the period of
+muscular growth and development.  The simplicity which is enforced in music
+is extended to gymnastic; Plato is aware that the training of the body may
+be inconsistent with the training of the mind, and that bodily exercise may
+be easily overdone.  Excessive training of the body is apt to give men a
+headache or to render them sleepy at a lecture on philosophy, and this they
+attribute not to the true cause, but to the nature of the subject.  Two
+points are noticeable in Plato's treatment of gymnastic:--First, that the
+time of training is entirely separated from the time of literary education. 
+He seems to have thought that two things of an opposite and different
+nature could not be learnt at the same time.  Here we can hardly agree with
+him; and, if we may judge by experience, the effect of spending three years
+between the ages of fourteen and seventeen in mere bodily exercise would be
+far from improving to the intellect.  Secondly, he affirms that music and
+gymnastic are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the one
+for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that they
+are both equally designed for the improvement of the mind.  The body, in
+his view, is the servant of the mind; the subjection of the lower to the
+higher is for the advantage of both.  And doubtless the mind may exercise a
+very great and paramount influence over the body, if exerted not at
+particular moments and by fits and starts, but continuously, in making
+preparation for the whole of life.  Other Greek writers saw the mischievous
+tendency of Spartan discipline (Arist. Pol; Thuc.).  But only Plato
+recognized the fundamental error on which the practice was based.
+
+The subject of gymnastic leads Plato to the sister subject of medicine,
+which he further illustrates by the parallel of law.  The modern disbelief
+in medicine has led in this, as in some other departments of knowledge, to
+a demand for greater simplicity; physicians are becoming aware that they
+often make diseases 'greater and more complicated' by their treatment of
+them (Rep.).  In two thousand years their art has made but slender
+progress; what they have gained in the analysis of the parts is in a great
+degree lost by their feebler conception of the human frame as a whole. 
+They have attended more to the cure of diseases than to the conditions of
+health; and the improvements in medicine have been more than
+counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training.  Until lately they have
+hardly thought of air and water, the importance of which was well
+understood by the ancients; as Aristotle remarks, 'Air and water, being the
+elements which we most use, have the greatest effect upon health' (Polit.). 
+For ages physicians have been under the dominion of prejudices which have
+only recently given way; and now there are as many opinions in medicine as
+in theology, and an equal degree of scepticism and some want of toleration
+about both.  Plato has several good notions about medicine; according to
+him, 'the eye cannot be cured without the rest of the body, nor the body
+without the mind' (Charm.).  No man of sense, he says in the Timaeus, would
+take physic; and we heartily sympathize with him in the Laws when he
+declares that 'the limbs of the rustic worn with toil will derive more
+benefit from warm baths than from the prescriptions of a not over wise
+doctor.'  But we can hardly praise him when, in obedience to the authority
+of Homer, he depreciates diet, or approve of the inhuman spirit in which he
+would get rid of invalid and useless lives by leaving them to die.  He does
+not seem to have considered that the 'bridle of Theages' might be
+accompanied by qualities which were of far more value to the State than the
+health or strength of the citizens; or that the duty of taking care of the
+helpless might be an important element of education in a State.  The
+physician himself (this is a delicate and subtle observation) should not be
+a man in robust health; he should have, in modern phraseology, a nervous
+temperament; he should have experience of disease in his own person, in
+order that his powers of observation may be quickened in the case of
+others.
+
+The perplexity of medicine is paralleled by the perplexity of law; in
+which, again, Plato would have men follow the golden rule of simplicity. 
+Greater matters are to be determined by the legislator or by the oracle of
+Delphi, lesser matters are to be left to the temporary regulation of the
+citizens themselves.  Plato is aware that laissez faire is an important
+element of government.  The diseases of a State are like the heads of a
+hydra; they multiply when they are cut off.  The true remedy for them is
+not extirpation but prevention.  And the way to prevent them is to take
+care of education, and education will take care of all the rest.  So in
+modern times men have often felt that the only political measure worth
+having--the only one which would produce any certain or lasting effect, was
+a measure of national education.  And in our own more than in any previous
+age the necessity has been recognized of restoring the ever-increasing
+confusion of law to simplicity and common sense.
+
+When the training in music and gymnastic is completed, there follows the
+first stage of active and public life.  But soon education is to begin
+again from a new point of view.  In the interval between the Fourth and
+Seventh Books we have discussed the nature of knowledge, and have thence
+been led to form a higher conception of what was required of us.  For true
+knowledge, according to Plato, is of abstractions, and has to do, not with
+particulars or individuals, but with universals only; not with the beauties
+of poetry, but with the ideas of philosophy.  And the great aim of
+education is the cultivation of the habit of abstraction.  This is to be
+acquired through the study of the mathematical sciences.  They alone are
+capable of giving ideas of relation, and of arousing the dormant energies
+of thought.
+
+Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part of that
+which is now included in them; but they bore a much larger proportion to
+the sum of human knowledge.  They were the only organon of thought which
+the human mind at that time possessed, and the only measure by which the
+chaos of particulars could be reduced to rule and order.  The faculty which
+they trained was naturally at war with the poetical or imaginative; and
+hence to Plato, who is everywhere seeking for abstractions and trying to
+get rid of the illusions of sense, nearly the whole of education is
+contained in them.  They seemed to have an inexhaustible application,
+partly because their true limits were not yet understood.  These Plato
+himself is beginning to investigate; though not aware that number and
+figure are mere abstractions of sense, he recognizes that the forms used by
+geometry are borrowed from the sensible world.  He seeks to find the
+ultimate ground of mathematical ideas in the idea of good, though he does
+not satisfactorily explain the connexion between them; and in his
+conception of the relation of ideas to numbers, he falls very far short of
+the definiteness attributed to him by Aristotle (Met.).  But if he fails to
+recognize the true limits of mathematics, he also reaches a point beyond
+them; in his view, ideas of number become secondary to a higher conception
+of knowledge. The dialectician is as much above the mathematician as the
+mathematician is above the ordinary man.  The one, the self-proving, the
+good which is the higher sphere of dialectic, is the perfect truth to which
+all things ascend, and in which they finally repose.
+
+This self-proving unity or idea of good is a mere vision of which no
+distinct explanation can be given, relative only to a particular stage in
+Greek philosophy.  It is an abstraction under which no individuals are
+comprehended, a whole which has no parts (Arist., Nic. Eth.).  The vacancy
+of such a form was perceived by Aristotle, but not by Plato.  Nor did he
+recognize that in the dialectical process are included two or more methods
+of investigation which are at variance with each other.  He did not see
+that whether he took the longer or the shorter road, no advance could be
+made in this way.  And yet such visions often have an immense effect; for
+although the method of science cannot anticipate science, the idea of
+science, not as it is, but as it will be in the future, is a great and
+inspiring principle.  In the pursuit of knowledge we are always pressing
+forward to something beyond us; and as a false conception of knowledge, for
+example the scholastic philosophy, may lead men astray during many ages, so
+the true ideal, though vacant, may draw all their thoughts in a right
+direction.  It makes a great difference whether the general expectation of
+knowledge, as this indefinite feeling may be termed, is based upon a sound
+judgment.  For mankind may often entertain a true conception of what
+knowledge ought to be when they have but a slender experience of facts. 
+The correlation of the sciences, the consciousness of the unity of nature,
+the idea of classification, the sense of proportion, the unwillingness to
+stop short of certainty or to confound probability with truth, are
+important principles of the higher education.  Although Plato could tell us
+nothing, and perhaps knew that he could tell us nothing, of the absolute
+truth, he has exercised an influence on the human mind which even at the
+present day is not exhausted; and political and social questions may yet
+arise in which the thoughts of Plato may be read anew and receive a fresh
+meaning.
+
+The Idea of good is so called only in the Republic, but there are traces of
+it in other dialogues of Plato.  It is a cause as well as an idea, and from
+this point of view may be compared with the creator of the Timaeus, who out
+of his goodness created all things.  It corresponds to a certain extent
+with the modern conception of a law of nature, or of a final cause, or of
+both in one, and in this regard may be connected with the measure and
+symmetry of the Philebus.  It is represented in the Symposium under the
+aspect of beauty, and is supposed to be attained there by stages of
+initiation, as here by regular gradations of knowledge.  Viewed
+subjectively, it is the process or science of dialectic.  This is the
+science which, according to the Phaedrus, is the true basis of rhetoric,
+which alone is able to distinguish the natures and classes of men and
+things; which divides a whole into the natural parts, and reunites the
+scattered parts into a natural or organized whole; which defines the
+abstract essences or universal ideas of all things, and connects them;
+which pierces the veil of hypotheses and reaches the final cause or first
+principle of all; which regards the sciences in relation to the idea of
+good.  This ideal science is the highest process of thought, and may be
+described as the soul conversing with herself or holding communion with
+eternal truth and beauty, and in another form is the everlasting question
+and answer--the ceaseless interrogative of Socrates.  The dialogues of
+Plato are themselves examples of the nature and method of dialectic. 
+Viewed objectively, the idea of good is a power or cause which makes the
+world without us correspond with the world within.  Yet this world without
+us is still a world of ideas.  With Plato the investigation of nature is
+another department of knowledge, and in this he seeks to attain only
+probable conclusions (Timaeus).
+
+If we ask whether this science of dialectic which Plato only half explains
+to us is more akin to logic or to metaphysics, the answer is that in his
+mind the two sciences are not as yet distinguished, any more than the
+subjective and objective aspects of the world and of man, which German
+philosophy has revealed to us.  Nor has he determined whether his science
+of dialectic is at rest or in motion, concerned with the contemplation of
+absolute being, or with a process of development and evolution.  Modern
+metaphysics may be described as the science of abstractions, or as the
+science of the evolution of thought; modern logic, when passing beyond the
+bounds of mere Aristotelian forms, may be defined as the science of method. 
+The germ of both of them is contained in the Platonic dialectic; all
+metaphysicians have something in common with the ideas of Plato; all
+logicians have derived something from the method of Plato.  The nearest
+approach in modern philosophy to the universal science of Plato, is to be
+found in the Hegelian 'succession of moments in the unity of the idea.' 
+Plato and Hegel alike seem to have conceived the world as the correlation
+of abstractions; and not impossibly they would have understood one another
+better than any of their commentators understand them (Swift's Voyage to
+Laputa.  'Having a desire to see those ancients who were most renowned for
+wit and learning, I set apart one day on purpose.  I proposed that Homer
+and Aristotle might appear at the head of all their commentators; but these
+were so numerous that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court and
+outward rooms of the palace.  I knew, and could distinguish these two
+heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd, but from each other. 
+Homer was the taller and comelier person of the two, walked very erect for
+one of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever
+beheld.  Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff.  His visage was
+meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow.  I soon discovered
+that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company, and
+had never seen or heard of them before.  And I had a whisper from a ghost,
+who shall be nameless, "That these commentators always kept in the most
+distant quarters from their principals, in the lower world, through a
+consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly
+misrepresented the meaning of these authors to posterity."  I introduced
+Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better
+than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a genius to enter
+into the spirit of a poet.  But Aristotle was out of all patience with the
+account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he
+asked them "whether the rest of the tribe were as great dunces as
+themselves?"').  There is, however, a difference between them:  for whereas
+Hegel is thinking of all the minds of men as one mind, which developes the
+stages of the idea in different countries or at different times in the same
+country, with Plato these gradations are regarded only as an order of
+thought or ideas; the history of the human mind had not yet dawned upon
+him.
+
+Many criticisms may be made on Plato's theory of education.  While in some
+respects he unavoidably falls short of modern thinkers, in others he is in
+advance of them.  He is opposed to the modes of education which prevailed
+in his own time; but he can hardly be said to have discovered new ones.  He
+does not see that education is relative to the characters of individuals;
+he only desires to impress the same form of the state on the minds of all.
+He has no sufficient idea of the effect of literature on the formation of
+the mind, and greatly exaggerates that of mathematics.  His aim is above
+all things to train the reasoning faculties; to implant in the mind the
+spirit and power of abstraction; to explain and define general notions,
+and, if possible, to connect them.  No wonder that in the vacancy of actual
+knowledge his followers, and at times even he himself, should have fallen
+away from the doctrine of ideas, and have returned to that branch of
+knowledge in which alone the relation of the one and many can be truly
+seen--the science of number.  In his views both of teaching and training he
+might be styled, in modern language, a doctrinaire; after the Spartan
+fashion he would have his citizens cast in one mould; he does not seem to
+consider that some degree of freedom, 'a little wholesome neglect,' is
+necessary to strengthen and develope the character and to give play to the
+individual nature.  His citizens would not have acquired that knowledge
+which in the vision of Er is supposed to be gained by the pilgrims from
+their experience of evil.
+
+On the other hand, Plato is far in advance of modern philosophers and
+theologians when he teaches that education is to be continued through life
+and will begin again in another.  He would never allow education of some
+kind to cease; although he was aware that the proverbial saying of Solon,
+'I grow old learning many things,' cannot be applied literally.  Himself
+ravished with the contemplation of the idea of good, and delighting in
+solid geometry (Rep.), he has no difficulty in imagining that a lifetime
+might be passed happily in such pursuits.  We who know how many more men of
+business there are in the world than real students or thinkers, are not
+equally sanguine.  The education which he proposes for his citizens is
+really the ideal life of the philosopher or man of genius, interrupted, but
+only for a time, by practical duties,--a life not for the many, but for the
+few.
+
+Yet the thought of Plato may not be wholly incapable of application to our
+own times.  Even if regarded as an ideal which can never be realized, it
+may have a great effect in elevating the characters of mankind, and raising
+them above the routine of their ordinary occupation or profession.  It is
+the best form under which we can conceive the whole of life.  Nevertheless
+the idea of Plato is not easily put into practice.  For the education of
+after life is necessarily the education which each one gives himself.  Men
+and women cannot be brought together in schools or colleges at forty or
+fifty years of age; and if they could the result would be disappointing. 
+The destination of most men is what Plato would call 'the Den' for the
+whole of life, and with that they are content.  Neither have they teachers
+or advisers with whom they can take counsel in riper years.  There is no
+'schoolmaster abroad' who will tell them of their faults, or inspire them
+with the higher sense of duty, or with the ambition of a true success in
+life; no Socrates who will convict them of ignorance; no Christ, or
+follower of Christ, who will reprove them of sin.  Hence they have a
+difficulty in receiving the first element of improvement, which is self-
+knowledge.  The hopes of youth no longer stir them; they rather wish to
+rest than to pursue high objects.  A few only who have come across great
+men and women, or eminent teachers of religion and morality, have received
+a second life from them, and have lighted a candle from the fire of their
+genius.
+
+The want of energy is one of the main reasons why so few persons continue
+to improve in later years.  They have not the will, and do not know the
+way.  They 'never try an experiment,' or look up a point of interest for
+themselves; they make no sacrifices for the sake of knowledge; their minds,
+like their bodies, at a certain age become fixed.  Genius has been defined
+as 'the power of taking pains'; but hardly any one keeps up his interest in
+knowledge throughout a whole life.  The troubles of a family, the business
+of making money, the demands of a profession destroy the elasticity of the
+mind.  The waxen tablet of the memory which was once capable of receiving
+'true thoughts and clear impressions' becomes hard and crowded; there is
+not room for the accumulations of a long life (Theaet.).  The student, as
+years advance, rather makes an exchange of knowledge than adds to his
+stores.  There is no pressing necessity to learn; the stock of Classics or
+History or Natural Science which was enough for a man at twenty-five is
+enough for him at fifty.  Neither is it easy to give a definite answer to
+any one who asks how he is to improve.  For self-education consists in a
+thousand things, commonplace in themselves,--in adding to what we are by
+nature something of what we are not; in learning to see ourselves as others
+see us; in judging, not by opinion, but by the evidence of facts; in
+seeking out the society of superior minds; in a study of lives and writings
+of great men; in observation of the world and character; in receiving
+kindly the natural influence of different times of life; in any act or
+thought which is raised above the practice or opinions of mankind; in the
+pursuit of some new or original enquiry; in any effort of mind which calls
+forth some latent power.
+
+If any one is desirous of carrying out in detail the Platonic education of
+after-life, some such counsels as the following may be offered to him:--
+That he shall choose the branch of knowledge to which his own mind most
+distinctly inclines, and in which he takes the greatest delight, either one
+which seems to connect with his own daily employment, or, perhaps,
+furnishes the greatest contrast to it.  He may study from the speculative
+side the profession or business in which he is practically engaged.  He may
+make Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, Bacon the friends and companions of
+his life.  He may find opportunities of hearing the living voice of a great
+teacher.  He may select for enquiry some point of history or some
+unexplained phenomenon of nature.  An hour a day passed in such scientific
+or literary pursuits will furnish as many facts as the memory can retain,
+and will give him 'a pleasure not to be repented of' (Timaeus).  Only let
+him beware of being the slave of crotchets, or of running after a Will o'
+the Wisp in his ignorance, or in his vanity of attributing to himself the
+gifts of a poet or assuming the air of a philosopher.  He should know the
+limits of his own powers.  Better to build up the mind by slow additions,
+to creep on quietly from one thing to another, to gain insensibly new
+powers and new interests in knowledge, than to form vast schemes which are
+never destined to be realized.  But perhaps, as Plato would say, 'This is
+part of another subject' (Tim.); though we may also defend our digression
+by his example (Theaet.).
+
+4.  We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the natural
+growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on political philosophy
+seem hardly ever to have attracted the attention of Plato and Aristotle. 
+The ancients were familiar with the mutability of human affairs; they could
+moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of empires (Plato,
+Statesman, and Sulpicius' Letter to Cicero); by them fate and chance were
+deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great share in
+political events.  The wiser of them like Thucydides believed that 'what
+had been would be again,' and that a tolerable idea of the future could be
+gathered from the past.  Also they had dreams of a Golden Age which existed
+once upon a time and might still exist in some unknown land, or might
+return again in the remote future.  But the regular growth of a state
+enlightened by experience, progressing in knowledge, improving in the arts,
+of which the citizens were educated by the fulfilment of political duties,
+appears never to have come within the range of their hopes and aspirations. 
+Such a state had never been seen, and therefore could not be conceived by
+them.  Their experience (Aristot. Metaph.; Plato, Laws) led them to
+conclude that there had been cycles of civilization in which the arts had
+been discovered and lost many times over, and cities had been overthrown
+and rebuilt again and again, and deluges and volcanoes and other natural
+convulsions had altered the face of the earth.  Tradition told them of many
+destructions of mankind and of the preservation of a remnant.  The world
+began again after a deluge and was reconstructed out of the fragments of
+itself.  Also they were acquainted with empires of unknown antiquity, like
+the Egyptian or Assyrian; but they had never seen them grow, and could not
+imagine, any more than we can, the state of man which preceded them.  They
+were puzzled and awestricken by the Egyptian monuments, of which the forms,
+as Plato says, not in a figure, but literally, were ten thousand years old
+(Laws), and they contrasted the antiquity of Egypt with their own short
+memories.
+
+The early legends of Hellas have no real connection with the later history: 
+they are at a distance, and the intermediate region is concealed from view;
+there is no road or path which leads from one to the other.  At the
+beginning of Greek history, in the vestibule of the temple, is seen
+standing first of all the figure of the legislator, himself the interpreter
+and servant of the God.  The fundamental laws which he gives are not
+supposed to change with time and circumstances.  The salvation of the state
+is held rather to depend on the inviolable maintenance of them.  They were
+sanctioned by the authority of heaven, and it was deemed impiety to alter
+them.  The desire to maintain them unaltered seems to be the origin of what
+at first sight is very surprising to us--the intolerant zeal of Plato
+against innovators in religion or politics (Laws); although with a happy
+inconsistency he is also willing that the laws of other countries should be
+studied and improvements in legislation privately communicated to the
+Nocturnal Council (Laws).  The additions which were made to them in later
+ages in order to meet the increasing complexity of affairs were still
+ascribed by a fiction to the original legislator; and the words of such
+enactments at Athens were disputed over as if they had been the words of
+Solon himself.  Plato hopes to preserve in a later generation the mind of
+the legislator; he would have his citizens remain within the lines which he
+has laid down for them.  He would not harass them with minute regulations,
+he would have allowed some changes in the laws:  but not changes which
+would affect the fundamental institutions of the state, such for example as
+would convert an aristocracy into a timocracy, or a timocracy into a
+popular form of government.
+
+Passing from speculations to facts, we observe that progress has been the
+exception rather than the law of human history.  And therefore we are not
+surprised to find that the idea of progress is of modern rather than of
+ancient date; and, like the idea of a philosophy of history, is not more
+than a century or two old.  It seems to have arisen out of the impression
+left on the human mind by the growth of the Roman Empire and of the
+Christian Church, and to be due to the political and social improvements
+which they introduced into the world; and still more in our own century to
+the idealism of the first French Revolution and the triumph of American
+Independence; and in a yet greater degree to the vast material prosperity
+and growth of population in England and her colonies and in America.  It is
+also to be ascribed in a measure to the greater study of the philosophy of
+history.  The optimist temperament of some great writers has assisted the
+creation of it, while the opposite character has led a few to regard the
+future of the world as dark.  The 'spectator of all time and of all
+existence' sees more of 'the increasing purpose which through the ages ran'
+than formerly:  but to the inhabitant of a small state of Hellas the vision
+was necessarily limited like the valley in which he dwelt.  There was no
+remote past on which his eye could rest, nor any future from which the veil
+was partly lifted up by the analogy of history.  The narrowness of view,
+which to ourselves appears so singular, was to him natural, if not
+unavoidable.
+
+5.  For the relation of the Republic to the Statesman and the Laws, and the
+two other works of Plato which directly treat of politics, see the
+Introductions to the two latter; a few general points of comparison may be
+touched upon in this place.
+
+And first of the Laws.
+
+(1) The Republic, though probably written at intervals, yet speaking
+generally and judging by the indications of thought and style, may be
+reasonably ascribed to the middle period of Plato's life:  the Laws are
+certainly the work of his declining years, and some portions of them at any
+rate seem to have been written in extreme old age.
+
+(2) The Republic is full of hope and aspiration:  the Laws bear the stamp
+of failure and disappointment.  The one is a finished work which received
+the last touches of the author:  the other is imperfectly executed, and
+apparently unfinished.  The one has the grace and beauty of youth:  the
+other has lost the poetical form, but has more of the severity and
+knowledge of life which is characteristic of old age.
+
+(3) The most conspicuous defect of the Laws is the failure of dramatic
+power, whereas the Republic is full of striking contrasts of ideas and
+oppositions of character.
+
+(4) The Laws may be said to have more the nature of a sermon, the Republic
+of a poem; the one is more religious, the other more intellectual.
+
+(5) Many theories of Plato, such as the doctrine of ideas, the government
+of the world by philosophers, are not found in the Laws; the immortality of
+the soul is first mentioned in xii; the person of Socrates has altogether
+disappeared.  The community of women and children is renounced; the
+institution of common or public meals for women (Laws) is for the first
+time introduced (Ar. Pol.).
+
+(6) There remains in the Laws the old enmity to the poets, who are
+ironically saluted in high-flown terms, and, at the same time, are
+peremptorily ordered out of the city, if they are not willing to submit
+their poems to the censorship of the magistrates (Rep.).
+
+(7) Though the work is in most respects inferior, there are a few passages
+in the Laws, such as the honour due to the soul, the evils of licentious or
+unnatural love, the whole of Book x. (religion), the dishonesty of retail
+trade, and bequests, which come more home to us, and contain more of what
+may be termed the modern element in Plato than almost anything in the
+Republic.
+
+The relation of the two works to one another is very well given: 
+
+(1) by Aristotle in the Politics from the side of the Laws:--
+
+'The same, or nearly the same, objections apply to Plato's later work, the
+Laws, and therefore we had better examine briefly the constitution which is
+therein described.  In the Republic, Socrates has definitely settled in all
+a few questions only; such as the community of women and children, the
+community of property, and the constitution of the state.  The population
+is divided into two classes--one of husbandmen, and the other of warriors;
+from this latter is taken a third class of counsellors and rulers of the
+state.  But Socrates has not determined whether the husbandmen and artists
+are to have a share in the government, and whether they too are to carry
+arms and share in military service or not.  He certainly thinks that the
+women ought to share in the education of the guardians, and to fight by
+their side.  The remainder of the work is filled up with digressions
+foreign to the main subject, and with discussions about the education of
+the guardians.  In the Laws there is hardly anything but laws; not much is
+said about the constitution.  This, which he had intended to make more of
+the ordinary type, he gradually brings round to the other or ideal form. 
+For with the exception of the community of women and property, he supposes
+everything to be the same in both states; there is to be the same
+education; the citizens of both are to live free from servile occupations,
+and there are to be common meals in both.  The only difference is that in
+the Laws the common meals are extended to women, and the warriors number
+about 5000, but in the Republic only 1000.'
+
+(2) by Plato in the Laws (Book v.), from the side of the Republic:--
+
+'The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the
+law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying that
+"Friends have all things in common."  Whether there is now, or ever will
+be, this communion of women and children and of property, in which the
+private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which
+are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common,
+and all men express praise and blame, and feel joy and sorrow, on the same
+occasions, and the laws unite the city to the utmost,--whether all this is
+possible or not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will
+ever constitute a state more exalted in virtue, or truer or better than
+this.  Such a state, whether inhabited by Gods or sons of Gods, will make
+them blessed who dwell therein; and therefore to this we are to look for
+the pattern of the state, and to cling to this, and, as far as possible, to
+seek for one which is like this.  The state which we have now in hand, when
+created, will be nearest to immortality and unity in the next degree; and
+after that, by the grace of God, we will complete the third one.  And we
+will begin by speaking of the nature and origin of the second.'
+
+The comparatively short work called the Statesman or Politicus in its style
+and manner is more akin to the Laws, while in its idealism it rather
+resembles the Republic.  As far as we can judge by various indications of
+language and thought, it must be later than the one and of course earlier
+than the other.  In both the Republic and Statesman a close connection is
+maintained between Politics and Dialectic.  In the Statesman, enquiries
+into the principles of Method are interspersed with discussions about
+Politics.  The comparative advantages of the rule of law and of a person
+are considered, and the decision given in favour of a person (Arist. Pol.). 
+But much may be said on the other side, nor is the opposition necessary;
+for a person may rule by law, and law may be so applied as to be the living
+voice of the legislator.  As in the Republic, there is a myth, describing,
+however, not a future, but a former existence of mankind.  The question is
+asked, 'Whether the state of innocence which is described in the myth, or a
+state like our own which possesses art and science and distinguishes good
+from evil, is the preferable condition of man.'  To this question of the
+comparative happiness of civilized and primitive life, which was so often
+discussed in the last century and in our own, no answer is given.  The
+Statesman, though less perfect in style than the Republic and of far less
+range, may justly be regarded as one of the greatest of Plato's dialogues.
+
+6.  Others as well as Plato have chosen an ideal Republic to be the vehicle
+of thoughts which they could not definitely express, or which went beyond
+their own age.  The classical writing which approaches most nearly to the
+Republic of Plato is the 'De Republica' of Cicero; but neither in this nor
+in any other of his dialogues does he rival the art of Plato.  The manners
+are clumsy and inferior; the hand of the rhetorician is apparent at every
+turn.  Yet noble sentiments are constantly recurring:  the true note of
+Roman patriotism--'We Romans are a great people'--resounds through the
+whole work.  Like Socrates, Cicero turns away from the phenomena of the
+heavens to civil and political life.  He would rather not discuss the 'two
+Suns' of which all Rome was talking, when he can converse about 'the two
+nations in one' which had divided Rome ever since the days of the Gracchi.
+Like Socrates again, speaking in the person of Scipio, he is afraid lest he
+should assume too much the character of a teacher, rather than of an equal
+who is discussing among friends the two sides of a question.  He would
+confine the terms King or State to the rule of reason and justice, and he
+will not concede that title either to a democracy or to a monarchy.  But
+under the rule of reason and justice he is willing to include the natural
+superior ruling over the natural inferior, which he compares to the soul
+ruling over the body.  He prefers a mixture of forms of government to any
+single one.  The two portraits of the just and the unjust, which occur in
+the second book of the Republic, are transferred to the state--Philus, one
+of the interlocutors, maintaining against his will the necessity of
+injustice as a principle of government, while the other, Laelius, supports
+the opposite thesis.  His views of language and number are derived from
+Plato; like him he denounces the drama.  He also declares that if his life
+were to be twice as long he would have no time to read the lyric poets. 
+The picture of democracy is translated by him word for word, though he had
+hardly shown himself able to 'carry the jest' of Plato.  He converts into a
+stately sentence the humorous fancy about the animals, who 'are so imbued
+with the spirit of democracy that they make the passers-by get out of their
+way.'  His description of the tyrant is imitated from Plato, but is far
+inferior.  The second book is historical, and claims for the Roman
+constitution (which is to him the ideal) a foundation of fact such as Plato
+probably intended to have given to the Republic in the Critias.  His most
+remarkable imitation of Plato is the adaptation of the vision of Er, which
+is converted by Cicero into the 'Somnium Scipionis'; he has 'romanized' the
+myth of the Republic, adding an argument for the immortality of the soul
+taken from the Phaedrus, and some other touches derived from the Phaedo and
+the Timaeus.  Though a beautiful tale and containing splendid passages, the
+'Somnium Scipionis; is very inferior to the vision of Er; it is only a
+dream, and hardly allows the reader to suppose that the writer believes in
+his own creation.  Whether his dialogues were framed on the model of the
+lost dialogues of Aristotle, as he himself tells us, or of Plato, to which
+they bear many superficial resemblances, he is still the Roman orator; he
+is not conversing, but making speeches, and is never able to mould the
+intractable Latin to the grace and ease of the Greek Platonic dialogue. 
+But if he is defective in form, much more is he inferior to the Greek in
+matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings leaves upon our minds the
+impression of an original thinker.
+
+Plato's Republic has been said to be a church and not a state; and such an
+ideal of a city in the heavens has always hovered over the Christian world,
+and is embodied in St. Augustine's 'De Civitate Dei,' which is suggested by
+the decay and fall of the Roman Empire, much in the same manner in which we
+may imagine the Republic of Plato to have been influenced by the decline of
+Greek politics in the writer's own age.  The difference is that in the time
+of Plato the degeneracy, though certain, was gradual and insensible: 
+whereas the taking of Rome by the Goths stirred like an earthquake the age
+of St. Augustine.  Men were inclined to believe that the overthrow of the
+city was to be ascribed to the anger felt by the old Roman deities at the
+neglect of their worship.  St. Augustine maintains the opposite thesis; he
+argues that the destruction of the Roman Empire is due, not to the rise of
+Christianity, but to the vices of Paganism.  He wanders over Roman history,
+and over Greek philosophy and mythology, and finds everywhere crime,
+impiety and falsehood.  He compares the worst parts of the Gentile
+religions with the best elements of the faith of Christ.  He shows nothing
+of the spirit which led others of the early Christian Fathers to recognize
+in the writings of the Greek philosophers the power of the divine truth. 
+He traces the parallel of the kingdom of God, that is, the history of the
+Jews, contained in their scriptures, and of the kingdoms of the world,
+which are found in gentile writers, and pursues them both into an ideal
+future.  It need hardly be remarked that his use both of Greek and of Roman
+historians and of the sacred writings of the Jews is wholly uncritical. 
+The heathen mythology, the Sybilline oracles, the myths of Plato, the
+dreams of Neo-Platonists are equally regarded by him as matter of fact.  He
+must be acknowledged to be a strictly polemical or controversial writer who
+makes the best of everything on one side and the worst of everything on the
+other.  He has no sympathy with the old Roman life as Plato has with Greek
+life, nor has he any idea of the ecclesiastical kingdom which was to arise
+out of the ruins of the Roman empire.  He is not blind to the defects of
+the Christian Church, and looks forward to a time when Christian and Pagan
+shall be alike brought before the judgment-seat, and the true City of God
+shall appear...The work of St. Augustine is a curious repertory of
+antiquarian learning and quotations, deeply penetrated with Christian
+ethics, but showing little power of reasoning, and a slender knowledge of
+the Greek literature and language.  He was a great genius, and a noble
+character, yet hardly capable of feeling or understanding anything external
+to his own theology.  Of all the ancient philosophers he is most attracted
+by Plato, though he is very slightly acquainted with his writings.  He is
+inclined to believe that the idea of creation in the Timaeus is derived
+from the narrative in Genesis; and he is strangely taken with the
+coincidence (?) of Plato's saying that 'the philosopher is the lover of
+God,' and the words of the Book of Exodus in which God reveals himself to
+Moses (Exod.)  He dwells at length on miracles performed in his own day, of
+which the evidence is regarded by him as irresistible.  He speaks in a very
+interesting manner of the beauty and utility of nature and of the human
+frame, which he conceives to afford a foretaste of the heavenly state and
+of the resurrection of the body.  The book is not really what to most
+persons the title of it would imply, and belongs to an age which has passed
+away.  But it contains many fine passages and thoughts which are for all
+time.
+
+The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most remarkable of
+mediaeval ideals, and bears the impress of the great genius in whom Italy
+and the Middle Ages are so vividly reflected.  It is the vision of an
+Universal Empire, which is supposed to be the natural and necessary
+government of the world, having a divine authority distinct from the
+Papacy, yet coextensive with it.  It is not 'the ghost of the dead Roman
+Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,' but the legitimate heir and
+successor of it, justified by the ancient virtues of the Romans and the
+beneficence of their rule.  Their right to be the governors of the world is
+also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and acknowledged by St. Paul
+when he appealed to Caesar, and even more emphatically by Christ Himself,
+Who could not have made atonement for the sins of men if He had not been
+condemned by a divinely authorized tribunal.  The necessity for the
+establishment of an Universal Empire is proved partly by a priori arguments
+such as the unity of God and the unity of the family or nation; partly by
+perversions of Scripture and history, by false analogies of nature, by
+misapplied quotations from the classics, and by odd scraps and commonplaces
+of logic, showing a familiar but by no means exact knowledge of Aristotle
+(of Plato there is none).  But a more convincing argument still is the
+miserable state of the world, which he touchingly describes.  He sees no
+hope of happiness or peace for mankind until all nations of the earth are
+comprehended in a single empire.  The whole treatise shows how deeply the
+idea of the Roman Empire was fixed in the minds of his contemporaries.  Not
+much argument was needed to maintain the truth of a theory which to his own
+contemporaries seemed so natural and congenial.  He speaks, or rather
+preaches, from the point of view, not of the ecclesiastic, but of the
+layman, although, as a good Catholic, he is willing to acknowledge that in
+certain respects the Empire must submit to the Church.  The beginning and
+end of all his noble reflections and of his arguments, good and bad, is the
+aspiration 'that in this little plot of earth belonging to mortal man life
+may pass in freedom and peace.'  So inextricably is his vision of the
+future bound up with the beliefs and circumstances of his own age.
+
+The 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius, and
+shows a reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries.  The book was
+written by him at the age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the generous
+sentiments of youth.  He brings the light of Plato to bear upon the
+miserable state of his own country.  Living not long after the Wars of the
+Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is indignant
+at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility and gentry,
+at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by war.  To the eye
+of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay; and side by side with
+the misery and oppression which he has described in the First Book of the
+Utopia, he places in the Second Book the ideal state which by the help of
+Plato he had constructed.  The times were full of stir and intellectual
+interest.  The distant murmur of the Reformation was beginning to be heard.
+To minds like More's, Greek literature was a revelation:  there had arisen
+an art of interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be
+understood as it had never been before, and has not often been since, in
+its natural sense.  The life there depicted appeared to him wholly unlike
+that of Christian commonwealths, in which 'he saw nothing but a certain
+conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and
+title of the Commonwealth.'  He thought that Christ, like Plato,
+'instituted all things common,' for which reason, he tells us, the citizens
+of Utopia were the more willing to receive his doctrines ('Howbeit, I think
+this was no small help and furtherance in the matter, that they heard us
+say that Christ instituted among his, all things common, and that the same
+community doth yet remain in the rightest Christian communities'
+(Utopia).).  The community of property is a fixed idea with him, though he
+is aware of the arguments which may be urged on the other side ('These
+things (I say), when I consider with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do
+nothing marvel that he would make no laws for them that refused those laws,
+whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of riches and
+commodities.  For the wise men did easily foresee this to be the one and
+only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all things should be
+brought in and established' (Utopia).).  We wonder how in the reign of
+Henry VIII, though veiled in another language and published in a foreign
+country, such speculations could have been endured.
+
+He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one who succeeded
+him, with the exception of Swift.  In the art of feigning he is a worthy
+disciple of Plato.  Like him, starting from a small portion of fact, he
+founds his tale with admirable skill on a few lines in the Latin narrative
+of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci.  He is very precise about dates and
+facts, and has the power of making us believe that the narrator of the tale
+must have been an eyewitness.  We are fairly puzzled by his manner of
+mixing up real and imaginary persons; his boy John Clement and Peter Giles, 
+citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes about the precise words which are
+supposed to have been used by the (imaginary) Portuguese traveller, Raphael
+Hythloday.  'I have the more cause,' says Hythloday, 'to fear that my words
+shall not be believed, for that I know how difficultly and hardly I myself
+would have believed another man telling the same, if I had not myself seen
+it with mine own eyes.'  Or again:  'If you had been with me in Utopia, and
+had presently seen their fashions and laws as I did which lived there five
+years and more, and would never have come thence, but only to make the new
+land known here,' etc.  More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask
+Hythloday in what part of the world Utopia is situated; he 'would have
+spent no small sum of money rather than it should have escaped him,' and he
+begs Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and obtain an answer to
+the question.  After this we are not surprised to hear that a Professor of
+Divinity (perhaps 'a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,' as the
+translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a missionary by the
+High Bishop, 'yea, and that he may himself be made Bishop of Utopia,
+nothing doubting that he must obtain this Bishopric with suit; and he
+counteth that a godly suit which proceedeth not of the desire of honour or
+lucre, but only of a godly zeal.'  The design may have failed through the
+disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we have 'very uncertain news'
+after his departure.  There is no doubt, however, that he had told More and
+Giles the exact situation of the island, but unfortunately at the same
+moment More's attention, as he is reminded in a letter from Giles, was
+drawn off by a servant, and one of the company from a cold caught on
+shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent Giles from hearing.  And 'the
+secret has perished' with him; to this day the place of Utopia remains
+unknown.
+
+The words of Phaedrus, 'O Socrates, you can easily invent Egyptians or
+anything,' are recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike fiction.  Yet
+the greater merit of the work is not the admirable art, but the originality
+of thought.  More is as free as Plato from the prejudices of his age, and
+far more tolerant.  The Utopians do not allow him who believes not in the
+immortality of the soul to share in the administration of the state (Laws),
+'howbeit they put him to no punishment, because they be persuaded that it
+is in no man's power to believe what he list'; and 'no man is to be blamed
+for reasoning in support of his own religion ('One of our company in my
+presence was sharply punished.  He, as soon as he was baptised, began,
+against our wills, with more earnest affection than wisdom, to reason of
+Christ's religion, and began to wax so hot in his matter, that he did not
+only prefer our religion before all other, but also did despise and condemn
+all other, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and
+devilish, and the children of everlasting damnation.  When he had thus long
+reasoned the matter, they laid hold on him, accused him, and condemned him
+into exile, not as a despiser of religion, but as a seditious person and a
+raiser up of dissension among the people').'  In the public services 'no
+prayers be used, but such as every man may boldly pronounce without giving
+offence to any sect.'  He says significantly, 'There be that give worship
+to a man that was once of excellent virtue or of famous glory, not only as
+God, but also the chiefest and highest God.  But the most and the wisest
+part, rejecting all these, believe that there is a certain godly power
+unknown, far above the capacity and reach of man's wit, dispersed
+throughout all the world, not in bigness, but in virtue and power.  Him
+they call the Father of all.  To Him alone they attribute the beginnings,
+the increasings, the proceedings, the changes, and the ends of all things. 
+Neither give they any divine honours to any other than him.'  So far was
+More from sharing the popular beliefs of his time.  Yet at the end he
+reminds us that he does not in all respects agree with the customs and
+opinions of the Utopians which he describes.  And we should let him have
+the benefit of this saving clause, and not rudely withdraw the veil behind
+which he has been pleased to conceal himself.
+
+Nor is he less in advance of popular opinion in his political and moral
+speculations.  He would like to bring military glory into contempt; he
+would set all sorts of idle people to profitable occupation, including in
+the same class, priests, women, noblemen, gentlemen, and 'sturdy and
+valiant beggars,' that the labour of all may be reduced to six hours a day. 
+His dislike of capital punishment, and plans for the reformation of
+offenders; his detestation of priests and lawyers (Compare his satirical
+observation:  'They (the Utopians) have priests of exceeding holiness, and
+therefore very few.); his remark that 'although every one may hear of
+ravenous dogs and wolves and cruel man-eaters, it is not easy to find
+states that are well and wisely governed,' are curiously at variance with
+the notions of his age and indeed with his own life.  There are many points
+in which he shows a modern feeling and a prophetic insight like Plato.  He
+is a sanitary reformer; he maintains that civilized states have a right to
+the soil of waste countries; he is inclined to the opinion which places
+happiness in virtuous pleasures, but herein, as he thinks, not disagreeing
+from those other philosophers who define virtue to be a life according to
+nature.  He extends the idea of happiness so as to include the happiness of
+others; and he argues ingeniously, 'All men agree that we ought to make
+others happy; but if others, how much more ourselves!'  And still he thinks
+that there may be a more excellent way, but to this no man's reason can
+attain unless heaven should inspire him with a higher truth.  His
+ceremonies before marriage; his humane proposal that war should be carried
+on by assassinating the leaders of the enemy, may be compared to some of
+the paradoxes of Plato.  He has a charming fancy, like the affinities of
+Greeks and barbarians in the Timaeus, that the Utopians learnt the language
+of the Greeks with the more readiness because they were originally of the
+same race with them.  He is penetrated with the spirit of Plato, and quotes
+or adapts many thoughts both from the Republic and from the Timaeus.  He
+prefers public duties to private, and is somewhat impatient of the
+importunity of relations.  His citizens have no silver or gold of their
+own, but are ready enough to pay them to their mercenaries.  There is
+nothing of which he is more contemptuous than the love of money.  Gold is
+used for fetters of criminals, and diamonds and pearls for children's
+necklaces (When the ambassadors came arrayed in gold and peacocks' feathers
+'to the eyes of all the Utopians except very few, which had been in other
+countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel
+seemed shameful and reproachful.  In so much that they most reverently
+saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords--passing over the
+ambassadors themselves without any honour, judging them by their wearing of
+golden chains to be bondmen.  You should have seen children also, that had
+cast away their pearls and precious stones, when they saw the like sticking
+upon the ambassadors' caps, dig and push their mothers under the sides,
+saying thus to them--"Look, though he were a little child still."  But the
+mother; yea and that also in good earnest:  "Peace, son," saith she, "I
+think he be some of the ambassadors' fools."')
+
+Like Plato he is full of satirical reflections on governments and princes;
+on the state of the world and of knowledge.  The hero of his discourse
+(Hythloday) is very unwilling to become a minister of state, considering
+that he would lose his independence and his advice would never be heeded
+(Compare an exquisite passage, of which the conclusion is as follows:  'And
+verily it is naturally given...suppressed and ended.')  He ridicules the
+new logic of his time; the Utopians could never be made to understand the
+doctrine of Second Intentions ('For they have not devised one of all those
+rules of restrictions, amplifications, and suppositions, very wittily
+invented in the small Logicals, which here our children in every place do
+learn.  Furthermore, they were never yet able to find out the second
+intentions; insomuch that none of them all could ever see man himself in
+common, as they call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than was ever
+any giant, yea, and pointed to of us even with our finger.')  He is very
+severe on the sports of the gentry; the Utopians count 'hunting the lowest,
+the vilest, and the most abject part of butchery.'  He quotes the words of
+the Republic in which the philosopher is described 'standing out of the way
+under a wall until the driving storm of sleet and rain be overpast,' which
+admit of a singular application to More's own fate; although, writing
+twenty years before (about the year 1514), he can hardly be supposed to
+have foreseen this.  There is no touch of satire which strikes deeper than
+his quiet remark that the greater part of the precepts of Christ are more
+at variance with the lives of ordinary Christians than the discourse of
+Utopia ('And yet the most part of them is more dissident from the manners
+of the world now a days, than my communication was.  But preachers, sly and
+wily men, following your counsel (as I suppose) because they saw men evil-
+willing to frame their manners to Christ's rule, they have wrested and
+wried his doctrine, and, like a rule of lead, have applied it to men's
+manners, that by some means at the least way, they might agree together.')
+
+The 'New Atlantis' is only a fragment, and far inferior in merit to the
+'Utopia.'  The work is full of ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy,
+and by no means impresses the reader with a sense of credibility.  In some
+places Lord Bacon is characteristically different from Sir Thomas More, as,
+for example, in the external state which he attributes to the governor of
+Solomon's House, whose dress he minutely describes, while to Sir Thomas
+More such trappings appear simple ridiculous.  Yet, after this programme of
+dress, Bacon adds the beautiful trait, 'that he had a look as though he
+pitied men.'  Several things are borrowed by him from the Timaeus; but he
+has injured the unity of style by adding thoughts and passages which are
+taken from the Hebrew Scriptures.
+
+The 'City of the Sun' written by Campanella (1568-1639), a Dominican friar,
+several years after the 'New Atlantis' of Bacon, has many resemblances to
+the Republic of Plato.  The citizens have wives and children in common;
+their marriages are of the same temporary sort, and are arranged by the
+magistrates from time to time.  They do not, however, adopt his system of
+lots, but bring together the best natures, male and female, 'according to
+philosophical rules.'  The infants until two years of age are brought up by
+their mothers in public temples; and since individuals for the most part
+educate their children badly, at the beginning of their third year they are
+committed to the care of the State, and are taught at first, not out of
+books, but from paintings of all kinds, which are emblazoned on the walls
+of the city.  The city has six interior circuits of walls, and an outer
+wall which is the seventh.  On this outer wall are painted the figures of
+legislators and philosophers, and on each of the interior walls the symbols
+or forms of some one of the sciences are delineated.  The women are, for
+the most part, trained, like the men, in warlike and other exercises; but
+they have two special occupations of their own.  After a battle, they and
+the boys soothe and relieve the wounded warriors; also they encourage them
+with embraces and pleasant words.  Some elements of the Christian or
+Catholic religion are preserved among them.  The life of the Apostles is
+greatly admired by this people because they had all things in common; and
+the short prayer which Jesus Christ taught men is used in their worship. 
+It is a duty of the chief magistrates to pardon sins, and therefore the
+whole people make secret confession of them to the magistrates, and they to
+their chief, who is a sort of Rector Metaphysicus; and by this means he is
+well informed of all that is going on in the minds of men.  After
+confession, absolution is granted to the citizens collectively, but no one
+is mentioned by name.  There also exists among them a practice of perpetual
+prayer, performed by a succession of priests, who change every hour.  Their
+religion is a worship of God in Trinity, that is of Wisdom, Love and Power,
+but without any distinction of persons.  They behold in the sun the
+reflection of His glory; mere graven images they reject, refusing to fall
+under the 'tyranny' of idolatry.
+
+Many details are given about their customs of eating and drinking, about
+their mode of dressing, their employments, their wars.  Campanella looks
+forward to a new mode of education, which is to be a study of nature, and
+not of Aristotle.  He would not have his citizens waste their time in the
+consideration of what he calls 'the dead signs of things.'  He remarks that
+he who knows one science only, does not really know that one any more than
+the rest, and insists strongly on the necessity of a variety of knowledge.
+More scholars are turned out in the City of the Sun in one year than by
+contemporary methods in ten or fifteen.  He evidently believes, like Bacon,
+that henceforward natural science will play a great part in education, a
+hope which seems hardly to have been realized, either in our own or in any
+former age; at any rate the fulfilment of it has been long deferred.
+
+There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this work, and a
+most enlightened spirit pervades it.  But it has little or no charm of
+style, and falls very far short of the 'New Atlantis' of Bacon, and still
+more of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More.  It is full of inconsistencies,
+and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a superficial acquaintance with
+his writings.  It is a work such as one might expect to have been written
+by a philosopher and man of genius who was also a friar, and who had spent
+twenty-seven years of his life in a prison of the Inquisition.  The most
+interesting feature of the book, common to Plato and Sir Thomas More, is
+the deep feeling which is shown by the writer, of the misery and ignorance
+prevailing among the lower classes in his own time.  Campanella takes note
+of Aristotle's answer to Plato's community of property, that in a society
+where all things are common, no individual would have any motive to work
+(Arist. Pol.):  he replies, that his citizens being happy and contented in
+themselves (they are required to work only four hours a day), will have
+greater regard for their fellows than exists among men at present.  He
+thinks, like Plato, that if he abolishes private feelings and interests, a
+great public feeling will take their place.
+
+Other writings on ideal states, such as the 'Oceana' of Harrington, in
+which the Lord Archon, meaning Cromwell, is described, not as he was, but
+as he ought to have been; or the 'Argenis' of Barclay, which is an
+historical allegory of his own time, are too unlike Plato to be worth
+mentioning.  More interesting than either of these, and far more Platonic
+in style and thought, is Sir John Eliot's 'Monarchy of Man,' in which the
+prisoner of the Tower, no longer able 'to be a politician in the land of
+his birth,' turns away from politics to view 'that other city which is
+within him,' and finds on the very threshold of the grave that the secret
+of human happiness is the mastery of self.  The change of government in the
+time of the English Commonwealth set men thinking about first principles,
+and gave rise to many works of this class...The great original genius of
+Swift owes nothing to Plato; nor is there any trace in the conversation or
+in the works of Dr. Johnson of any acquaintance with his writings.  He
+probably would have refuted Plato without reading him, in the same fashion
+in which he supposed himself to have refuted Bishop Berkeley's theory of
+the non-existence of matter.  If we except the so-called English
+Platonists, or rather Neo-Platonists, who never understood their master,
+and the writings of Coleridge, who was to some extent a kindred spirit,
+Plato has left no permanent impression on English literature.
+
+7.  Human life and conduct are affected by ideals in the same way that they
+are affected by the examples of eminent men.  Neither the one nor the other
+are immediately applicable to practice, but there is a virtue flowing from
+them which tends to raise individuals above the common routine of society
+or trade, and to elevate States above the mere interests of commerce or the
+necessities of self-defence.  Like the ideals of art they are partly framed
+by the omission of particulars; they require to be viewed at a certain
+distance, and are apt to fade away if we attempt to approach them.  They
+gain an imaginary distinctness when embodied in a State or in a system of
+philosophy, but they still remain the visions of 'a world unrealized.' 
+More striking and obvious to the ordinary mind are the examples of great
+men, who have served their own generation and are remembered in another. 
+Even in our own family circle there may have been some one, a woman, or
+even a child, in whose face has shone forth a goodness more than human. 
+The ideal then approaches nearer to us, and we fondly cling to it.  The
+ideal of the past, whether of our own past lives or of former states of
+society, has a singular fascination for the minds of many.  Too late we
+learn that such ideals cannot be recalled, though the recollection of them
+may have a humanizing influence on other times.  But the abstractions of
+philosophy are to most persons cold and vacant; they give light without
+warmth; they are like the full moon in the heavens when there are no stars
+appearing.  Men cannot live by thought alone; the world of sense is always
+breaking in upon them.  They are for the most part confined to a corner of
+earth, and see but a little way beyond their own home or place of abode;
+they 'do not lift up their eyes to the hills'; they are not awake when the
+dawn appears.  But in Plato we have reached a height from which a man may
+look into the distance and behold the future of the world and of
+philosophy.  The ideal of the State and of the life of the philosopher; the
+ideal of an education continuing through life and extending equally to both
+sexes; the ideal of the unity and correlation of knowledge; the faith in
+good and immortality--are the vacant forms of light on which Plato is
+seeking to fix the eye of mankind.
+
+8.  Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek
+Philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day:  one seen more
+clearly than formerly, as though each year and each generation brought us
+nearer to some great change; the other almost in the same degree retiring
+from view behind the laws of nature, as if oppressed by them, but still
+remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the heart of man. 
+The first ideal is the future of the human race in this world; the second
+the future of the individual in another.  The first is the more perfect
+realization of our own present life; the second, the abnegation of it:  the
+one, limited by experience, the other, transcending it.  Both of them have
+been and are powerful motives of action; there are a few in whom they have
+taken the place of all earthly interests.  The hope of a future for the
+human race at first sight seems to be the more disinterested, the hope of
+individual existence the more egotistical, of the two motives.  But when
+men have learned to resolve their hope of a future either for themselves or
+for the world into the will of God--'not my will but Thine,' the difference
+between them falls away; and they may be allowed to make either of them the
+basis of their lives, according to their own individual character or
+temperament.  There is as much faith in the willingness to work for an
+unseen future in this world as in another.  Neither is it inconceivable
+that some rare nature may feel his duty to another generation, or to
+another century, almost as strongly as to his own, or that living always in
+the presence of God, he may realize another world as vividly as he does
+this.
+
+The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under
+similitudes derived from human qualities; although sometimes, like the
+Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures of speech and describe the
+nature of God only in negatives.  These again by degrees acquire a positive
+meaning.  It would be well, if when meditating on the higher truths either
+of philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one form of expression
+for another, lest through the necessities of language we should become the
+slaves of mere words.
+
+There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which has a place
+in the home and heart of every believer in the religion of Christ, and in
+which men seem to find a nearer and more familiar truth, the Divine man,
+the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, Who is the first-born and head of
+the whole family in heaven and earth, in Whom the Divine and human, that
+which is without and that which is within the range of our earthly
+faculties, are indissolubly united.  Neither is this divine form of
+goodness wholly separable from the ideal of the Christian Church, which is
+said in the New Testament to be 'His body,' or at variance with those other
+images of good which Plato sets before us.  We see Him in a figure only,
+and of figures of speech we select but a few, and those the simplest, to be
+the expression of Him.  We behold Him in a picture, but He is not there. 
+We gather up the fragments of His discourses, but neither do they represent
+Him as He truly was.  His dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, but in
+the heart of man.  This is that image which Plato saw dimly in the
+distance, which, when existing among men, he called, in the language of
+Homer, 'the likeness of God,' the likeness of a nature which in all ages
+men have felt to be greater and better than themselves, and which in
+endless forms, whether derived from Scripture or nature, from the witness
+of history or from the human heart, regarded as a person or not as a
+person, with or without parts or passions, existing in space or not in
+space, is and will always continue to be to mankind the Idea of Good.
+
+
+
+
+THE REPUBLIC.
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE.
+
+Socrates, who is the narrator.
+
+Glaucon.
+
+Adeimantus.
+
+Polemarchus.
+
+Cephalus.
+
+Thrasymachus.
+
+Cleitophon.
+
+And others who are mute auditors.
+
+The scene is laid in the house of Cephalus at the Piraeus; and the whole
+dialogue is narrated by Socrates the day after it actually took place to
+Timaeus, Hermocrates, Critias, and a nameless person, who are introduced in
+the Timaeus.
+
+
+I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that
+I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.);
+and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the
+festival, which was a new thing.  I was delighted with the procession of
+the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more,
+beautiful.  When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we
+turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the
+son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were
+starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for
+him.  The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: 
+Polemarchus desires you to wait.
+
+I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
+
+There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
+
+Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared,
+and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son of Nicias,
+and several others who had been at the procession.
+
+Polemarchus said to me:  I perceive, Socrates, that you and your companion
+are already on your way to the city.
+
+You are not far wrong, I said.
+
+But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
+
+Of course.
+
+And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain
+where you are.
+
+May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let
+us go?
+
+But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
+
+Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
+
+Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
+
+Adeimantus added:  Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in
+honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?
+
+With horses! I replied:  That is a novelty.  Will horsemen carry torches
+and pass them one to another during the race?
+
+Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will be celebrated
+at night, which you certainly ought to see.  Let us rise soon after supper
+and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will
+have a good talk.  Stay then, and do not be perverse.
+
+Glaucon said:  I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
+
+Very good, I replied.
+
+Accordingly we went with Polemarchus to his house; and there we found his
+brothers Lysias and Euthydemus, and with them Thrasymachus the
+Chalcedonian, Charmantides the Paeanian, and Cleitophon the son of
+Aristonymus.  There too was Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, whom I had
+not seen for a long time, and I thought him very much aged.  He was seated
+on a cushioned chair, and had a garland on his head, for he had been
+sacrificing in the court; and there were some other chairs in the room
+arranged in a semicircle, upon which we sat down by him.  He saluted me
+eagerly, and then he said:--
+
+You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought:  If I were still
+able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me.  But at my age I
+can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come oftener to the
+Piraeus.  For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade
+away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.  Do not
+then deny my request, but make our house your resort and keep company with
+these young men; we are old friends, and you will be quite at home with us.
+
+I replied:  There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus,
+than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have
+gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire,
+whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.  And this is a
+question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time
+which the poets call the 'threshold of old age'--Is life harder towards the
+end, or what report do you give of it?
+
+I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is.  Men of my age
+flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at
+our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is --I cannot eat, I
+cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away:  there was a
+good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.  Some
+complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will
+tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause.  But to me,
+Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in
+fault.  For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old
+man, would have felt as they do.  But this is not my own experience, nor
+that of others whom I have known.  How well I remember the aged poet
+Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age,
+Sophocles,--are you still the man you were?  Peace, he replied; most gladly
+have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped
+from a mad and furious master.  His words have often occurred to my mind
+since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. 
+For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the
+passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the
+grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.  The truth is, Socrates,
+that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be
+attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters
+and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the
+pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age
+are equally a burden.
+
+I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go on
+--Yes, Cephalus, I said:  but I rather suspect that people in general are
+not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age sits
+lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but because you
+are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
+
+You are right, he replied; they are not convinced:  and there is something
+in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine.  I might answer
+them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying
+that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he was an Athenian: 
+'If you had been a native of my country or I of yours, neither of us would
+have been famous.'  And to those who are not rich and are impatient of old
+age, the same reply may be made; for to the good poor man old age cannot be
+a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself.
+
+May I ask, Cephalus, whether your fortune was for the most part inherited
+or acquired by you?
+
+Acquired!  Socrates; do you want to know how much I acquired?  In the art
+of making money I have been midway between my father and grandfather:  for
+my grandfather, whose name I bear, doubled and trebled the value of his
+patrimony, that which he inherited being much what I possess now; but my
+father Lysanias reduced the property below what it is at present:  and I
+shall be satisfied if I leave to these my sons not less but a little more
+than I received.
+
+That was why I asked you the question, I replied, because I see that you
+are indifferent about money, which is a characteristic rather of those who
+have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them; the
+makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own,
+resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for
+their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and
+profit which is common to them and all men.  And hence they are very bad
+company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+Yes, that is very true, but may I ask another question?--What do you
+consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your
+wealth?
+
+One, he said, of which I could not expect easily to convince others.  For
+let me tell you, Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be near death,
+fears and cares enter into his mind which he never had before; the tales of
+a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here
+were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the
+thought that they may be true:  either from the weakness of age, or because
+he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of
+these things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins
+to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others.  And when he
+finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like
+a child start up in his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark
+forebodings.  But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar
+charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age:
+
+'Hope,' he says, 'cherishes the soul of him who lives in justice and
+holiness, and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his journey;--
+hope which is mightiest to sway the restless soul of man.'
+
+How admirable are his words!  And the great blessing of riches, I do not
+say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to
+deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and
+when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension about
+offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men.  Now to this peace
+of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say,
+that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which
+wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest.
+
+Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it?--to
+speak the truth and to pay your debts--no more than this?  And even to this
+are there not exceptions?  Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has
+deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right
+mind, ought I to give them back to him?  No one would say that I ought or
+that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would say that I
+ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his condition.
+
+You are quite right, he replied.
+
+But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct
+definition of justice.
+
+Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said Polemarchus
+interposing.
+
+I fear, said Cephalus, that I must go now, for I have to look after the
+sacrifices, and I hand over the argument to Polemarchus and the company.
+
+Is not Polemarchus your heir? I said.
+
+To be sure, he answered, and went away laughing to the sacrifices.
+
+Tell me then, O thou heir of the argument, what did Simonides say, and
+according to you truly say, about justice?
+
+He said that the repayment of a debt is just, and in saying so he appears
+to me to be right.
+
+I should be sorry to doubt the word of such a wise and inspired man, but
+his meaning, though probably clear to you, is the reverse of clear to me. 
+For he certainly does not mean, as we were just now saying, that I ought to
+return a deposit of arms or of anything else to one who asks for it when he
+is not in his right senses; and yet a deposit cannot be denied to be a
+debt.
+
+True.
+
+Then when the person who asks me is not in his right mind I am by no means
+to make the return?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+When Simonides said that the repayment of a debt was justice, he did not
+mean to include that case?
+
+Certainly not; for he thinks that a friend ought always to do good to a
+friend and never evil.
+
+You mean that the return of a deposit of gold which is to the injury of the
+receiver, if the two parties are friends, is not the repayment of a debt,--
+that is what you would imagine him to say?
+
+Yes.
+
+And are enemies also to receive what we owe to them?
+
+To be sure, he said, they are to receive what we owe them, and an enemy, as
+I take it, owes to an enemy that which is due or proper to him--that is to
+say, evil.
+
+Simonides, then, after the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken
+darkly of the nature of justice; for he really meant to say that justice is
+the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt.
+
+That must have been his meaning, he said.
+
+By heaven! I replied; and if we asked him what due or proper thing is given
+by medicine, and to whom, what answer do you think that he would make to
+us?
+
+He would surely reply that medicine gives drugs and meat and drink to human
+bodies.
+
+And what due or proper thing is given by cookery, and to what?
+
+Seasoning to food.
+
+And what is that which justice gives, and to whom?
+
+If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the preceding
+instances, then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to
+enemies.
+
+That is his meaning then?
+
+I think so.
+
+And who is best able to do good to his friends and evil to his enemies in
+time of sickness?
+
+The physician.
+
+Or when they are on a voyage, amid the perils of the sea?
+
+The pilot.
+
+And in what sort of actions or with a view to what result is the just man
+most able to do harm to his enemy and good to his friend?
+
+In going to war against the one and in making alliances with the other.
+
+But when a man is well, my dear Polemarchus, there is no need of a
+physician?
+
+No.
+
+And he who is not on a voyage has no need of a pilot?
+
+No.
+
+Then in time of peace justice will be of no use?
+
+I am very far from thinking so.
+
+You think that justice may be of use in peace as well as in war?
+
+Yes.
+
+Like husbandry for the acquisition of corn?
+
+Yes.
+
+Or like shoemaking for the acquisition of shoes,--that is what you mean?
+
+Yes.
+
+And what similar use or power of acquisition has justice in time of peace?
+
+In contracts, Socrates, justice is of use.
+
+And by contracts you mean partnerships?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But is the just man or the skilful player a more useful and better partner
+at a game of draughts?
+
+The skilful player.
+
+And in the laying of bricks and stones is the just man a more useful or
+better partner than the builder?
+
+Quite the reverse.
+
+Then in what sort of partnership is the just man a better partner than the
+harp-player, as in playing the harp the harp-player is certainly a better
+partner than the just man?
+
+In a money partnership.
+
+Yes, Polemarchus, but surely not in the use of money; for you do not want a
+just man to be your counsellor in the purchase or sale of a horse; a man
+who is knowing about horses would be better for that, would he not?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And when you want to buy a ship, the shipwright or the pilot would be
+better?
+
+True.
+
+Then what is that joint use of silver or gold in which the just man is to
+be preferred?
+
+When you want a deposit to be kept safely.
+
+You mean when money is not wanted, but allowed to lie?
+
+Precisely.
+
+That is to say, justice is useful when money is useless?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+And when you want to keep a pruning-hook safe, then justice is useful to
+the individual and to the state; but when you want to use it, then the art
+of the vine-dresser?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And when you want to keep a shield or a lyre, and not to use them, you
+would say that justice is useful; but when you want to use them, then the
+art of the soldier or of the musician?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And so of all other things;--justice is useful when they are useless, and
+useless when they are useful?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+Then justice is not good for much.  But let us consider this further point: 
+Is not he who can best strike a blow in a boxing match or in any kind of
+fighting best able to ward off a blow?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And he who is most skilful in preventing or escaping from a disease is best
+able to create one?
+
+True.
+
+And he is the best guard of a camp who is best able to steal a march upon
+the enemy?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?
+
+That, I suppose, is to be inferred.
+
+Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.
+
+That is implied in the argument.
+
+Then after all the just man has turned out to be a thief.  And this is a
+lesson which I suspect you must have learnt out of Homer; for he, speaking
+of Autolycus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, who is a favourite of
+his, affirms that
+
+'He was excellent above all men in theft and perjury.'
+
+And so, you and Homer and Simonides are agreed that justice is an art of
+theft; to be practised however 'for the good of friends and for the harm of
+enemies,'--that was what you were saying?
+
+No, certainly not that, though I do not now know what I did say; but I
+still stand by the latter words.
+
+Well, there is another question:  By friends and enemies do we mean those
+who are so really, or only in seeming?
+
+Surely, he said, a man may be expected to love those whom he thinks good,
+and to hate those whom he thinks evil.
+
+Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil:  many who are not
+good seem to be so, and conversely?
+
+That is true.
+
+Then to them the good will be enemies and the evil will be their friends? 
+True.
+
+And in that case they will be right in doing good to the evil and evil to
+the good?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But the good are just and would not do an injustice?
+
+True.
+
+Then according to your argument it is just to injure those who do no wrong?
+
+Nay, Socrates; the doctrine is immoral.
+
+Then I suppose that we ought to do good to the just and harm to the unjust?
+
+I like that better.
+
+But see the consequence:--Many a man who is ignorant of human nature has
+friends who are bad friends, and in that case he ought to do harm to them;
+and he has good enemies whom he ought to benefit; but, if so, we shall be
+saying the very opposite of that which we affirmed to be the meaning of
+Simonides.
+
+Very true, he said:  and I think that we had better correct an error into
+which we seem to have fallen in the use of the words 'friend' and 'enemy.'
+
+What was the error, Polemarchus? I asked.
+
+We assumed that he is a friend who seems to be or who is thought good.
+
+And how is the error to be corrected?
+
+We should rather say that he is a friend who is, as well as seems, good;
+and that he who seems only, and is not good, only seems to be and is not a
+friend; and of an enemy the same may be said.
+
+You would argue that the good are our friends and the bad our enemies?
+
+Yes.
+
+And instead of saying simply as we did at first, that it is just to do good
+to our friends and harm to our enemies, we should further say:  It is just
+to do good to our friends when they are good and harm to our enemies when
+they are evil?
+
+Yes, that appears to me to be the truth.
+
+But ought the just to injure any one at all?
+
+Undoubtedly he ought to injure those who are both wicked and his enemies.
+
+When horses are injured, are they improved or deteriorated?
+
+The latter.
+
+Deteriorated, that is to say, in the good qualities of horses, not of dogs?
+
+Yes, of horses.
+
+And dogs are deteriorated in the good qualities of dogs, and not of horses?
+
+Of course.
+
+And will not men who are injured be deteriorated in that which is the
+proper virtue of man?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that human virtue is justice?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?
+
+That is the result.
+
+But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking generally, can the
+good by virtue make them bad?
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+Any more than heat can produce cold?
+
+It cannot.
+
+Or drought moisture?
+
+Clearly not.
+
+Nor can the good harm any one?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the just is the good?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then to injure a friend or any one else is not the act of a just man, but
+of the opposite, who is the unjust?
+
+I think that what you say is quite true, Socrates.
+
+Then if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and
+that good is the debt which a just man owes to his friends, and evil the
+debt which he owes to his enemies,--to say this is not wise; for it is not
+true, if, as has been clearly shown, the injuring of another can be in no
+case just.
+
+I agree with you, said Polemarchus.
+
+Then you and I are prepared to take up arms against any one who attributes
+such a saying to Simonides or Bias or Pittacus, or any other wise man or
+seer?
+
+I am quite ready to do battle at your side, he said.
+
+Shall I tell you whose I believe the saying to be?
+
+Whose?
+
+I believe that Periander or Perdiccas or Xerxes or Ismenias the Theban, or
+some other rich and mighty man, who had a great opinion of his own power,
+was the first to say that justice is 'doing good to your friends and harm
+to your enemies.'
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Yes, I said; but if this definition of justice also breaks down, what other
+can be offered?
+
+Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an
+attempt to get the argument into his own hands, and had been put down by
+the rest of the company, who wanted to hear the end.  But when Polemarchus
+and I had done speaking and there was a pause, he could no longer hold his
+peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at us like a wild beast, seeking
+to devour us.  We were quite panic-stricken at the sight of him.
+
+He roared out to the whole company:  What folly, Socrates, has taken
+possession of you all?  And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to one
+another?  I say that if you want really to know what justice is, you should
+not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to yourself from
+the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for there is many
+a one who can ask and cannot answer.  And now I will not have you say that
+justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort
+of nonsense will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy.
+
+I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without
+trembling.  Indeed I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I
+should have been struck dumb:  but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at
+him first, and was therefore able to reply to him.
+
+Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don't be hard upon us.  Polemarchus
+and I may have been guilty of a little mistake in the argument, but I can
+assure you that the error was not intentional.  If we were seeking for a
+piece of gold, you would not imagine that we were 'knocking under to one
+another,' and so losing our chance of finding it.  And why, when we are
+seeking for justice, a thing more precious than many pieces of gold, do you
+say that we are weakly yielding to one another and not doing our utmost to
+get at the truth?  Nay, my good friend, we are most willing and anxious to
+do so, but the fact is that we cannot.  And if so, you people who know all
+things should pity us and not be angry with us.
+
+How characteristic of Socrates! he replied, with a bitter laugh;--that's
+your ironical style!  Did I not foresee--have I not already told you, that
+whatever he was asked he would refuse to answer, and try irony or any other
+shuffle, in order that he might avoid answering?
+
+You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you
+ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom
+you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or
+four times three, 'for this sort of nonsense will not do for me,'--then
+obviously, if that is your way of putting the question, no one can answer
+you. But suppose that he were to retort, 'Thrasymachus, what do you mean? 
+If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to the
+question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right
+one?--is that your meaning?'--How would you answer him?
+
+Just as if the two cases were at all alike! he said.
+
+Why should they not be? I replied; and even if they are not, but only
+appear to be so to the person who is asked, ought he not to say what he
+thinks, whether you and I forbid him or not?
+
+I presume then that you are going to make one of the interdicted answers?
+
+I dare say that I may, notwithstanding the danger, if upon reflection I
+approve of any of them.
+
+But what if I give you an answer about justice other and better, he said,
+than any of these?  What do you deserve to have done to you?
+
+Done to me!--as becomes the ignorant, I must learn from the wise--that is
+what I deserve to have done to me.
+
+What, and no payment! a pleasant notion!
+
+I will pay when I have the money, I replied.
+
+But you have, Socrates, said Glaucon:  and you, Thrasymachus, need be under
+no anxiety about money, for we will all make a contribution for Socrates.
+
+Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does--refuse to
+answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of some one else.
+
+Why, my good friend, I said, how can any one answer who knows, and says
+that he knows, just nothing; and who, even if he has some faint notions of
+his own, is told by a man of authority not to utter them?  The natural
+thing is, that the speaker should be some one like yourself who professes
+to know and can tell what he knows.  Will you then kindly answer, for the
+edification of the company and of myself?
+
+Glaucon and the rest of the company joined in my request, and Thrasymachus,
+as any one might see, was in reality eager to speak; for he thought that he
+had an excellent answer, and would distinguish himself.  But at first he
+affected to insist on my answering; at length he consented to begin. 
+Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and
+goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you.
+
+That I learn of others, I replied, is quite true; but that I am ungrateful
+I wholly deny.  Money I have none, and therefore I pay in praise, which is
+all I have; and how ready I am to praise any one who appears to me to speak
+well you will very soon find out when you answer; for I expect that you
+will answer well.
+
+Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the
+interest of the stronger.  And now why do you not praise me?  But of course
+you won't.
+
+Let me first understand you, I replied.  Justice, as you say, is the
+interest of the stronger.  What, Thrasymachus, is the meaning of this?  You
+cannot mean to say that because Polydamas, the pancratiast, is stronger
+than we are, and finds the eating of beef conducive to his bodily strength,
+that to eat beef is therefore equally for our good who are weaker than he
+is, and right and just for us?
+
+That's abominable of you, Socrates; you take the words in the sense which
+is most damaging to the argument.
+
+Not at all, my good sir, I said; I am trying to understand them; and I wish
+that you would be a little clearer.
+
+Well, he said, have you never heard that forms of government differ; there
+are tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are aristocracies?
+
+Yes, I know.
+
+And the government is the ruling power in each state?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the different forms of government make laws democratical,
+aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and
+these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice
+which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they
+punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust.  And that is what I mean when I
+say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the
+interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have
+power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one
+principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.
+
+Now I understand you, I said; and whether you are right or not I will try
+to discover.  But let me remark, that in defining justice you have yourself
+used the word 'interest' which you forbade me to use.  It is true, however,
+that in your definition the words 'of the stronger' are added.
+
+A small addition, you must allow, he said.
+
+Great or small, never mind about that:  we must first enquire whether what
+you are saying is the truth.  Now we are both agreed that justice is
+interest of some sort, but you go on to say 'of the stronger'; about this
+addition I am not so sure, and must therefore consider further.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I will; and first tell me, Do you admit that it is just for subjects to
+obey their rulers?
+
+I do.
+
+But are the rulers of states absolutely infallible, or are they sometimes
+liable to err?
+
+To be sure, he replied, they are liable to err.
+
+Then in making their laws they may sometimes make them rightly, and
+sometimes not?
+
+True.
+
+When they make them rightly, they make them agreeably to their interest;
+when they are mistaken, contrary to their interest; you admit that?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the laws which they make must be obeyed by their subjects,--and that is
+what you call justice?
+
+Doubtless.
+
+Then justice, according to your argument, is not only obedience to the
+interest of the stronger but the reverse?
+
+What is that you are saying? he asked.
+
+I am only repeating what you are saying, I believe.  But let us consider: 
+Have we not admitted that the rulers may be mistaken about their own
+interest in what they command, and also that to obey them is justice?  Has
+not that been admitted?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then you must also have acknowledged justice not to be for the interest of
+the stronger, when the rulers unintentionally command things to be done
+which are to their own injury.  For if, as you say, justice is the
+obedience which the subject renders to their commands, in that case, O
+wisest of men, is there any escape from the conclusion that the weaker are
+commanded to do, not what is for the interest, but what is for the injury
+of the stronger?
+
+Nothing can be clearer, Socrates, said Polemarchus.
+
+Yes, said Cleitophon, interposing, if you are allowed to be his witness.
+
+But there is no need of any witness, said Polemarchus, for Thrasymachus
+himself acknowledges that rulers may sometimes command what is not for
+their own interest, and that for subjects to obey them is justice.
+
+Yes, Polemarchus,--Thrasymachus said that for subjects to do what was
+commanded by their rulers is just.
+
+Yes, Cleitophon, but he also said that justice is the interest of the
+stronger, and, while admitting both these propositions, he further
+acknowledged that the stronger may command the weaker who are his subjects
+to do what is not for his own interest; whence follows that justice is the
+injury quite as much as the interest of the stronger.
+
+But, said Cleitophon, he meant by the interest of the stronger what the
+stronger thought to be his interest,--this was what the weaker had to do;
+and this was affirmed by him to be justice.
+
+Those were not his words, rejoined Polemarchus.
+
+Never mind, I replied, if he now says that they are, let us accept his
+statement.  Tell me, Thrasymachus, I said, did you mean by justice what the
+stronger thought to be his interest, whether really so or not?
+
+Certainly not, he said.  Do you suppose that I call him who is mistaken the
+stronger at the time when he is mistaken?
+
+Yes, I said, my impression was that you did so, when you admitted that the
+ruler was not infallible but might be sometimes mistaken.
+
+You argue like an informer, Socrates.  Do you mean, for example, that he
+who is mistaken about the sick is a physician in that he is mistaken? or
+that he who errs in arithmetic or grammar is an arithmetician or grammarian
+at the time when he is making the mistake, in respect of the mistake? 
+True, we say that the physician or arithmetician or grammarian has made a
+mistake, but this is only a way of speaking; for the fact is that neither
+the grammarian nor any other person of skill ever makes a mistake in so far
+as he is what his name implies; they none of them err unless their skill
+fails them, and then they cease to be skilled artists.  No artist or sage
+or ruler errs at the time when he is what his name implies; though he is
+commonly said to err, and I adopted the common mode of speaking.  But to be
+perfectly accurate, since you are such a lover of accuracy, we should say
+that the ruler, in so far as he is a ruler, is unerring, and, being
+unerring, always commands that which is for his own interest; and the
+subject is required to execute his commands; and therefore, as I said at
+first and now repeat, justice is the interest of the stronger.
+
+Indeed, Thrasymachus, and do I really appear to you to argue like an
+informer?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And do you suppose that I ask these questions with any design of injuring
+you in the argument?
+
+Nay, he replied, 'suppose' is not the word--I know it; but you will be
+found out, and by sheer force of argument you will never prevail.
+
+I shall not make the attempt, my dear man; but to avoid any
+misunderstanding occurring between us in future, let me ask, in what sense
+do you speak of a ruler or stronger whose interest, as you were saying, he
+being the superior, it is just that the inferior should execute--is he a
+ruler in the popular or in the strict sense of the term?
+
+In the strictest of all senses, he said.  And now cheat and play the
+informer if you can; I ask no quarter at your hands.  But you never will be
+able, never.
+
+And do you imagine, I said, that I am such a madman as to try and cheat,
+Thrasymachus?  I might as well shave a lion.
+
+Why, he said, you made the attempt a minute ago, and you failed.
+
+Enough, I said, of these civilities.  It will be better that I should ask
+you a question:  Is the physician, taken in that strict sense of which you
+are speaking, a healer of the sick or a maker of money?  And remember that
+I am now speaking of the true physician.
+
+A healer of the sick, he replied.
+
+And the pilot--that is to say, the true pilot--is he a captain of sailors
+or a mere sailor?
+
+A captain of sailors.
+
+The circumstance that he sails in the ship is not to be taken into account;
+neither is he to be called a sailor; the name pilot by which he is
+distinguished has nothing to do with sailing, but is significant of his
+skill and of his authority over the sailors.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now, I said, every art has an interest?
+
+Certainly.
+
+For which the art has to consider and provide?
+
+Yes, that is the aim of art.
+
+And the interest of any art is the perfection of it--this and nothing else?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean what I may illustrate negatively by the example of the body. 
+Suppose you were to ask me whether the body is self-sufficing or has wants,
+I should reply:  Certainly the body has wants; for the body may be ill and
+require to be cured, and has therefore interests to which the art of
+medicine ministers; and this is the origin and intention of medicine, as
+you will acknowledge.  Am I not right?
+
+Quite right, he replied.
+
+But is the art of medicine or any other art faulty or deficient in any
+quality in the same way that the eye may be deficient in sight or the ear
+fail of hearing, and therefore requires another art to provide for the
+interests of seeing and hearing--has art in itself, I say, any similar
+liability to fault or defect, and does every art require another
+supplementary art to provide for its interests, and that another and
+another without end?  Or have the arts to look only after their own
+interests?  Or have they no need either of themselves or of another?--
+having no faults or defects, they have no need to correct them, either by
+the exercise of their own art or of any other; they have only to consider
+the interest of their subject-matter.  For every art remains pure and
+faultless while remaining true--that is to say, while perfect and
+unimpaired.  Take the words in your precise sense, and tell me whether I am
+not right.
+
+Yes, clearly.
+
+Then medicine does not consider the interest of medicine, but the interest
+of the body?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Nor does the art of horsemanship consider the interests of the art of
+horsemanship, but the interests of the horse; neither do any other arts
+care for themselves, for they have no needs; they care only for that which
+is the subject of their art?
+
+True, he said.
+
+But surely, Thrasymachus, the arts are the superiors and rulers of their
+own subjects?
+
+To this he assented with a good deal of reluctance.
+
+Then, I said, no science or art considers or enjoins the interest of the
+stronger or superior, but only the interest of the subject and weaker?
+
+He made an attempt to contest this proposition also, but finally
+acquiesced.
+
+Then, I continued, no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers
+his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of his patient; for the
+true physician is also a ruler having the human body as a subject, and is
+not a mere money-maker; that has been admitted?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the pilot likewise, in the strict sense of the term, is a ruler of
+sailors and not a mere sailor?
+
+That has been admitted.
+
+And such a pilot and ruler will provide and prescribe for the interest of
+the sailor who is under him, and not for his own or the ruler's interest?
+
+He gave a reluctant 'Yes.'
+
+Then, I said, Thrasymachus, there is no one in any rule who, in so far as
+he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but
+always what is for the interest of his subject or suitable to his art; to
+that he looks, and that alone he considers in everything which he says and
+does.
+
+When we had got to this point in the argument, and every one saw that the
+definition of justice had been completely upset, Thrasymachus, instead of
+replying to me, said:  Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?
+
+Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be
+answering?
+
+Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose:  she has not
+even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep.
+
+What makes you say that? I replied.
+
+Because you fancy that the shepherd or neatherd fattens or tends the sheep
+or oxen with a view to their own good and not to the good of himself or his
+master; and you further imagine that the rulers of states, if they are true
+rulers, never think of their subjects as sheep, and that they are not
+studying their own advantage day and night.  Oh, no; and so entirely astray
+are you in your ideas about the just and unjust as not even to know that
+justice and the just are in reality another's good; that is to say, the
+interest of the ruler and stronger, and the loss of the subject and
+servant; and injustice the opposite; for the unjust is lord over the truly
+simple and just:  he is the stronger, and his subjects do what is for his
+interest, and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their
+own.  Consider further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a
+loser in comparison with the unjust.  First of all, in private contracts: 
+wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find that, when the
+partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more and the just less. 
+Secondly, in their dealings with the State:  when there is an income-tax,
+the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of
+income; and when there is anything to be received the one gains nothing and
+the other much.  Observe also what happens when they take an office; there
+is the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses,
+and getting nothing out of the public, because he is just; moreover he is
+hated by his friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in
+unlawful ways.  But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man.  I
+am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the
+advantage of the unjust is most apparent; and my meaning will be most
+clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the
+criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to
+do injustice are the most miserable--that is to say tyranny, which by fraud
+and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but
+wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private
+and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any
+one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace--they who
+do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and
+man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves.  But when a man
+besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them,
+then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed,
+not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the
+consummation of injustice.  For mankind censure injustice, fearing that
+they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing
+it.  And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient
+scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I
+said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice
+is a man's own profit and interest.
+
+Thrasymachus, when he had thus spoken, having, like a bath-man, deluged our
+ears with his words, had a mind to go away.  But the company would not let
+him; they insisted that he should remain and defend his position; and I
+myself added my own humble request that he would not leave us. 
+Thrasymachus, I said to him, excellent man, how suggestive are your
+remarks!  And are you going to run away before you have fairly taught or
+learned whether they are true or not?  Is the attempt to determine the way
+of man's life so small a matter in your eyes--to determine how life may be
+passed by each one of us to the greatest advantage?
+
+And do I differ from you, he said, as to the importance of the enquiry?
+
+You appear rather, I replied, to have no care or thought about us,
+Thrasymachus--whether we live better or worse from not knowing what you say
+you know, is to you a matter of indifference.  Prithee, friend, do not keep
+your knowledge to yourself; we are a large party; and any benefit which you
+confer upon us will be amply rewarded.  For my own part I openly declare
+that I am not convinced, and that I do not believe injustice to be more
+gainful than justice, even if uncontrolled and allowed to have free play.
+For, granting that there may be an unjust man who is able to commit
+injustice either by fraud or force, still this does not convince me of the
+superior advantage of injustice, and there may be others who are in the
+same predicament with myself.  Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your
+wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to
+injustice.
+
+And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by
+what I have just said; what more can I do for you?  Would you have me put
+the proof bodily into your souls?
+
+Heaven forbid! I said; I would only ask you to be consistent; or, if you
+change, change openly and let there be no deception.  For I must remark,
+Thrasymachus, if you will recall what was previously said, that although
+you began by defining the true physician in an exact sense, you did not
+observe a like exactness when speaking of the shepherd; you thought that
+the shepherd as a shepherd tends the sheep not with a view to their own
+good, but like a mere diner or banquetter with a view to the pleasures of
+the table; or, again, as a trader for sale in the market, and not as a
+shepherd.  Yet surely the art of the shepherd is concerned only with the
+good of his subjects; he has only to provide the best for them, since the
+perfection of the art is already ensured whenever all the requirements of
+it are satisfied.  And that was what I was saying just now about the ruler.
+I conceived that the art of the ruler, considered as ruler, whether in a
+state or in private life, could only regard the good of his flock or
+subjects; whereas you seem to think that the rulers in states, that is to
+say, the true rulers, like being in authority.
+
+Think!  Nay, I am sure of it.
+
+Then why in the case of lesser offices do men never take them willingly
+without payment, unless under the idea that they govern for the advantage
+not of themselves but of others?  Let me ask you a question:  Are not the
+several arts different, by reason of their each having a separate function? 
+And, my dear illustrious friend, do say what you think, that we may make a
+little progress.
+
+Yes, that is the difference, he replied.
+
+And each art gives us a particular good and not merely a general one--
+medicine, for example, gives us health; navigation, safety at sea, and so
+on?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And the art of payment has the special function of giving pay:  but we do
+not confuse this with other arts, any more than the art of the pilot is to
+be confused with the art of medicine, because the health of the pilot may
+be improved by a sea voyage.  You would not be inclined to say, would you,
+that navigation is the art of medicine, at least if we are to adopt your
+exact use of language?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or because a man is in good health when he receives pay you would not say
+that the art of payment is medicine?
+
+I should not.
+
+Nor would you say that medicine is the art of receiving pay because a man
+takes fees when he is engaged in healing?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And we have admitted, I said, that the good of each art is specially
+confined to the art?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then, if there be any good which all artists have in common, that is to be
+attributed to something of which they all have the common use?
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And when the artist is benefited by receiving pay the advantage is gained
+by an additional use of the art of pay, which is not the art professed by
+him?
+
+He gave a reluctant assent to this.
+
+Then the pay is not derived by the several artists from their respective
+arts.  But the truth is, that while the art of medicine gives health, and
+the art of the builder builds a house, another art attends them which is
+the art of pay.  The various arts may be doing their own business and
+benefiting that over which they preside, but would the artist receive any
+benefit from his art unless he were paid as well?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+But does he therefore confer no benefit when he works for nothing?
+
+Certainly, he confers a benefit.
+
+Then now, Thrasymachus, there is no longer any doubt that neither arts nor
+governments provide for their own interests; but, as we were before saying,
+they rule and provide for the interests of their subjects who are the
+weaker and not the stronger--to their good they attend and not to the good
+of the superior.  And this is the reason, my dear Thrasymachus, why, as I
+was just now saying, no one is willing to govern; because no one likes to
+take in hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without
+remuneration.  For, in the execution of his work, and in giving his orders
+to another, the true artist does not regard his own interest, but always
+that of his subjects; and therefore in order that rulers may be willing to
+rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment, money, or honour,
+or a penalty for refusing.
+
+What do you mean, Socrates? said Glaucon.  The first two modes of payment
+are intelligible enough, but what the penalty is I do not understand, or
+how a penalty can be a payment.
+
+You mean that you do not understand the nature of this payment which to the
+best men is the great inducement to rule?  Of course you know that ambition
+and avarice are held to be, as indeed they are, a disgrace?
+
+Very true.
+
+And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for them;
+good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to
+get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the
+public revenues to get the name of thieves.  And not being ambitious they
+do not care about honour.  Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and
+they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment.  And this, as I
+imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of
+waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable.  Now the worst part
+of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by
+one who is worse than himself.  And the fear of this, as I conceive,
+induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they
+cannot help--not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or
+enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to
+commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or
+indeed as good.  For there is reason to think that if a city were composed
+entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of
+contention as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain
+proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own
+interest, but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would
+choose rather to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of
+conferring one.  So far am I from agreeing with Thrasymachus that justice
+is the interest of the stronger.  This latter question need not be further
+discussed at present; but when Thrasymachus says that the life of the
+unjust is more advantageous than that of the just, his new statement
+appears to me to be of a far more serious character.  Which of us has
+spoken truly?  And which sort of life, Glaucon, do you prefer?
+
+I for my part deem the life of the just to be the more advantageous, he
+answered.
+
+Did you hear all the advantages of the unjust which Thrasymachus was
+rehearsing?
+
+Yes, I heard him, he replied, but he has not convinced me.
+
+Then shall we try to find some way of convincing him, if we can, that he is
+saying what is not true?
+
+Most certainly, he replied.
+
+If, I said, he makes a set speech and we make another recounting all the
+advantages of being just, and he answers and we rejoin, there must be a
+numbering and measuring of the goods which are claimed on either side, and
+in the end we shall want judges to decide; but if we proceed in our enquiry
+as we lately did, by making admissions to one another, we shall unite the
+offices of judge and advocate in our own persons.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+And which method do I understand you to prefer? I said.
+
+That which you propose.
+
+Well, then, Thrasymachus, I said, suppose you begin at the beginning and
+answer me.  You say that perfect injustice is more gainful than perfect
+justice?
+
+Yes, that is what I say, and I have given you my reasons.
+
+And what is your view about them?  Would you call one of them virtue and
+the other vice?
+
+Certainly.
+
+I suppose that you would call justice virtue and injustice vice?
+
+What a charming notion!  So likely too, seeing that I affirm injustice to
+be profitable and justice not.
+
+What else then would you say?
+
+The opposite, he replied.
+
+And would you call justice vice?
+
+No, I would rather say sublime simplicity.
+
+Then would you call injustice malignity?
+
+No; I would rather say discretion.
+
+And do the unjust appear to you to be wise and good?
+
+Yes, he said; at any rate those of them who are able to be perfectly
+unjust, and who have the power of subduing states and nations; but perhaps
+you imagine me to be talking of cutpurses.  Even this profession if
+undetected has advantages, though they are not to be compared with those of
+which I was just now speaking.
+
+I do not think that I misapprehend your meaning, Thrasymachus, I replied;
+but still I cannot hear without amazement that you class injustice with
+wisdom and virtue, and justice with the opposite.
+
+Certainly I do so class them.
+
+Now, I said, you are on more substantial and almost unanswerable ground;
+for if the injustice which you were maintaining to be profitable had been
+admitted by you as by others to be vice and deformity, an answer might have
+been given to you on received principles; but now I perceive that you will
+call injustice honourable and strong, and to the unjust you will attribute
+all the qualities which were attributed by us before to the just, seeing
+that you do not hesitate to rank injustice with wisdom and virtue.
+
+You have guessed most infallibly, he replied.
+
+Then I certainly ought not to shrink from going through with the argument
+so long as I have reason to think that you, Thrasymachus, are speaking your
+real mind; for I do believe that you are now in earnest and are not amusing
+yourself at our expense.
+
+I may be in earnest or not, but what is that to you?--to refute the
+argument is your business.
+
+Very true, I said; that is what I have to do:  But will you be so good as
+answer yet one more question?  Does the just man try to gain any advantage
+over the just?
+
+Far otherwise; if he did he would not be the simple amusing creature which
+he is.
+
+And would he try to go beyond just action?
+
+He would not.
+
+And how would he regard the attempt to gain an advantage over the unjust;
+would that be considered by him as just or unjust?
+
+He would think it just, and would try to gain the advantage; but he would
+not be able.
+
+Whether he would or would not be able, I said, is not to the point.  My
+question is only whether the just man, while refusing to have more than
+another just man, would wish and claim to have more than the unjust?
+
+Yes, he would.
+
+And what of the unjust--does he claim to have more than the just man and to
+do more than is just?
+
+Of course, he said, for he claims to have more than all men.
+
+And the unjust man will strive and struggle to obtain more than the unjust
+man or action, in order that he may have more than all?
+
+True.
+
+We may put the matter thus, I said--the just does not desire more than his
+like but more than his unlike, whereas the unjust desires more than both
+his like and his unlike?
+
+Nothing, he said, can be better than that statement.
+
+And the unjust is good and wise, and the just is neither?
+
+Good again, he said.
+
+And is not the unjust like the wise and good and the just unlike them?
+
+Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who are of
+a certain nature; he who is not, not.
+
+Each of them, I said, is such as his like is?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+Very good, Thrasymachus, I said; and now to take the case of the arts:  you
+would admit that one man is a musician and another not a musician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And which is wise and which is foolish?
+
+Clearly the musician is wise, and he who is not a musician is foolish.
+
+And he is good in as far as he is wise, and bad in as far as he is foolish?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you would say the same sort of thing of the physician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And do you think, my excellent friend, that a musician when he adjusts the
+lyre would desire or claim to exceed or go beyond a musician in the
+tightening and loosening the strings?
+
+I do not think that he would.
+
+But he would claim to exceed the non-musician?
+
+Of course.
+
+And what would you say of the physician?  In prescribing meats and drinks
+would he wish to go beyond another physician or beyond the practice of
+medicine?
+
+He would not.
+
+But he would wish to go beyond the non-physician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And about knowledge and ignorance in general; see whether you think that
+any man who has knowledge ever would wish to have the choice of saying or
+doing more than another man who has knowledge.  Would he not rather say or
+do the same as his like in the same case?
+
+That, I suppose, can hardly be denied.
+
+And what of the ignorant? would he not desire to have more than either the
+knowing or the ignorant?
+
+I dare say.
+
+And the knowing is wise?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the wise is good?
+
+True.
+
+Then the wise and good will not desire to gain more than his like, but more
+than his unlike and opposite?
+
+I suppose so.
+
+Whereas the bad and ignorant will desire to gain more than both?
+
+Yes.
+
+But did we not say, Thrasymachus, that the unjust goes beyond both his like
+and unlike?  Were not these your words?
+
+They were.
+
+And you also said that the just will not go beyond his like but his unlike?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil and
+ignorant?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+And each of them is such as his like is?
+
+That was admitted.
+
+Then the just has turned out to be wise and good and the unjust evil and
+ignorant.
+
+Thrasymachus made all these admissions, not fluently, as I repeat them, but
+with extreme reluctance; it was a hot summer's day, and the perspiration
+poured from him in torrents; and then I saw what I had never seen before,
+Thrasymachus blushing.  As we were now agreed that justice was virtue and
+wisdom, and injustice vice and ignorance, I proceeded to another point:
+
+Well, I said, Thrasymachus, that matter is now settled; but were we not
+also saying that injustice had strength; do you remember?
+
+Yes, I remember, he said, but do not suppose that I approve of what you are
+saying or have no answer; if however I were to answer, you would be quite
+certain to accuse me of haranguing; therefore either permit me to have my
+say out, or if you would rather ask, do so, and I will answer 'Very good,'
+as they say to story-telling old women, and will nod 'Yes' and 'No.'
+
+Certainly not, I said, if contrary to your real opinion.
+
+Yes, he said, I will, to please you, since you will not let me speak.  What
+else would you have?
+
+Nothing in the world, I said; and if you are so disposed I will ask and you
+shall answer.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Then I will repeat the question which I asked before, in order that our
+examination of the relative nature of justice and injustice may be carried
+on regularly.  A statement was made that injustice is stronger and more
+powerful than justice, but now justice, having been identified with wisdom
+and virtue, is easily shown to be stronger than injustice, if injustice is
+ignorance; this can no longer be questioned by any one.  But I want to view
+the matter, Thrasymachus, in a different way:  You would not deny that a
+state may be unjust and may be unjustly attempting to enslave other states,
+or may have already enslaved them, and may be holding many of them in
+subjection?
+
+True, he replied; and I will add that the best and most perfectly unjust
+state will be most likely to do so.
+
+I know, I said, that such was your position; but what I would further
+consider is, whether this power which is possessed by the superior state
+can exist or be exercised without justice or only with justice.
+
+If you are right in your view, and justice is wisdom, then only with
+justice; but if I am right, then without justice.
+
+I am delighted, Thrasymachus, to see you not only nodding assent and
+dissent, but making answers which are quite excellent.
+
+That is out of civility to you, he replied.
+
+You are very kind, I said; and would you have the goodness also to inform
+me, whether you think that a state, or an army, or a band of robbers and
+thieves, or any other gang of evil-doers could act at all if they injured
+one another?
+
+No indeed, he said, they could not.
+
+But if they abstained from injuring one another, then they might act
+together better?
+
+Yes.
+
+And this is because injustice creates divisions and hatreds and fighting,
+and justice imparts harmony and friendship; is not that true, Thrasymachus?
+
+I agree, he said, because I do not wish to quarrel with you.
+
+How good of you, I said; but I should like to know also whether injustice,
+having this tendency to arouse hatred, wherever existing, among slaves or
+among freemen, will not make them hate one another and set them at variance
+and render them incapable of common action?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And even if injustice be found in two only, will they not quarrel and
+fight, and become enemies to one another and to the just?
+
+They will.
+
+And suppose injustice abiding in a single person, would your wisdom say
+that she loses or that she retains her natural power?
+
+Let us assume that she retains her power.
+
+Yet is not the power which injustice exercises of such a nature that
+wherever she takes up her abode, whether in a city, in an army, in a
+family, or in any other body, that body is, to begin with, rendered
+incapable of united action by reason of sedition and distraction; and does
+it not become its own enemy and at variance with all that opposes it, and
+with the just?  Is not this the case?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person; in the
+first place rendering him incapable of action because he is not at unity
+with himself, and in the second place making him an enemy to himself and
+the just?  Is not that true, Thrasymachus?
+
+Yes.
+
+And O my friend, I said, surely the gods are just?
+
+Granted that they are.
+
+But if so, the unjust will be the enemy of the gods, and the just will be
+their friend?
+
+Feast away in triumph, and take your fill of the argument; I will not
+oppose you, lest I should displease the company.
+
+Well then, proceed with your answers, and let me have the remainder of my
+repast.  For we have already shown that the just are clearly wiser and
+better and abler than the unjust, and that the unjust are incapable of
+common action; nay more, that to speak as we did of men who are evil acting
+at any time vigorously together, is not strictly true, for if they had been
+perfectly evil, they would have laid hands upon one another; but it is
+evident that there must have been some remnant of justice in them, which
+enabled them to combine; if there had not been they would have injured one
+another as well as their victims; they were but half-villains in their
+enterprises; for had they been whole villains, and utterly unjust, they
+would have been utterly incapable of action.  That, as I believe, is the
+truth of the matter, and not what you said at first.  But whether the just
+have a better and happier life than the unjust is a further question which
+we also proposed to consider.  I think that they have, and for the reasons
+which I have given; but still I should like to examine further, for no
+light matter is at stake, nothing less than the rule of human life.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I will proceed by asking a question:  Would you not say that a horse has
+some end?
+
+I should.
+
+And the end or use of a horse or of anything would be that which could not
+be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any other thing?
+
+I do not understand, he said.
+
+Let me explain:  Can you see, except with the eye?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or hear, except with the ear?
+
+No.
+
+These then may be truly said to be the ends of these organs?
+
+They may.
+
+But you can cut off a vine-branch with a dagger or with a chisel, and in
+many other ways?
+
+Of course.
+
+And yet not so well as with a pruning-hook made for the purpose?
+
+True.
+
+May we not say that this is the end of a pruning-hook?
+
+We may.
+
+Then now I think you will have no difficulty in understanding my meaning
+when I asked the question whether the end of anything would be that which
+could not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any other thing?
+
+I understand your meaning, he said, and assent.
+
+And that to which an end is appointed has also an excellence?  Need I ask
+again whether the eye has an end?
+
+It has.
+
+And has not the eye an excellence?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the ear has an end and an excellence also?
+
+True.
+
+And the same is true of all other things; they have each of them an end and
+a special excellence?
+
+That is so.
+
+Well, and can the eyes fulfil their end if they are wanting in their own
+proper excellence and have a defect instead?
+
+How can they, he said, if they are blind and cannot see?
+
+You mean to say, if they have lost their proper excellence, which is sight;
+but I have not arrived at that point yet.  I would rather ask the question
+more generally, and only enquire whether the things which fulfil their ends
+fulfil them by their own proper excellence, and fail of fulfilling them by
+their own defect?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+I might say the same of the ears; when deprived of their own proper
+excellence they cannot fulfil their end?
+
+True.
+
+And the same observation will apply to all other things?
+
+I agree.
+
+Well; and has not the soul an end which nothing else can fulfil? for
+example, to superintend and command and deliberate and the like.  Are not
+these functions proper to the soul, and can they rightly be assigned to any
+other?
+
+To no other.
+
+And is not life to be reckoned among the ends of the soul?
+
+Assuredly, he said.
+
+And has not the soul an excellence also?
+
+Yes.
+
+And can she or can she not fulfil her own ends when deprived of that
+excellence?
+
+She cannot.
+
+Then an evil soul must necessarily be an evil ruler and superintendent, and
+the good soul a good ruler?
+
+Yes, necessarily.
+
+And we have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and
+injustice the defect of the soul?
+
+That has been admitted.
+
+Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man will
+live ill?
+
+That is what your argument proves.
+
+And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the
+reverse of happy?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable?
+
+So be it.
+
+But happiness and not misery is profitable.
+
+Of course.
+
+Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable than
+justice.
+
+Let this, Socrates, he said, be your entertainment at the Bendidea.
+
+For which I am indebted to you, I said, now that you have grown gentle
+towards me and have left off scolding.  Nevertheless, I have not been well
+entertained; but that was my own fault and not yours.  As an epicure
+snatches a taste of every dish which is successively brought to table, he
+not having allowed himself time to enjoy the one before, so have I gone
+from one subject to another without having discovered what I sought at
+first, the nature of justice.  I left that enquiry and turned away to
+consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil and folly; and when
+there arose a further question about the comparative advantages of justice
+and injustice, I could not refrain from passing on to that.  And the result
+of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all.  For I know
+not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or
+is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+With these words I was thinking that I had made an end of the discussion;
+but the end, in truth, proved to be only a beginning.  For Glaucon, who is
+always the most pugnacious of men, was dissatisfied at Thrasymachus'
+retirement; he wanted to have the battle out.  So he said to me:  Socrates,
+do you wish really to persuade us, or only to seem to have persuaded us,
+that to be just is always better than to be unjust?
+
+I should wish really to persuade you, I replied, if I could.
+
+Then you certainly have not succeeded.  Let me ask you now:--How would you
+arrange goods--are there not some which we welcome for their own sakes, and
+independently of their consequences, as, for example, harmless pleasures
+and enjoyments, which delight us at the time, although nothing follows from
+them?
+
+I agree in thinking that there is such a class, I replied.
+
+Is there not also a second class of goods, such as knowledge, sight,
+health, which are desirable not only in themselves, but also for their
+results?
+
+Certainly, I said.
+
+And would you not recognize a third class, such as gymnastic, and the care
+of the sick, and the physician's art; also the various ways of
+money-making--these do us good but we regard them as disagreeable; and no
+one would choose them for their own sakes, but only for the sake of some
+reward or result which flows from them?
+
+There is, I said, this third class also.  But why do you ask?
+
+Because I want to know in which of the three classes you would place
+justice?
+
+In the highest class, I replied,--among those goods which he who would be
+happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their results.
+
+Then the many are of another mind; they think that justice is to be
+reckoned in the troublesome class, among goods which are to be pursued for
+the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are disagreeable
+and rather to be avoided.
+
+I know, I said, that this is their manner of thinking, and that this was
+the thesis which Thrasymachus was maintaining just now, when he censured
+justice and praised injustice.  But I am too stupid to be convinced by him.
+
+I wish, he said, that you would hear me as well as him, and then I shall
+see whether you and I agree.  For Thrasymachus seems to me, like a snake,
+to have been charmed by your voice sooner than he ought to have been; but
+to my mind the nature of justice and injustice have not yet been made
+clear.  Setting aside their rewards and results, I want to know what they
+are in themselves, and how they inwardly work in the soul.  If you, please,
+then, I will revive the argument of Thrasymachus.  And first I will speak
+of the nature and origin of justice according to the common view of them. 
+Secondly, I will show that all men who practise justice do so against their
+will, of necessity, but not as a good.  And thirdly, I will argue that
+there is reason in this view, for the life of the unjust is after all
+better far than the life of the just--if what they say is true, Socrates,
+since I myself am not of their opinion.  But still I acknowledge that I am
+perplexed when I hear the voices of Thrasymachus and myriads of others
+dinning in my ears; and, on the other hand, I have never yet heard the
+superiority of justice to injustice maintained by any one in a satisfactory
+way.  I want to hear justice praised in respect of itself; then I shall be
+satisfied, and you are the person from whom I think that I am most likely
+to hear this; and therefore I will praise the unjust life to the utmost of
+my power, and my manner of speaking will indicate the manner in which I
+desire to hear you too praising justice and censuring injustice.  Will you
+say whether you approve of my proposal?
+
+Indeed I do; nor can I imagine any theme about which a man of sense would
+oftener wish to converse.
+
+I am delighted, he replied, to hear you say so, and shall begin by
+speaking, as I proposed, of the nature and origin of justice.
+
+They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice,
+evil; but that the evil is greater than the good.  And so when men have
+both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being
+able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better
+agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual
+covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and
+just.  This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;--it is a
+mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and
+not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without
+the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the
+two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by
+reason of the inability of men to do injustice.  For no man who is worthy
+to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able
+to resist; he would be mad if he did.  Such is the received account,
+Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.
+
+Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they
+have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of
+this kind:  having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what
+they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we
+shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding
+along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be
+their good, and are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of
+law.  The liberty which we are supposing may be most completely given to
+them in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by
+Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian.  According to the tradition,
+Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great
+storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he
+was feeding his flock.  Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening,
+where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors,
+at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared
+to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he
+took from the finger of the dead and reascended.  Now the shepherds met
+together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report
+about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring
+on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the
+collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to
+the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no
+longer present.  He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he
+turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the
+ring, and always with the same result--when he turned the collet inwards he
+became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.  Whereupon he contrived to
+be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as
+he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the
+king and slew him, and took the kingdom.  Suppose now that there were two
+such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;
+no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand
+fast in justice.  No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when
+he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and
+lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he
+would, and in all respects be like a God among men.  Then the actions of
+the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at
+last to the same point.  And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof
+that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any
+good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks
+that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.  For all men believe in
+their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than
+justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are
+right.  If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming
+invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he
+would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although
+they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with
+one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.  Enough of
+this.
+
+Now, if we are to form a real judgment of the life of the just and unjust,
+we must isolate them; there is no other way; and how is the isolation to be
+effected?  I answer:  Let the unjust man be entirely unjust, and the just
+man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away from either of them, and
+both are to be perfectly furnished for the work of their respective lives. 
+First, let the unjust be like other distinguished masters of craft; like
+the skilful pilot or physician, who knows intuitively his own powers and
+keeps within their limits, and who, if he fails at any point, is able to
+recover himself.  So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right
+way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice:  (he who is
+found out is nobody:)  for the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed
+just when you are not.  Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we
+must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we
+must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the
+greatest reputation for justice.  If he have taken a false step he must be
+able to recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any
+of his deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is
+required by his courage and strength, and command of money and friends. 
+And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity,
+wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good.  There must be no
+seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and
+then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for
+the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice
+only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of
+life the opposite of the former.  Let him be the best of men, and let him
+be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall
+see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. 
+And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to
+be unjust.  When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of
+justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is
+the happier of the two.
+
+Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up for
+the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two statues.
+
+I do my best, he said.  And now that we know what they are like there is no
+difficulty in tracing out the sort of life which awaits either of them. 
+This I will proceed to describe; but as you may think the description a
+little too coarse, I ask you to suppose, Socrates, that the words which
+follow are not mine.--Let me put them into the mouths of the eulogists of
+injustice:  They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will
+be scourged, racked, bound--will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last,
+after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled:  Then he will
+understand that he ought to seem only, and not to be, just; the words of
+Aeschylus may be more truly spoken of the unjust than of the just.  For the
+unjust is pursuing a reality; he does not live with a view to appearances--
+he wants to be really unjust and not to seem only:--
+
+'His mind has a soil deep and fertile,
+Out of which spring his prudent counsels.'
+
+In the first place, he is thought just, and therefore bears rule in the
+city; he can marry whom he will, and give in marriage to whom he will; also
+he can trade and deal where he likes, and always to his own advantage,
+because he has no misgivings about injustice; and at every contest, whether
+in public or private, he gets the better of his antagonists, and gains at
+their expense, and is rich, and out of his gains he can benefit his
+friends, and harm his enemies; moreover, he can offer sacrifices, and
+dedicate gifts to the gods abundantly and magnificently, and can honour the
+gods or any man whom he wants to honour in a far better style than the
+just, and therefore he is likely to be dearer than they are to the gods. 
+And thus, Socrates, gods and men are said to unite in making the life of
+the unjust better than the life of the just.
+
+I was going to say something in answer to Glaucon, when Adeimantus, his
+brother, interposed:  Socrates, he said, you do not suppose that there is
+nothing more to be urged?
+
+Why, what else is there? I answered.
+
+The strongest point of all has not been even mentioned, he replied.
+
+Well, then, according to the proverb, 'Let brother help brother'--if he
+fails in any part do you assist him; although I must confess that Glaucon
+has already said quite enough to lay me in the dust, and take from me the
+power of helping justice.
+
+Nonsense, he replied.  But let me add something more:  There is another
+side to Glaucon's argument about the praise and censure of justice and
+injustice, which is equally required in order to bring out what I believe
+to be his meaning.  Parents and tutors are always telling their sons and
+their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the sake of justice,
+but for the sake of character and reputation; in the hope of obtaining for
+him who is reputed just some of those offices, marriages, and the like
+which Glaucon has enumerated among the advantages accruing to the unjust
+from the reputation of justice.  More, however, is made of appearances by
+this class of persons than by the others; for they throw in the good
+opinion of the gods, and will tell you of a shower of benefits which the
+heavens, as they say, rain upon the pious; and this accords with the
+testimony of the noble Hesiod and Homer, the first of whom says, that the
+gods make the oaks of the just--
+
+'To bear acorns at their summit, and bees in the middle;
+And the sheep are bowed down with the weight of their fleeces,'
+
+and many other blessings of a like kind are provided for them.  And Homer
+has a very similar strain; for he speaks of one whose fame is--
+
+'As the fame of some blameless king who, like a god,
+Maintains justice; to whom the black earth brings forth
+Wheat and barley, whose trees are bowed with fruit,
+And his sheep never fail to bear, and the sea gives him fish.'
+
+Still grander are the gifts of heaven which Musaeus and his son vouchsafe
+to the just; they take them down into the world below, where they have the
+saints lying on couches at a feast, everlastingly drunk, crowned with
+garlands; their idea seems to be that an immortality of drunkenness is the
+highest meed of virtue.  Some extend their rewards yet further; the
+posterity, as they say, of the faithful and just shall survive to the third
+and fourth generation.  This is the style in which they praise justice. 
+But about the wicked there is another strain; they bury them in a slough in
+Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve; also while they are yet living
+they bring them to infamy, and inflict upon them the punishments which
+Glaucon described as the portion of the just who are reputed to be unjust;
+nothing else does their invention supply.  Such is their manner of praising
+the one and censuring the other.
+
+Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way of speaking
+about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets, but is
+found in prose writers.  The universal voice of mankind is always declaring
+that justice and virtue are honourable, but grievous and toilsome; and that
+the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment, and are only
+censured by law and opinion.  They say also that honesty is for the most
+part less profitable than dishonesty; and they are quite ready to call
+wicked men happy, and to honour them both in public and private when they
+are rich or in any other way influential, while they despise and overlook
+those who may be weak and poor, even though acknowledging them to be better
+than the others.  But most extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking
+about virtue and the gods:  they say that the gods apportion calamity and
+misery to many good men, and good and happiness to the wicked.  And
+mendicant prophets go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have
+a power committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man's
+own or his ancestor's sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and
+feasts; and they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a
+small cost; with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they say,
+to execute their will.  And the poets are the authorities to whom they
+appeal, now smoothing the path of vice with the words of Hesiod;--
+
+'Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her
+dwelling-place is near.  But before virtue the gods have set toil,'
+
+and a tedious and uphill road:  then citing Homer as a witness that the
+gods may be influenced by men; for he also says:--
+
+'The gods, too, may be turned from their purpose; and men pray to them and
+avert their wrath by sacrifices and soothing entreaties, and by libations
+and the odour of fat, when they have sinned and transgressed.'
+
+And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, who were
+children of the Moon and the Muses--that is what they say--according to
+which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but
+whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by
+sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the
+service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries,
+and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one
+knows what awaits us.
+
+He proceeded:  And now when the young hear all this said about virtue and
+vice, and the way in which gods and men regard them, how are their minds
+likely to be affected, my dear Socrates,--those of them, I mean, who are
+quickwitted, and, like bees on the wing, light on every flower, and from
+all that they hear are prone to draw conclusions as to what manner of
+persons they should be and in what way they should walk if they would make
+the best of life?  Probably the youth will say to himself in the words of
+Pindar--
+
+'Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which
+may be a fortress to me all my days?'
+
+For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just
+profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are
+unmistakeable.  But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice,
+a heavenly life is promised to me.  Since then, as philosophers prove,
+appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I
+must devote myself.  I will describe around me a picture and shadow of
+virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail
+the subtle and crafty fox, as Archilochus, greatest of sages, recommends. 
+But I hear some one exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often
+difficult; to which I answer, Nothing great is easy.  Nevertheless, the
+argument indicates this, if we would be happy, to be the path along which
+we should proceed.  With a view to concealment we will establish secret
+brotherhoods and political clubs.  And there are professors of rhetoric who
+teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by
+persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be
+punished.  Still I hear a voice saying that the gods cannot be deceived,
+neither can they be compelled.  But what if there are no gods? or, suppose
+them to have no care of human things--why in either case should we mind
+about concealment?  And even if there are gods, and they do care about us,
+yet we know of them only from tradition and the genealogies of the poets;
+and these are the very persons who say that they may be influenced and
+turned by 'sacrifices and soothing entreaties and by offerings.'  Let us be
+consistent then, and believe both or neither.  If the poets speak truly,
+why then we had better be unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for
+if we are just, although we may escape the vengeance of heaven, we shall
+lose the gains of injustice; but, if we are unjust, we shall keep the
+gains, and by our sinning and praying, and praying and sinning, the gods
+will be propitiated, and we shall not be punished.  'But there is a world
+below in which either we or our posterity will suffer for our unjust
+deeds.'  Yes, my friend, will be the reflection, but there are mysteries
+and atoning deities, and these have great power.  That is what mighty
+cities declare; and the children of the gods, who were their poets and
+prophets, bear a like testimony.
+
+On what principle, then, shall we any longer choose justice rather than the
+worst injustice? when, if we only unite the latter with a deceitful regard
+to appearances, we shall fare to our mind both with gods and men, in life
+and after death, as the most numerous and the highest authorities tell us. 
+Knowing all this, Socrates, how can a man who has any superiority of mind
+or person or rank or wealth, be willing to honour justice; or indeed to
+refrain from laughing when he hears justice praised?  And even if there
+should be some one who is able to disprove the truth of my words, and who
+is satisfied that justice is best, still he is not angry with the unjust,
+but is very ready to forgive them, because he also knows that men are not
+just of their own free will; unless, peradventure, there be some one whom
+the divinity within him may have inspired with a hatred of injustice, or
+who has attained knowledge of the truth--but no other man.  He only blames
+injustice who, owing to cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the
+power of being unjust.  And this is proved by the fact that when he obtains
+the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.
+
+The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning of
+the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were to find
+that of all the professing panegyrists of justice--beginning with the
+ancient heroes of whom any memorial has been preserved to us, and ending
+with the men of our own time--no one has ever blamed injustice or praised
+justice except with a view to the glories, honours, and benefits which flow
+from them.  No one has ever adequately described either in verse or prose
+the true essential nature of either of them abiding in the soul, and
+invisible to any human or divine eye; or shown that of all the things of a
+man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good, and
+injustice the greatest evil.  Had this been the universal strain, had you
+sought to persuade us of this from our youth upwards, we should not have
+been on the watch to keep one another from doing wrong, but every one would
+have been his own watchman, because afraid, if he did wrong, of harbouring
+in himself the greatest of evils.  I dare say that Thrasymachus and others
+would seriously hold the language which I have been merely repeating, and
+words even stronger than these about justice and injustice, grossly, as I
+conceive, perverting their true nature.  But I speak in this vehement
+manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from you
+the opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the superiority
+which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have on the
+possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil to
+him.  And please, as Glaucon requested of you, to exclude reputations; for
+unless you take away from each of them his true reputation and add on the
+false, we shall say that you do not praise justice, but the appearance of
+it; we shall think that you are only exhorting us to keep injustice dark,
+and that you really agree with Thrasymachus in thinking that justice is
+another's good and the interest of the stronger, and that injustice is a
+man's own profit and interest, though injurious to the weaker.  Now as you
+have admitted that justice is one of that highest class of goods which are
+desired indeed for their results, but in a far greater degree for their own
+sakes--like sight or hearing or knowledge or health, or any other real and
+natural and not merely conventional good--I would ask you in your praise of
+justice to regard one point only:  I mean the essential good and evil which
+justice and injustice work in the possessors of them.  Let others praise
+justice and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards and honours of the
+one and abusing the other; that is a manner of arguing which, coming from
+them, I am ready to tolerate, but from you who have spent your whole life
+in the consideration of this question, unless I hear the contrary from your
+own lips, I expect something better.  And therefore, I say, not only prove
+to us that justice is better than injustice, but show what they either of
+them do to the possessor of them, which makes the one to be a good and the
+other an evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and men.
+
+I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but on hearing
+these words I was quite delighted, and said:  Sons of an illustrious
+father, that was not a bad beginning of the Elegiac verses which the
+admirer of Glaucon made in honour of you after you had distinguished
+yourselves at the battle of Megara:--
+
+'Sons of Ariston,' he sang, 'divine offspring of an illustrious hero.'
+
+The epithet is very appropriate, for there is something truly divine in
+being able to argue as you have done for the superiority of injustice, and
+remaining unconvinced by your own arguments.  And I do believe that you are
+not convinced--this I infer from your general character, for had I judged
+only from your speeches I should have mistrusted you.  But now, the greater
+my confidence in you, the greater is my difficulty in knowing what to say. 
+For I am in a strait between two; on the one hand I feel that I am unequal
+to the task; and my inability is brought home to me by the fact that you
+were not satisfied with the answer which I made to Thrasymachus, proving,
+as I thought, the superiority which justice has over injustice.  And yet I
+cannot refuse to help, while breath and speech remain to me; I am afraid
+that there would be an impiety in being present when justice is evil spoken
+of and not lifting up a hand in her defence.  And therefore I had best give
+such help as I can.
+
+Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question
+drop, but to proceed in the investigation.  They wanted to arrive at the
+truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly,
+about their relative advantages.  I told them, what I really thought, that
+the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would require very good eyes. 
+Seeing then, I said, that we are no great wits, I think that we had better
+adopt a method which I may illustrate thus; suppose that a short-sighted
+person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance;
+and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place
+which was larger and in which the letters were larger--if they were the
+same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the
+lesser--this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.
+
+Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our
+enquiry?
+
+I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our enquiry,
+is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and
+sometimes as the virtue of a State.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And is not a State larger than an individual?
+
+It is.
+
+Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and more
+easily discernible.  I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of
+justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and secondly in
+the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing
+them.
+
+That, he said, is an excellent proposal.
+
+And if we imagine the State in process of creation, we shall see the
+justice and injustice of the State in process of creation also.
+
+I dare say.
+
+When the State is completed there may be a hope that the object of our
+search will be more easily discovered.
+
+Yes, far more easily.
+
+But ought we to attempt to construct one? I said; for to do so, as I am
+inclined to think, will be a very serious task.  Reflect therefore.
+
+I have reflected, said Adeimantus, and am anxious that you should proceed.
+
+A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one
+is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.  Can any other origin of
+a State be imagined?
+
+There can be no other.
+
+Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them,
+one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and when these
+partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of
+inhabitants is termed a State.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives,
+under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true
+creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.
+
+Of course, he replied.
+
+Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition
+of life and existence.
+
+Certainly.
+
+The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.
+
+True.
+
+And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: 
+We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one
+else a weaver--shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other
+purveyor to our bodily wants?
+
+Quite right.
+
+The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And how will they proceed?  Will each bring the result of his labours into
+a common stock?--the individual husbandman, for example, producing for
+four, and labouring four times as long and as much as he need in the
+provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will
+he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing
+for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of
+the time, and in the remaining three fourths of his time be employed in
+making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with
+others, but supplying himself all his own wants?
+
+Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at
+producing everything.
+
+Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you say
+this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities
+of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations.
+
+Very true.
+
+And will you have a work better done when the workman has many occupations,
+or when he has only one?
+
+When he has only one.
+
+Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when not done at the
+right time?
+
+No doubt.
+
+For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the business is at
+leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the
+business his first object.
+
+He must.
+
+And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and
+easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural
+to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Then more than four citizens will be required; for the husbandman will not
+make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of agriculture, if they
+are to be good for anything.  Neither will the builder make his tools--and
+he too needs many; and in like manner the weaver and shoemaker.
+
+True.
+
+Then carpenters, and smiths, and many other artisans, will be sharers in
+our little State, which is already beginning to grow?
+
+True.
+
+Yet even if we add neatherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen, in order that
+our husbandmen may have oxen to plough with, and builders as well as
+husbandmen may have draught cattle, and curriers and weavers fleeces and
+hides,--still our State will not be very large.
+
+That is true; yet neither will it be a very small State which contains all
+these.
+
+Then, again, there is the situation of the city--to find a place where
+nothing need be imported is wellnigh impossible.
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring the required
+supply from another city?
+
+There must.
+
+But if the trader goes empty-handed, having nothing which they require who
+would supply his need, he will come back empty-handed.
+
+That is certain.
+
+And therefore what they produce at home must be not only enough for
+themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate those
+from whom their wants are supplied.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then more husbandmen and more artisans will be required?
+
+They will.
+
+Not to mention the importers and exporters, who are called merchants?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then we shall want merchants?
+
+We shall.
+
+And if merchandise is to be carried over the sea, skilful sailors will also
+be needed, and in considerable numbers?
+
+Yes, in considerable numbers.
+
+Then, again, within the city, how will they exchange their productions?  To
+secure such an exchange was, as you will remember, one of our principal
+objects when we formed them into a society and constituted a State.
+
+Clearly they will buy and sell.
+
+Then they will need a market-place, and a money-token for purposes of
+exchange.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to
+market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him,--
+is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?
+
+Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the
+office of salesmen.  In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are
+the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other
+purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money in exchange
+for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from those who
+desire to buy.
+
+This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our State.  Is not
+'retailer' the term which is applied to those who sit in the market-place
+engaged in buying and selling, while those who wander from one city to
+another are called merchants?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And there is another class of servants, who are intellectually hardly on
+the level of companionship; still they have plenty of bodily strength for
+labour, which accordingly they sell, and are called, if I do not mistake,
+hirelings, hire being the name which is given to the price of their labour.
+
+True.
+
+Then hirelings will help to make up our population?
+
+Yes.
+
+And now, Adeimantus, is our State matured and perfected?
+
+I think so.
+
+Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the
+State did they spring up?
+
+Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another.  I cannot
+imagine that they are more likely to be found any where else.
+
+I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better
+think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.
+
+Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now
+that we have thus established them.  Will they not produce corn, and wine,
+and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves?  And when they are
+housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in
+winter substantially clothed and shod.  They will feed on barley-meal and
+flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves;
+these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves
+reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle.  And they and
+their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made,
+wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in
+happy converse with one another.  And they will take care that their
+families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.
+
+But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their
+meal.
+
+True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish--salt,
+and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country
+people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans;
+and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in
+moderation.  And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and
+health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children
+after them.
+
+Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how
+else would you feed the beasts?
+
+But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
+
+Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. 
+People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine
+off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.
+
+Yes, I said, now I understand:  the question which you would have me
+consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created;
+and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more
+likely to see how justice and injustice originate.  In my opinion the true
+and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. 
+But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have no objection. 
+For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life.
+They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also
+dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these
+not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the
+necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes,
+and shoes:  the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set
+in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no
+longer sufficient.  Now will the city have to fill and swell with a
+multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as
+the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do
+with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music--poets and
+their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also
+makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses.  And we
+shall want more servants.  Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses
+wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and
+swineherds, too, who were not needed and therefore had no place in the
+former edition of our State, but are needed now?  They must not be
+forgotten:  and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat
+them.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than
+before?
+
+Much greater.
+
+And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will
+be too small now, and not enough?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and
+tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they
+exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited
+accumulation of wealth?
+
+That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
+
+And so we shall go to war, Glaucon.  Shall we not?
+
+Most certainly, he replied.
+
+Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we
+may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which
+are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as
+public.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And our State must once more enlarge; and this time the enlargement will be
+nothing short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight with the
+invaders for all that we have, as well as for the things and persons whom
+we were describing above.
+
+Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves?
+
+No, I said; not if we were right in the principle which was acknowledged by
+all of us when we were framing the State:  the principle, as you will
+remember, was that one man cannot practise many arts with success.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But is not war an art?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And the shoemaker was not allowed by us to be a husbandman, or a weaver, or
+a builder--in order that we might have our shoes well made; but to him and
+to every other worker was assigned one work for which he was by nature
+fitted, and at that he was to continue working all his life long and at no
+other; he was not to let opportunities slip, and then he would become a
+good workman.  Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a
+soldier should be well done.  But is war an art so easily acquired that a
+man may be a warrior who is also a husbandman, or shoemaker, or other
+artisan; although no one in the world would be a good dice or draught
+player who merely took up the game as a recreation, and had not from his
+earliest years devoted himself to this and nothing else?  No tools will
+make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor be of any use to
+him who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any
+attention upon them.  How then will he who takes up a shield or other
+implement of war become a good fighter all in a day, whether with
+heavy-armed or any other kind of troops?
+
+Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond
+price.
+
+And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more time, and
+skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?
+
+No doubt, he replied.
+
+Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then it will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted for
+the task of guarding the city?
+
+It will.
+
+And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we must be brave and
+do our best.
+
+We must.
+
+Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and
+watching?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to overtake
+the enemy when they see him; and strong too if, when they have caught him,
+they have to fight with him.
+
+All these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.
+
+Well, and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any
+other animal?  Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable is
+spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be
+absolutely fearless and indomitable?
+
+I have.
+
+Then now we have a clear notion of the bodily qualities which are required
+in the guardian.
+
+True.
+
+And also of the mental ones; his soul is to be full of spirit?
+
+Yes.
+
+But are not these spirited natures apt to be savage with one another, and
+with everybody else?
+
+A difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.
+
+Whereas, I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to
+their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for
+their enemies to destroy them.
+
+True, he said.
+
+What is to be done then? I said; how shall we find a gentle nature which
+has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the other?
+
+True.
+
+He will not be a good guardian who is wanting in either of these two
+qualities; and yet the combination of them appears to be impossible; and
+hence we must infer that to be a good guardian is impossible.
+
+I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.
+
+Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had preceded.--My friend,
+I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have lost sight of
+the image which we had before us.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean to say that there do exist natures gifted with those opposite
+qualities.
+
+And where do you find them?
+
+Many animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog is a
+very good one:  you know that well-bred dogs are perfectly gentle to their
+familiars and acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.
+
+Yes, I know.
+
+Then there is nothing impossible or out of the order of nature in our
+finding a guardian who has a similar combination of qualities?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature,
+need to have the qualities of a philosopher?
+
+I do not apprehend your meaning.
+
+The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the dog,
+and is remarkable in the animal.
+
+What trait?
+
+Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he
+welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other
+any good.  Did this never strike you as curious?
+
+The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your
+remark.
+
+And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;--your dog is a true
+philosopher.
+
+Why?
+
+Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by
+the criterion of knowing and not knowing.  And must not an animal be a
+lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of
+knowledge and ignorance?
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?
+
+They are the same, he replied.
+
+And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is likely to be
+gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover of
+wisdom and knowledge?
+
+That we may safely affirm.
+
+Then he who is to be a really good and noble guardian of the State will
+require to unite in himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness and
+strength?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them,
+how are they to be reared and educated?  Is not this an enquiry which may
+be expected to throw light on the greater enquiry which is our final end--
+How do justice and injustice grow up in States? for we do not want either
+to omit what is to the point or to draw out the argument to an inconvenient
+length.
+
+Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great service to us.
+
+Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up, even if
+somewhat long.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story
+shall be the education of our heroes.
+
+By all means.
+
+And what shall be their education?  Can we find a better than the
+traditional sort?--and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and
+music for the soul.
+
+True.
+
+Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?
+
+By all means.
+
+And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?
+
+I do.
+
+And literature may be either true or false?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the false?
+
+I do not understand your meaning, he said.
+
+You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though
+not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these
+stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.
+
+Very true.
+
+That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before gymnastics.
+
+Quite right, he said.
+
+You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work,
+especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at
+which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more
+readily taken.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which
+may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for
+the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have
+when they are grown up?
+
+We cannot.
+
+Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of
+fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and
+reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their
+children the authorised ones only.  Let them fashion the mind with such
+tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most
+of those which are now in use must be discarded.
+
+Of what tales are you speaking? he said.
+
+You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are
+necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.
+
+Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the
+greater.
+
+Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the
+poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.
+
+But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with
+them?
+
+A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and,
+what is more, a bad lie.
+
+But when is this fault committed?
+
+Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and
+heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a
+likeness to the original.
+
+Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are
+the stories which you mean?
+
+First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places,
+which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,--I mean what
+Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him.  The doings
+of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him,
+even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and
+thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. 
+But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might
+hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian)
+pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the
+hearers will be very few indeed.
+
+Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.
+
+Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the
+young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is
+far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his
+father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following
+the example of the first and greatest among the gods.
+
+I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are quite
+unfit to be repeated.
+
+Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling
+among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to
+them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods
+against one another, for they are not true.  No, we shall never mention the
+battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall
+be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with
+their friends and relatives.  If they would only believe us we would tell
+them that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there
+been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women
+should begin by telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also
+should be told to compose for them in a similar spirit.  But the narrative
+of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent
+him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the
+battles of the gods in Homer--these tales must not be admitted into our
+State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. 
+For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal;
+anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become
+indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the
+tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.
+
+There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models
+to be found and of what tales are you speaking--how shall we answer him?
+
+I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but
+founders of a State:  now the founders of a State ought to know the general
+forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be
+observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business.
+
+Very true, he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?
+
+Something of this kind, I replied:--God is always to be represented as he
+truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which
+the representation is given.
+
+Right.
+
+And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And no good thing is hurtful?
+
+No, indeed.
+
+And that which is not hurtful hurts not?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And that which hurts not does no evil?
+
+No.
+
+And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the good is advantageous?
+
+Yes.
+
+And therefore the cause of well-being?
+
+Yes.
+
+It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but of
+the good only?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many
+assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things
+that occur to men.  For few are the goods of human life, and many are the
+evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the
+causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
+
+That appears to me to be most true, he said.
+
+Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the
+folly of saying that two casks
+
+'Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil
+lots,'
+
+and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two
+
+'Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;'
+
+but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,
+
+'Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.'
+
+And again--
+
+'Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.'
+
+And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was
+really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athene and Zeus, or that
+the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis and Zeus, he
+shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our young men to hear
+the words of Aeschylus, that
+
+'God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house.'
+
+And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe--the subject of the tragedy
+in which these iambic verses occur--or of the house of Pelops, or of the
+Trojan war or on any similar theme, either we must not permit him to say
+that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he must devise some
+explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must say that God did what
+was just and right, and they were the better for being punished; but that
+those who are punished are miserable, and that God is the author of their
+misery--the poet is not to be permitted to say; though he may say that the
+wicked are miserable because they require to be punished, and are benefited
+by receiving punishment from God; but that God being good is the author of
+evil to any one is to be strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or
+heard in verse or prose by any one whether old or young in any well-ordered
+commonwealth.  Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.
+
+I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.
+
+Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to
+which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform,--that God is not
+the author of all things, but of good only.
+
+That will do, he said.
+
+And what do you think of a second principle?  Shall I ask you whether God
+is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in one shape, and
+now in another--sometimes himself changing and passing into many forms,
+sometimes deceiving us with the semblance of such transformations; or is he
+one and the same immutably fixed in his own proper image?
+
+I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.
+
+Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that change must be
+effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+And things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered or
+discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the human frame is
+least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant which is in
+the fullest vigour also suffers least from winds or the heat of the sun or
+any similar causes.
+
+Of course.
+
+And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged by
+any external influence?
+
+True.
+
+And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all composite
+things--furniture, houses, garments:  when good and well made, they are
+least altered by time and circumstances.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then everything which is good, whether made by art or nature, or both, is
+least liable to suffer change from without?
+
+True.
+
+But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?
+
+Of course they are.
+
+Then he can hardly be compelled by external influence to take many shapes?
+
+He cannot.
+
+But may he not change and transform himself?
+
+Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at all.
+
+And will he then change himself for the better and fairer, or for the worse
+and more unsightly?
+
+If he change at all he can only change for the worse, for we cannot suppose
+him to be deficient either in virtue or beauty.
+
+Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God or man, desire
+to make himself worse?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being, as
+is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every God remains
+absolutely and for ever in his own form.
+
+That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.
+
+Then, I said, my dear friend, let none of the poets tell us that
+
+'The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up and
+down cities in all sorts of forms;'
+
+and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in
+tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in the
+likeness of a priestess asking an alms
+
+'For the life-giving daughters of Inachus the river of Argos;'
+
+--let us have no more lies of that sort.  Neither must we have mothers
+under the influence of the poets scaring their children with a bad version
+of these myths--telling how certain gods, as they say, 'Go about by night
+in the likeness of so many strangers and in divers forms;' but let them
+take heed lest they make cowards of their children, and at the same time
+speak blasphemy against the gods.
+
+Heaven forbid, he said.
+
+But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by witchcraft and
+deception they may make us think that they appear in various forms?
+
+Perhaps, he replied.
+
+Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie, whether in word
+or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?
+
+I cannot say, he replied.
+
+Do you not know, I said, that the true lie, if such an expression may be
+allowed, is hated of gods and men?
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest and
+highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters; there,
+above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.
+
+Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.
+
+The reason is, I replied, that you attribute some profound meaning to my
+words; but I am only saying that deception, or being deceived or uninformed
+about the highest realities in the highest part of themselves, which is the
+soul, and in that part of them to have and to hold the lie, is what mankind
+least like;--that, I say, is what they utterly detest.
+
+There is nothing more hateful to them.
+
+And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul of him who is
+deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only a kind of
+imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the soul, not pure
+unadulterated falsehood.  Am I not right?
+
+Perfectly right.
+
+The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?
+
+Yes.
+
+Whereas the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in
+dealing with enemies--that would be an instance; or again, when those whom
+we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some
+harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive; also in
+the tales of mythology, of which we were just now speaking--because we do
+not know the truth about ancient times, we make falsehood as much like
+truth as we can, and so turn it to account.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But can any of these reasons apply to God?  Can we suppose that he is
+ignorant of antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?
+
+That would be ridiculous, he said.
+
+Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?
+
+I should say not.
+
+Or perhaps he may tell a lie because he is afraid of enemies?
+
+That is inconceivable.
+
+But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?
+
+But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.
+
+Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?
+
+None whatever.
+
+Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes
+not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision.
+
+Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.
+
+You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in
+which we should write and speak about divine things.  The gods are not
+magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any
+way.
+
+I grant that.
+
+Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying dream
+which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses of
+Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials
+
+'Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and
+to know no sickness.  And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things
+blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul.  And I
+thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would
+not fail.  And now he himself who uttered the strain, he who was present at
+the banquet, and who said this--he it is who has slain my son.'
+
+These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our
+anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall we
+allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young,
+meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be true
+worshippers of the gods and like them.
+
+I entirely agree, he said, in these principles, and promise to make them my
+laws.
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+Such then, I said, are our principles of theology--some tales are to be
+told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth
+upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value
+friendship with one another.
+
+Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.
+
+But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides
+these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death?  Can
+any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather
+than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and
+terrible?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as
+well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to
+commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are
+untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.
+
+That will be our duty, he said.
+
+Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages,
+beginning with the verses,
+
+'I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than
+rule over all the dead who have come to nought.'
+
+We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,
+
+'Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen
+both of mortals and immortals.'
+
+And again:--
+
+'O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but
+no mind at all!'
+
+Again of Tiresias:--
+
+'(To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,) that he alone should
+be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.'
+
+Again:--
+
+'The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate,
+leaving manhood and youth.'
+
+Again:--
+
+'And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.'
+
+And,--
+
+'As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out
+of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one
+another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.'
+
+And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out
+these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or
+unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm
+of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant
+to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names which
+describe the world below--Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and
+sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a
+shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them.  I do not
+say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there
+is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable
+and effeminate by them.
+
+There is a real danger, he said.
+
+Then we must have no more of them.
+
+True.
+
+Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous men?
+
+They will go with the rest.
+
+But shall we be right in getting rid of them?  Reflect:  our principle is
+that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man
+who is his comrade.
+
+Yes; that is our principle.
+
+And therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he had
+suffered anything terrible?
+
+He will not.
+
+Such an one, as we further maintain, is sufficient for himself and his own
+happiness, and therefore is least in need of other men.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the deprivation of
+fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will bear with the
+greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall him.
+
+Yes, he will feel such a misfortune far less than another.
+
+Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous men,
+and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good for
+anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated by
+us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the like.
+
+That will be very right.
+
+Then we will once more entreat Homer and the other poets not to depict
+Achilles, who is the son of a goddess, first lying on his side, then on his
+back, and then on his face; then starting up and sailing in a frenzy along
+the shores of the barren sea; now taking the sooty ashes in both his hands
+and pouring them over his head, or weeping and wailing in the various modes
+which Homer has delineated.  Nor should he describe Priam the kinsman of
+the gods as praying and beseeching,
+
+'Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.'
+
+Still more earnestly will we beg of him at all events not to introduce the
+gods lamenting and saying,
+
+'Alas! my misery!  Alas! that I bore the bravest to my sorrow.'
+
+But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so
+completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him say--
+
+'O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased round
+and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.'
+
+Or again:--
+
+Woe is me that I am fated to have Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, subdued
+at the hands of Patroclus the son of Menoetius.'
+
+For if, my sweet Adeimantus, our youth seriously listen to such unworthy
+representations of the gods, instead of laughing at them as they ought,
+hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be
+dishonoured by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination
+which may arise in his mind to say and do the like.  And instead of having
+any shame or self-control, he will be always whining and lamenting on
+slight occasions.
+
+Yes, he said, that is most true.
+
+Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as the argument
+has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until it is
+disproved by a better.
+
+It ought not to be.
+
+Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter.  For a fit of laughter
+which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a violent
+reaction.
+
+So I believe.
+
+Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be represented as
+overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation of the gods
+be allowed.
+
+Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.
+
+Then we shall not suffer such an expression to be used about the gods as
+that of Homer when he describes how
+
+'Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw
+Hephaestus bustling about the mansion.'
+
+On your views, we must not admit them.
+
+On my views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit them
+is certain.
+
+Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is
+useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of
+such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have
+no business with them.
+
+Clearly not, he said.
+
+Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the
+State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with
+enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public
+good.  But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and
+although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them
+in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient or the
+pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily illnesses
+to the physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to tell the captain
+what is happening about the ship and the rest of the crew, and how things
+are going with himself or his fellow sailors.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,
+
+'Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,'
+
+he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive
+and destructive of ship or State.
+
+Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out.
+
+In the next place our youth must be temperate?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Are not the chief elements of temperance, speaking generally, obedience to
+commanders and self-control in sensual pleasures?
+
+True.
+
+Then we shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer,
+
+'Friend, sit still and obey my word,'
+
+and the verses which follow,
+
+'The Greeks marched breathing prowess,
+...in silent awe of their leaders,'
+
+and other sentiments of the same kind.
+
+We shall.
+
+What of this line,
+
+'O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog and the heart of a stag,'
+
+and of the words which follow?  Would you say that these, or any similar
+impertinences which private individuals are supposed to address to their
+rulers, whether in verse or prose, are well or ill spoken?
+
+They are ill spoken.
+
+They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do not conduce to
+temperance.  And therefore they are likely to do harm to our young men--you
+would agree with me there?
+
+Yes.
+
+And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing in his opinion
+is more glorious than
+
+'When the tables are full of bread and meat, and the cup-bearer carries
+round wine which he draws from the bowl and pours into the cups,'
+
+is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to hear such
+words?  Or the verse
+
+'The saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?'
+
+What would you say again to the tale of Zeus, who, while other gods and men
+were asleep and he the only person awake, lay devising plans, but forgot
+them all in a moment through his lust, and was so completely overcome at
+the sight of Here that he would not even go into the hut, but wanted to lie
+with her on the ground, declaring that he had never been in such a state of
+rapture before, even when they first met one another
+
+'Without the knowledge of their parents;'
+
+or that other tale of how Hephaestus, because of similar goings on, cast a
+chain around Ares and Aphrodite?
+
+Indeed, he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear that
+sort of thing.
+
+But any deeds of endurance which are done or told by famous men, these they
+ought to see and hear; as, for example, what is said in the verses,
+
+'He smote his breast, and thus reproached his heart,
+Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured!'
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of gifts or lovers of
+money.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Neither must we sing to them of
+
+'Gifts persuading gods, and persuading reverend kings.'
+
+Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be approved or deemed to have
+given his pupil good counsel when he told him that he should take the gifts
+of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift he should not lay
+aside his anger.  Neither will we believe or acknowledge Achilles himself
+to have been such a lover of money that he took Agamemnon's gifts, or that
+when he had received payment he restored the dead body of Hector, but that
+without payment he was unwilling to do so.
+
+Undoubtedly, he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.
+
+Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in attributing these
+feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly attributed to
+him, he is guilty of downright impiety.  As little can I believe the
+narrative of his insolence to Apollo, where he says,
+
+'Thou hast wronged me, O far-darter, most abominable of deities.  Verily I
+would be even with thee, if I had only the power;'
+
+or his insubordination to the river-god, on whose divinity he is ready to
+lay hands; or his offering to the dead Patroclus of his own hair, which had
+been previously dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius, and that he
+actually performed this vow; or that he dragged Hector round the tomb of
+Patroclus, and slaughtered the captives at the pyre; of all this I cannot
+believe that he was guilty, any more than I can allow our citizens to
+believe that he, the wise Cheiron's pupil, the son of a goddess and of
+Peleus who was the gentlest of men and third in descent from Zeus, was so
+disordered in his wits as to be at one time the slave of two seemingly
+inconsistent passions, meanness, not untainted by avarice, combined with
+overweening contempt of gods and men.
+
+You are quite right, he replied.
+
+And let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be repeated, the tale of
+Theseus son of Poseidon, or of Peirithous son of Zeus, going forth as they
+did to perpetrate a horrid rape; or of any other hero or son of a god
+daring to do such impious and dreadful things as they falsely ascribe to
+them in our day:  and let us further compel the poets to declare either
+that these acts were not done by them, or that they were not the sons of
+gods;--both in the same breath they shall not be permitted to affirm.  We
+will not have them trying to persuade our youth that the gods are the
+authors of evil, and that heroes are no better than men--sentiments which,
+as we were saying, are neither pious nor true, for we have already proved
+that evil cannot come from the gods.
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear them;
+for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is convinced that
+similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by--
+
+'The kindred of the gods, the relatives of Zeus, whose ancestral altar, the
+altar of Zeus, is aloft in air on the peak of Ida,'
+
+and who have
+
+'the blood of deities yet flowing in their veins.'
+
+And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity of
+morals among the young.
+
+By all means, he replied.
+
+But now that we are determining what classes of subjects are or are not to
+be spoken of, let us see whether any have been omitted by us.  The manner
+in which gods and demigods and heroes and the world below should be treated
+has been already laid down.
+
+Very true.
+
+And what shall we say about men?  That is clearly the remaining portion of
+our subject.
+
+Clearly so.
+
+But we are not in a condition to answer this question at present, my
+friend.
+
+Why not?
+
+Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that about men poets
+and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they
+tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that
+injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man's own
+loss and another's gain--these things we shall forbid them to utter, and
+command them to sing and say the opposite.
+
+To be sure we shall, he replied.
+
+But if you admit that I am right in this, then I shall maintain that you
+have implied the principle for which we have been all along contending.
+
+I grant the truth of your inference.
+
+That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question which we
+cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and how
+naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or not.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Enough of the subjects of poetry:  let us now speak of the style; and when
+this has been considered, both matter and manner will have been completely
+treated.
+
+I do not understand what you mean, said Adeimantus.
+
+Then I must make you understand; and perhaps I may be more intelligible if
+I put the matter in this way.  You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology
+and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of
+the two?
+
+That again, he said, I do not quite understand.
+
+I fear that I must be a ridiculous teacher when I have so much difficulty
+in making myself apprehended.  Like a bad speaker, therefore, I will not
+take the whole of the subject, but will break a piece off in illustration
+of my meaning.  You know the first lines of the Iliad, in which the poet
+says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his daughter, and that
+Agamemnon flew into a passion with him; whereupon Chryses, failing of his
+object, invoked the anger of the God against the Achaeans.  Now as far as
+these lines,
+
+'And he prayed all the Greeks, but especially the two sons of Atreus, the
+chiefs of the people,'
+
+the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that
+he is any one else.  But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses,
+and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not
+Homer, but the aged priest himself.  And in this double form he has cast
+the entire narrative of the events which occurred at Troy and in Ithaca and
+throughout the Odyssey.
+
+Yes.
+
+And a narrative it remains both in the speeches which the poet recites from
+time to time and in the intermediate passages?
+
+Quite true.
+
+But when the poet speaks in the person of another, may we not say that he
+assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs you, is
+going to speak?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or
+gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes?
+
+Of course.
+
+Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by way
+of imitation?
+
+Very true.
+
+Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then again
+the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration. 
+However, in order that I may make my meaning quite clear, and that you may
+no more say, 'I don't understand,' I will show how the change might be
+effected.  If Homer had said, 'The priest came, having his daughter's
+ransom in his hands, supplicating the Achaeans, and above all the kings;'
+and then if, instead of speaking in the person of Chryses, he had continued
+in his own person, the words would have been, not imitation, but simple
+narration.  The passage would have run as follows (I am no poet, and
+therefore I drop the metre), 'The priest came and prayed the gods on behalf
+of the Greeks that they might capture Troy and return safely home, but
+begged that they would give him back his daughter, and take the ransom
+which he brought, and respect the God.  Thus he spoke, and the other Greeks
+revered the priest and assented.  But Agamemnon was wroth, and bade him
+depart and not come again, lest the staff and chaplets of the God should be
+of no avail to him--the daughter of Chryses should not be released, he
+said--she should grow old with him in Argos.  And then he told him to go
+away and not to provoke him, if he intended to get home unscathed.  And the
+old man went away in fear and silence, and, when he had left the camp, he
+called upon Apollo by his many names, reminding him of everything which he
+had done pleasing to him, whether in building his temples, or in offering
+sacrifice, and praying that his good deeds might be returned to him, and
+that the Achaeans might expiate his tears by the arrows of the god,'--and
+so on.  In this way the whole becomes simple narrative.
+
+I understand, he said.
+
+Or you may suppose the opposite case--that the intermediate passages are
+omitted, and the dialogue only left.
+
+That also, he said, I understand; you mean, for example, as in tragedy.
+
+You have conceived my meaning perfectly; and if I mistake not, what you
+failed to apprehend before is now made clear to you, that poetry and
+mythology are, in some cases, wholly imitative--instances of this are
+supplied by tragedy and comedy; there is likewise the opposite style, in
+which the poet is the only speaker--of this the dithyramb affords the best
+example; and the combination of both is found in epic, and in several other
+styles of poetry.  Do I take you with me?
+
+Yes, he said; I see now what you meant.
+
+I will ask you to remember also what I began by saying, that we had done
+with the subject and might proceed to the style.
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+In saying this, I intended to imply that we must come to an understanding
+about the mimetic art,--whether the poets, in narrating their stories, are
+to be allowed by us to imitate, and if so, whether in whole or in part, and
+if the latter, in what parts; or should all imitation be prohibited?
+
+You mean, I suspect, to ask whether tragedy and comedy shall be admitted
+into our State?
+
+Yes, I said; but there may be more than this in question:  I really do not
+know as yet, but whither the argument may blow, thither we go.
+
+And go we will, he said.
+
+Then, Adeimantus, let me ask you whether our guardians ought to be
+imitators; or rather, has not this question been decided by the rule
+already laid down that one man can only do one thing well, and not many;
+and that if he attempt many, he will altogether fail of gaining much
+reputation in any?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this is equally true of imitation; no one man can imitate many things
+as well as he would imitate a single one?
+
+He cannot.
+
+Then the same person will hardly be able to play a serious part in life,
+and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other parts as
+well; for even when two species of imitation are nearly allied, the same
+persons cannot succeed in both, as, for example, the writers of tragedy and
+comedy--did you not just now call them imitations?
+
+Yes, I did; and you are right in thinking that the same persons cannot
+succeed in both.
+
+Any more than they can be rhapsodists and actors at once?
+
+True.
+
+Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these things are but
+imitations.
+
+They are so.
+
+And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been coined into yet smaller
+pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well, as of
+performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies.
+
+Quite true, he replied.
+
+If then we adhere to our original notion and bear in mind that our
+guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves
+wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft,
+and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to
+practise or imitate anything else; if they imitate at all, they should
+imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their
+profession--the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they
+should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or
+baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. 
+Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and
+continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second
+nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?
+
+Yes, certainly, he said.
+
+Then, I said, we will not allow those for whom we profess a care and of
+whom we say that they ought to be good men, to imitate a woman, whether
+young or old, quarrelling with her husband, or striving and vaunting
+against the gods in conceit of her happiness, or when she is in affliction,
+or sorrow, or weeping; and certainly not one who is in sickness, love, or
+labour.
+
+Very right, he said.
+
+Neither must they represent slaves, male or female, performing the offices
+of slaves?
+
+They must not.
+
+And surely not bad men, whether cowards or any others, who do the reverse
+of what we have just been prescribing, who scold or mock or revile one
+another in drink or out of drink, or who in any other manner sin against
+themselves and their neighbours in word or deed, as the manner of such is. 
+Neither should they be trained to imitate the action or speech of men or
+women who are mad or bad; for madness, like vice, is to be known but not to
+be practised or imitated.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Neither may they imitate smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, or
+boatswains, or the like?
+
+How can they, he said, when they are not allowed to apply their minds to
+the callings of any of these?
+
+Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls, the
+murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that sort of
+thing?
+
+Nay, he said, if madness be forbidden, neither may they copy the behaviour
+of madmen.
+
+You mean, I said, if I understand you aright, that there is one sort of
+narrative style which may be employed by a truly good man when he has
+anything to say, and that another sort will be used by a man of an opposite
+character and education.
+
+And which are these two sorts? he asked.
+
+Suppose, I answered, that a just and good man in the course of a narration
+comes on some saying or action of another good man,--I should imagine that
+he will like to personate him, and will not be ashamed of this sort of
+imitation:  he will be most ready to play the part of the good man when he
+is acting firmly and wisely; in a less degree when he is overtaken by
+illness or love or drink, or has met with any other disaster.  But when he
+comes to a character which is unworthy of him, he will not make a study of
+that; he will disdain such a person, and will assume his likeness, if at
+all, for a moment only when he is performing some good action; at other
+times he will be ashamed to play a part which he has never practised, nor
+will he like to fashion and frame himself after the baser models; he feels
+the employment of such an art, unless in jest, to be beneath him, and his
+mind revolts at it.
+
+So I should expect, he replied.
+
+Then he will adopt a mode of narration such as we have illustrated out of
+Homer, that is to say, his style will be both imitative and narrative; but
+there will be very little of the former, and a great deal of the latter. 
+Do you agree?
+
+Certainly, he said; that is the model which such a speaker must necessarily
+take.
+
+But there is another sort of character who will narrate anything, and, the
+worse he is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will be too bad for
+him:  and he will be ready to imitate anything, not as a joke, but in right
+good earnest, and before a large company.  As I was just now saying, he
+will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail,
+or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes,
+pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments:  he will bark like a dog,
+bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock; his entire art will consist in
+imitation of voice and gesture, and there will be very little narration.
+
+That, he said, will be his mode of speaking.
+
+These, then, are the two kinds of style?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you would agree with me in saying that one of them is simple and has
+but slight changes; and if the harmony and rhythm are also chosen for their
+simplicity, the result is that the speaker, if he speaks correctly, is
+always pretty much the same in style, and he will keep within the limits of
+a single harmony (for the changes are not great), and in like manner he
+will make use of nearly the same rhythm?
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+Whereas the other requires all sorts of harmonies and all sorts of rhythms,
+if the music and the style are to correspond, because the style has all
+sorts of changes.
+
+That is also perfectly true, he replied.
+
+And do not the two styles, or the mixture of the two, comprehend all
+poetry, and every form of expression in words?  No one can say anything
+except in one or other of them or in both together.
+
+They include all, he said.
+
+And shall we receive into our State all the three styles, or one only of
+the two unmixed styles? or would you include the mixed?
+
+I should prefer only to admit the pure imitator of virtue.
+
+Yes, I said, Adeimantus, but the mixed style is also very charming:  and
+indeed the pantomimic, which is the opposite of the one chosen by you, is
+the most popular style with children and their attendants, and with the
+world in general.
+
+I do not deny it.
+
+But I suppose you would argue that such a style is unsuitable to our State,
+in which human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man plays one
+part only?
+
+Yes; quite unsuitable.
+
+And this is the reason why in our State, and in our State only, we shall
+find a shoemaker to be a shoemaker and not a pilot also, and a husbandman
+to be a husbandman and not a dicast also, and a soldier a soldier and not a
+trader also, and the same throughout?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever
+that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to
+exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a
+sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our
+State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. 
+And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon
+his head, we shall send him away to another city.  For we mean to employ
+for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who
+will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models
+which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers.
+
+We certainly will, he said, if we have the power.
+
+Then now, my friend, I said, that part of music or literary education which
+relates to the story or myth may be considered to be finished; for the
+matter and manner have both been discussed.
+
+I think so too, he said.
+
+Next in order will follow melody and song.
+
+That is obvious.
+
+Every one can see already what we ought to say about them, if we are to be
+consistent with ourselves.
+
+I fear, said Glaucon, laughing, that the word 'every one' hardly includes
+me, for I cannot at the moment say what they should be; though I may guess.
+
+At any rate you can tell that a song or ode has three parts--the words, the
+melody, and the rhythm; that degree of knowledge I may presuppose?
+
+Yes, he said; so much as that you may.
+
+And as for the words, there will surely be no difference between words
+which are and which are not set to music; both will conform to the same
+laws, and these have been already determined by us?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the melody and rhythm will depend upon the words?
+
+Certainly.
+
+We were saying, when we spoke of the subject-matter, that we had no need of
+lamentation and strains of sorrow?
+
+True.
+
+And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow?  You are musical, and can
+tell me.
+
+The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian, and the
+full-toned or bass Lydian, and such like.
+
+These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a character to
+maintain they are of no use, and much less to men.
+
+Certainly.
+
+In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly
+unbecoming the character of our guardians.
+
+Utterly unbecoming.
+
+And which are the soft or drinking harmonies?
+
+The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed 'relaxed.'
+
+Well, and are these of any military use?
+
+Quite the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian are
+the only ones which you have left.
+
+I answered:  Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one
+warlike, to sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the hour
+of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going
+to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such
+crisis meets the blows of fortune with firm step and a determination to
+endure; and another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of
+action, when there is no pressure of necessity, and he is seeking to
+persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and admonition, or on the
+other hand, when he is expressing his willingness to yield to persuasion or
+entreaty or admonition, and which represents him when by prudent conduct he
+has attained his end, not carried away by his success, but acting
+moderately and wisely under the circumstances, and acquiescing in the
+event.  These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and
+the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the
+fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I
+say, leave.
+
+And these, he replied, are the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies of which I was
+just now speaking.
+
+Then, I said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and
+melodies, we shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic scale?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with three corners and
+complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed curiously-
+harmonised instruments?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players?  Would you admit
+them into our State when you reflect that in this composite use of harmony
+the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put together; even the
+panharmonic music is only an imitation of the flute?
+
+Clearly not.
+
+There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the city, and the
+shepherds may have a pipe in the country.
+
+That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.
+
+The preferring of Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his instruments
+is not at all strange, I said.
+
+Not at all, he replied.
+
+And so, by the dog of Egypt, we have been unconsciously purging the State,
+which not long ago we termed luxurious.
+
+And we have done wisely, he replied.
+
+Then let us now finish the purgation, I said.  Next in order to harmonies,
+rhythms will naturally follow, and they should be subject to the same
+rules, for we ought not to seek out complex systems of metre, or metres of
+every kind, but rather to discover what rhythms are the expressions of a
+courageous and harmonious life; and when we have found them, we shall adapt
+the foot and the melody to words having a like spirit, not the words to the
+foot and melody.  To say what these rhythms are will be your duty--you must
+teach me them, as you have already taught me the harmonies.
+
+But, indeed, he replied, I cannot tell you.  I only know that there are
+some three principles of rhythm out of which metrical systems are framed,
+just as in sounds there are four notes (i.e. the four notes of the
+tetrachord.) out of which all the harmonies are composed; that is an
+observation which I have made.  But of what sort of lives they are
+severally the imitations I am unable to say.
+
+Then, I said, we must take Damon into our counsels; and he will tell us
+what rhythms are expressive of meanness, or insolence, or fury, or other
+unworthiness, and what are to be reserved for the expression of opposite
+feelings.  And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his
+mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic, and he
+arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making the
+rhythms equal in the rise and fall of the foot, long and short alternating;
+and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well as of a trochaic
+rhythm, and assigned to them short and long quantities.  Also in some cases
+he appeared to praise or censure the movement of the foot quite as much as
+the rhythm; or perhaps a combination of the two; for I am not certain what
+he meant.  These matters, however, as I was saying, had better be referred
+to Damon himself, for the analysis of the subject would be difficult, you
+know?  (Socrates expresses himself carelessly in accordance with his
+assumed ignorance of the details of the subject.  In the first part of the
+sentence he appears to be speaking of paeonic rhythms which are in the
+ratio of 3/2; in the second part, of dactylic and anapaestic rhythms, which
+are in the ratio of 1/1; in the last clause, of iambic and trochaic
+rhythms, which are in the ratio of 1/2 or 2/1.)
+
+Rather so, I should say.
+
+But there is no difficulty in seeing that grace or the absence of grace is
+an effect of good or bad rhythm.
+
+None at all.
+
+And also that good and bad rhythm naturally assimilate to a good and bad
+style; and that harmony and discord in like manner follow style; for our
+principle is that rhythm and harmony are regulated by the words, and not
+the words by them.
+
+Just so, he said, they should follow the words.
+
+And will not the words and the character of the style depend on the temper
+of the soul?
+
+Yes.
+
+And everything else on the style?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on
+simplicity,--I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind
+and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for
+folly?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And if our youth are to do their work in life, must they not make these
+graces and harmonies their perpetual aim?
+
+They must.
+
+And surely the art of the painter and every other creative and constructive
+art are full of them,--weaving, embroidery, architecture, and every kind of
+manufacture; also nature, animal and vegetable,--in all of them there is
+grace or the absence of grace.  And ugliness and discord and inharmonious
+motion are nearly allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony
+are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue and bear their likeness.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to be
+required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on pain, if
+they do anything else, of expulsion from our State?  Or is the same control
+to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from
+exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and
+indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts; and is he
+who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be prevented from practising his
+art in our State, lest the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him?  We
+would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in
+some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb
+and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a
+festering mass of corruption in their own soul.  Let our artists rather be
+those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and
+graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights
+and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence
+of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze
+from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into
+likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.
+
+There can be no nobler training than that, he replied.
+
+And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent
+instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into
+the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting
+grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of
+him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received
+this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive
+omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he
+praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes
+noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of
+his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason
+comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has
+made him long familiar.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite agree with you in thinking that our youth should be
+trained in music and on the grounds which you mention.
+
+Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew the
+letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring sizes
+and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they occupy a
+space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out; and not
+thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we recognise them
+wherever they are found:
+
+True--
+
+Or, as we recognise the reflection of letters in the water, or in a mirror,
+only when we know the letters themselves; the same art and study giving us
+the knowledge of both:
+
+Exactly--
+
+Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor our guardians, whom we have to
+educate, can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms
+of temperance, courage, liberality, magnificence, and their kindred, as
+well as the contrary forms, in all their combinations, and can recognise
+them and their images wherever they are found, not slighting them either in
+small things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere of
+one art and study.
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+And when a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two are
+cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has an eye
+to see it?
+
+The fairest indeed.
+
+And the fairest is also the loveliest?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+And the man who has the spirit of harmony will be most in love with the
+loveliest; but he will not love him who is of an inharmonious soul?
+
+That is true, he replied, if the deficiency be in his soul; but if there be
+any merely bodily defect in another he will be patient of it, and will love
+all the same.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you have or have had experiences of this sort, and
+I agree.  But let me ask you another question:  Has excess of pleasure any
+affinity to temperance?
+
+How can that be? he replied; pleasure deprives a man of the use of his
+faculties quite as much as pain.
+
+Or any affinity to virtue in general?
+
+None whatever.
+
+Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?
+
+Yes, the greatest.
+
+And is there any greater or keener pleasure than that of sensual love?
+
+No, nor a madder.
+
+Whereas true love is a love of beauty and order--temperate and harmonious?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to approach true love?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then mad or intemperate pleasure must never be allowed to come near the
+lover and his beloved; neither of them can have any part in it if their
+love is of the right sort?
+
+No, indeed, Socrates, it must never come near them.
+
+Then I suppose that in the city which we are founding you would make a law
+to the effect that a friend should use no other familiarity to his love
+than a father would use to his son, and then only for a noble purpose, and
+he must first have the other's consent; and this rule is to limit him in
+all his intercourse, and he is never to be seen going further, or, if he
+exceeds, he is to be deemed guilty of coarseness and bad taste.
+
+I quite agree, he said.
+
+Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end
+of music if not the love of beauty?
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+After music comes gymnastic, in which our youth are next to be trained.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Gymnastic as well as music should begin in early years; the training in it
+should be careful and should continue through life.  Now my belief is,--and
+this is a matter upon which I should like to have your opinion in
+confirmation of my own, but my own belief is,--not that the good body by
+any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the contrary, that the
+good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this may be
+possible.  What do you say?
+
+Yes, I agree.
+
+Then, to the mind when adequately trained, we shall be right in handing
+over the more particular care of the body; and in order to avoid prolixity
+we will now only give the general outlines of the subject.
+
+Very good.
+
+That they must abstain from intoxication has been already remarked by us;
+for of all persons a guardian should be the last to get drunk and not know
+where in the world he is.
+
+Yes, he said; that a guardian should require another guardian to take care
+of him is ridiculous indeed.
+
+But next, what shall we say of their food; for the men are in training for
+the great contest of all--are they not?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And will the habit of body of our ordinary athletes be suited to them?
+
+Why not?
+
+I am afraid, I said, that a habit of body such as they have is but a sleepy
+sort of thing, and rather perilous to health.  Do you not observe that
+these athletes sleep away their lives, and are liable to most dangerous
+illnesses if they depart, in ever so slight a degree, from their customary
+regimen?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+Then, I said, a finer sort of training will be required for our warrior
+athletes, who are to be like wakeful dogs, and to see and hear with the
+utmost keenness; amid the many changes of water and also of food, of summer
+heat and winter cold, which they will have to endure when on a campaign,
+they must not be liable to break down in health.
+
+That is my view.
+
+The really excellent gymnastic is twin sister of that simple music which we
+were just now describing.
+
+How so?
+
+Why, I conceive that there is a gymnastic which, like our music, is simple
+and good; and especially the military gymnastic.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+My meaning may be learned from Homer; he, you know, feeds his heroes at
+their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers' fare; they have no
+fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they are not
+allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is the food most convenient for
+soldiers, requiring only that they should light a fire, and not involving
+the trouble of carrying about pots and pans.
+
+True.
+
+And I can hardly be mistaken in saying that sweet sauces are nowhere
+mentioned in Homer.  In proscribing them, however, he is not singular; all
+professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good
+condition should take nothing of the kind.
+
+Yes, he said; and knowing this, they are quite right in not taking them.
+
+Then you would not approve of Syracusan dinners, and the refinements of
+Sicilian cookery?
+
+I think not.
+
+Nor, if a man is to be in condition, would you allow him to have a
+Corinthian girl as his fair friend?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Neither would you approve of the delicacies, as they are thought, of
+Athenian confectionary?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+All such feeding and living may be rightly compared by us to melody and
+song composed in the panharmonic style, and in all the rhythms.
+
+Exactly.
+
+There complexity engendered licence, and here disease; whereas simplicity
+in music was the parent of temperance in the soul; and simplicity in
+gymnastic of health in the body.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+But when intemperance and diseases multiply in a State, halls of justice
+and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the doctor and the
+lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which not
+only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them.
+
+Of course.
+
+And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state of
+education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people
+need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who
+would profess to have had a liberal education?  Is it not disgraceful, and
+a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad
+for his law and physic because he has none of his own at home, and must
+therefore surrender himself into the hands of other men whom he makes lords
+and judges over him?
+
+Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.
+
+Would you say 'most,' I replied, when you consider that there is a further
+stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long litigant, passing
+all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or defendant, but is
+actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his litigiousness; he
+imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to take every crooked
+turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and
+getting out of the way of justice:  and all for what?--in order to gain
+small points not worth mentioning, he not knowing that so to order his life
+as to be able to do without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort
+of thing.  Is not that still more disgraceful?
+
+Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful.
+
+Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when a wound has to
+be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by indolence and
+a habit of life such as we have been describing, men fill themselves with
+waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh, compelling the ingenious
+sons of Asclepius to find more names for diseases, such as flatulence and
+catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?
+
+Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names to
+diseases.
+
+Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such diseases in the
+days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that the hero
+Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of Pramnian
+wine well besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese, which are
+certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who were at the
+Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink, or rebuke
+Patroclus, who is treating his case.
+
+Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a
+person in his condition.
+
+Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that in former days,
+as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of Asclepius
+did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be said to
+educate diseases.  But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself of a sickly
+constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring found out a way of
+torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly the rest of the world.
+
+How was that? he said.
+
+By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal disease which he
+perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question, he passed his
+entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but attend upon
+himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he departed in anything
+from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the help of science he
+struggled on to old age.
+
+A rare reward of his skill!
+
+Yes, I said; a reward which a man might fairly expect who never understood
+that, if Asclepius did not instruct his descendants in valetudinarian arts,
+the omission arose, not from ignorance or inexperience of such a branch of
+medicine, but because he knew that in all well-ordered states every
+individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no
+leisure to spend in continually being ill.  This we remark in the case of
+the artisan, but, ludicrously enough, do not apply the same rule to people
+of the richer sort.
+
+How do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean this:  When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and
+ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,--these are his
+remedies.  And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and
+tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of
+thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees
+no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of
+his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of
+physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives
+and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has no
+more trouble.
+
+Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of
+medicine thus far only.
+
+Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his
+life if he were deprived of his occupation?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he has
+any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would live.
+
+He is generally supposed to have nothing to do.
+
+Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man has
+a livelihood he should practise virtue?
+
+Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.
+
+Let us not have a dispute with him about this, I said; but rather ask
+ourselves:  Is the practice of virtue obligatory on the rich man, or can he
+live without it?  And if obligatory on him, then let us raise a further
+question, whether this dieting of disorders, which is an impediment to the
+application of the mind in carpentering and the mechanical arts, does not
+equally stand in the way of the sentiment of Phocylides?
+
+Of that, he replied, there can be no doubt; such excessive care of the
+body, when carried beyond the rules of gymnastic, is most inimical to the
+practice of virtue.
+
+Yes, indeed, I replied, and equally incompatible with the management of a
+house, an army, or an office of state; and, what is most important of all,
+irreconcileable with any kind of study or thought or self-reflection--there
+is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to
+philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the
+higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is
+being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.
+
+Yes, likely enough.
+
+And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited the
+power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy
+constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he
+cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein
+consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had
+penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by
+gradual processes of evacuation and infusion:  he did not want to lengthen
+out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting weaker sons;
+--if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to
+cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use either to himself, or
+to the State.
+
+Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a statesman.
+
+Clearly; and his character is further illustrated by his sons.  Note that
+they were heroes in the days of old and practised the medicines of which I
+am speaking at the siege of Troy:  You will remember how, when Pandarus
+wounded Menelaus, they
+
+'Sucked the blood out of the wound, and sprinkled soothing remedies,'
+
+but they never prescribed what the patient was afterwards to eat or drink
+in the case of Menelaus, any more than in the case of Eurypylus; the
+remedies, as they conceived, were enough to heal any man who before he was
+wounded was healthy and regular in his habits; and even though he did
+happen to drink a posset of Pramnian wine, he might get well all the same. 
+But they would have nothing to do with unhealthy and intemperate subjects,
+whose lives were of no use either to themselves or others; the art of
+medicine was not designed for their good, and though they were as rich as
+Midas, the sons of Asclepius would have declined to attend them.
+
+They were very acute persons, those sons of Asclepius.
+
+Naturally so, I replied.  Nevertheless, the tragedians and Pindar
+disobeying our behests, although they acknowledge that Asclepius was the
+son of Apollo, say also that he was bribed into healing a rich man who was
+at the point of death, and for this reason he was struck by lightning.  But
+we, in accordance with the principle already affirmed by us, will not
+believe them when they tell us both;--if he was the son of a god, we
+maintain that he was not avaricious; or, if he was avaricious, he was not
+the son of a god.
+
+All that, Socrates, is excellent; but I should like to put a question to
+you:  Ought there not to be good physicians in a State, and are not the
+best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions good and
+bad? and are not the best judges in like manner those who are acquainted
+with all sorts of moral natures?
+
+Yes, I said, I too would have good judges and good physicians.  But do you
+know whom I think good?
+
+Will you tell me?
+
+I will, if I can.  Let me however note that in the same question you join
+two things which are not the same.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+Why, I said, you join physicians and judges.  Now the most skilful
+physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with the
+knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had better
+not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of diseases in
+their own persons.  For the body, as I conceive, is not the instrument with
+which they cure the body; in that case we could not allow them ever to be
+or to have been sickly; but they cure the body with the mind, and the mind
+which has become and is sick can cure nothing.
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+But with the judge it is otherwise; since he governs mind by mind; he ought
+not therefore to have been trained among vicious minds, and to have
+associated with them from youth upwards, and to have gone through the whole
+calendar of crime, only in order that he may quickly infer the crimes of
+others as he might their bodily diseases from his own self-consciousness;
+the honourable mind which is to form a healthy judgment should have had no
+experience or contamination of evil habits when young.  And this is the
+reason why in youth good men often appear to be simple, and are easily
+practised upon by the dishonest, because they have no examples of what evil
+is in their own souls.
+
+Yes, he said, they are far too apt to be deceived.
+
+Therefore, I said, the judge should not be young; he should have learned to
+know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the
+nature of evil in others:  knowledge should be his guide, not personal
+experience.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the ideal of a judge.
+
+Yes, I replied, and he will be a good man (which is my answer to your
+question); for he is good who has a good soul.  But the cunning and
+suspicious nature of which we spoke,--he who has committed many crimes, and
+fancies himself to be a master in wickedness, when he is amongst his
+fellows, is wonderful in the precautions which he takes, because he judges
+of them by himself:  but when he gets into the company of men of virtue,
+who have the experience of age, he appears to be a fool again, owing to his
+unseasonable suspicions; he cannot recognise an honest man, because he has
+no pattern of honesty in himself; at the same time, as the bad are more
+numerous than the good, and he meets with them oftener, he thinks himself,
+and is by others thought to be, rather wise than foolish.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Then the good and wise judge whom we are seeking is not this man, but the
+other; for vice cannot know virtue too, but a virtuous nature, educated by
+time, will acquire a knowledge both of virtue and vice:  the virtuous, and
+not the vicious, man has wisdom--in my opinion.
+
+And in mine also.
+
+This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law, which you will
+sanction in your state.  They will minister to better natures, giving
+health both of soul and of body; but those who are diseased in their bodies
+they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put
+an end to themselves.
+
+That is clearly the best thing both for the patients and for the State.
+
+And thus our youth, having been educated only in that simple music which,
+as we said, inspires temperance, will be reluctant to go to law.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content to practise
+the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine unless in some
+extreme case.
+
+That I quite believe.
+
+The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended to stimulate
+the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his strength; he
+will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen to develope his
+muscles.
+
+Very right, he said.
+
+Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is
+often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other for the
+training of the body.
+
+What then is the real object of them?
+
+I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the
+improvement of the soul.
+
+How can that be? he asked.
+
+Did you never observe, I said, the effect on the mind itself of exclusive
+devotion to gymnastic, or the opposite effect of an exclusive devotion to
+music?
+
+In what way shown? he said.
+
+The one producing a temper of hardness and ferocity, the other of softness
+and effeminacy, I replied.
+
+Yes, he said, I am quite aware that the mere athlete becomes too much of a
+savage, and that the mere musician is melted and softened beyond what is
+good for him.
+
+Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if rightly
+educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is liable to
+become hard and brutal.
+
+That I quite think.
+
+On the other hand the philosopher will have the quality of gentleness.  And
+this also, when too much indulged, will turn to softness, but, if educated
+rightly, will be gentle and moderate.
+
+True.
+
+And in our opinion the guardians ought to have both these qualities?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And both should be in harmony?
+
+Beyond question.
+
+And the harmonious soul is both temperate and courageous?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the inharmonious is cowardly and boorish?
+
+Very true.
+
+And, when a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul
+through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs of
+which we were just now speaking, and his whole life is passed in warbling
+and the delights of song; in the first stage of the process the passion or
+spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of
+brittle and useless.  But, if he carries on the softening and soothing
+process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted
+away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul; and he becomes a feeble
+warrior.
+
+Very true.
+
+If the element of spirit is naturally weak in him the change is speedily
+accomplished, but if he have a good deal, then the power of music weakening
+the spirit renders him excitable;--on the least provocation he flames up at
+once, and is speedily extinguished; instead of having spirit he grows
+irritable and passionate and is quite impracticable.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And so in gymnastics, if a man takes violent exercise and is a great
+feeder, and the reverse of a great student of music and philosophy, at
+first the high condition of his body fills him with pride and spirit, and
+he becomes twice the man that he was.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And what happens? if he do nothing else, and holds no converse with the
+Muses, does not even that intelligence which there may be in him, having no
+taste of any sort of learning or enquiry or thought or culture, grow feeble
+and dull and blind, his mind never waking up or receiving nourishment, and
+his senses not being purged of their mists?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And he ends by becoming a hater of philosophy, uncivilized, never using the
+weapon of persuasion,--he is like a wild beast, all violence and
+fierceness, and knows no other way of dealing; and he lives in all
+ignorance and evil conditions, and has no sense of propriety and grace.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+And as there are two principles of human nature, one the spirited and the
+other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given mankind two
+arts answering to them (and only indirectly to the soul and body), in order
+that these two principles (like the strings of an instrument) may be
+relaxed or drawn tighter until they are duly harmonized.
+
+That appears to be the intention.
+
+And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and
+best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician
+and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings.
+
+You are quite right, Socrates.
+
+And such a presiding genius will be always required in our State if the
+government is to last.
+
+Yes, he will be absolutely necessary.
+
+Such, then, are our principles of nurture and education:  Where would be
+the use of going into further details about the dances of our citizens, or
+about their hunting and coursing, their gymnastic and equestrian contests? 
+For these all follow the general principle, and having found that, we shall
+have no difficulty in discovering them.
+
+I dare say that there will be no difficulty.
+
+Very good, I said; then what is the next question?  Must we not ask who are
+to be rulers and who subjects?
+
+Certainly.
+
+There can be no doubt that the elder must rule the younger.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And that the best of these must rule.
+
+That is also clear.
+
+Now, are not the best husbandmen those who are most devoted to husbandry?
+
+Yes.
+
+And as we are to have the best of guardians for our city, must they not be
+those who have most the character of guardians?
+
+Yes.
+
+And to this end they ought to be wise and efficient, and to have a special
+care of the State?
+
+True.
+
+And a man will be most likely to care about that which he loves?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And he will be most likely to love that which he regards as having the same
+interests with himself, and that of which the good or evil fortune is
+supposed by him at any time most to affect his own?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Then there must be a selection.  Let us note among the guardians those who
+in their whole life show the greatest eagerness to do what is for the good
+of their country, and the greatest repugnance to do what is against her
+interests.
+
+Those are the right men.
+
+And they will have to be watched at every age, in order that we may see
+whether they preserve their resolution, and never, under the influence
+either of force or enchantment, forget or cast off their sense of duty to
+the State.
+
+How cast off? he said.
+
+I will explain to you, I replied.  A resolution may go out of a man's mind
+either with his will or against his will; with his will when he gets rid of
+a falsehood and learns better, against his will whenever he is deprived of
+a truth.
+
+I understand, he said, the willing loss of a resolution; the meaning of the
+unwilling I have yet to learn.
+
+Why, I said, do you not see that men are unwillingly deprived of good, and
+willingly of evil?  Is not to have lost the truth an evil, and to possess
+the truth a good? and you would agree that to conceive things as they are
+is to possess the truth?
+
+Yes, he replied; I agree with you in thinking that mankind are deprived of
+truth against their will.
+
+And is not this involuntary deprivation caused either by theft, or force,
+or enchantment?
+
+Still, he replied, I do not understand you.
+
+I fear that I must have been talking darkly, like the tragedians.  I only
+mean that some men are changed by persuasion and that others forget;
+argument steals away the hearts of one class, and time of the other; and
+this I call theft.  Now you understand me?
+
+Yes.
+
+Those again who are forced, are those whom the violence of some pain or
+grief compels to change their opinion.
+
+I understand, he said, and you are quite right.
+
+And you would also acknowledge that the enchanted are those who change
+their minds either under the softer influence of pleasure, or the sterner
+influence of fear?
+
+Yes, he said; everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
+
+Therefore, as I was just now saying, we must enquire who are the best
+guardians of their own conviction that what they think the interest of the
+State is to be the rule of their lives.  We must watch them from their
+youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which they are most likely
+to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is not deceived is to
+be selected, and he who fails in the trial is to be rejected.  That will be
+the way?
+
+Yes.
+
+And there should also be toils and pains and conflicts prescribed for them,
+in which they will be made to give further proof of the same qualities.
+
+Very right, he replied.
+
+And then, I said, we must try them with enchantments--that is the third
+sort of test--and see what will be their behaviour:  like those who take
+colts amid noise and tumult to see if they are of a timid nature, so must
+we take our youth amid terrors of some kind, and again pass them into
+pleasures, and prove them more thoroughly than gold is proved in the
+furnace, that we may discover whether they are armed against all
+enchantments, and of a noble bearing always, good guardians of themselves
+and of the music which they have learned, and retaining under all
+circumstances a rhythmical and harmonious nature, such as will be most
+serviceable to the individual and to the State.  And he who at every age,
+as boy and youth and in mature life, has come out of the trial victorious
+and pure, shall be appointed a ruler and guardian of the State; he shall be
+honoured in life and death, and shall receive sepulture and other memorials
+of honour, the greatest that we have to give.  But him who fails, we must
+reject.  I am inclined to think that this is the sort of way in which our
+rulers and guardians should be chosen and appointed.  I speak generally,
+and not with any pretension to exactness.
+
+And, speaking generally, I agree with you, he said.
+
+And perhaps the word 'guardian' in the fullest sense ought to be applied to
+this higher class only who preserve us against foreign enemies and maintain
+peace among our citizens at home, that the one may not have the will, or
+the others the power, to harm us.  The young men whom we before called
+guardians may be more properly designated auxiliaries and supporters of the
+principles of the rulers.
+
+I agree with you, he said.
+
+How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately
+spoke--just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be
+possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?
+
+What sort of lie? he said.
+
+Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale (Laws) of what has
+often occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and have made
+the world believe,) though not in our time, and I do not know whether such
+an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made probable, if it
+did.
+
+How your words seem to hesitate on your lips!
+
+You will not wonder, I replied, at my hesitation when you have heard.
+
+Speak, he said, and fear not.
+
+Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the
+face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to
+communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and
+lastly to the people.  They are to be told that their youth was a dream,
+and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance
+only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the
+womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances
+were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent
+them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse,
+they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks,
+and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own
+brothers.
+
+You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were going
+to tell.
+
+True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half. 
+Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has
+framed you differently.  Some of you have the power of command, and in the
+composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the
+greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others
+again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and
+iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children.  But as
+all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a
+silver son, or a silver parent a golden son.  And God proclaims as a first
+principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which
+they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good
+guardians, as of the purity of the race.  They should observe what elements
+mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has
+an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of
+ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child
+because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan,
+just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or
+silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. 
+For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it
+will be destroyed.  Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making
+our citizens believe in it?
+
+Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing
+this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons'
+sons, and posterity after them.
+
+I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief will
+make them care more for the city and for one another.  Enough, however, of
+the fiction, which may now fly abroad upon the wings of rumour, while we
+arm our earth-born heroes, and lead them forth under the command of their
+rulers.  Let them look round and select a spot whence they can best
+suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory within, and also defend
+themselves against enemies, who like wolves may come down on the fold from
+without; there let them encamp, and when they have encamped, let them
+sacrifice to the proper Gods and prepare their dwellings.
+
+Just so, he said.
+
+And their dwellings must be such as will shield them against the cold of
+winter and the heat of summer.
+
+I suppose that you mean houses, he replied.
+
+Yes, I said; but they must be the houses of soldiers, and not of shop-
+keepers.
+
+What is the difference? he said.
+
+That I will endeavour to explain, I replied.  To keep watch-dogs, who, from
+want of discipline or hunger, or some evil habit or other, would turn upon
+the sheep and worry them, and behave not like dogs but wolves, would be a
+foul and monstrous thing in a shepherd?
+
+Truly monstrous, he said.
+
+And therefore every care must be taken that our auxiliaries, being stronger
+than our citizens, may not grow to be too much for them and become savage
+tyrants instead of friends and allies?
+
+Yes, great care should be taken.
+
+And would not a really good education furnish the best safeguard?
+
+But they are well-educated already, he replied.
+
+I cannot be so confident, my dear Glaucon, I said; I am much more certain
+that they ought to be, and that true education, whatever that may be, will
+have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize them in their relations
+to one another, and to those who are under their protection.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And not only their education, but their habitations, and all that belongs
+to them, should be such as will neither impair their virtue as guardians,
+nor tempt them to prey upon the other citizens.  Any man of sense must
+acknowledge that.
+
+He must.
+
+Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to
+realize our idea of them.  In the first place, none of them should have any
+property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should
+they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to
+enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained
+warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to
+receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses
+of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like
+soldiers in a camp.  Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from
+God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of
+the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine
+by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source
+of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled.  And they alone of all
+the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same
+roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them.  And this will be their
+salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State.  But should they
+ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become
+housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants
+instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting
+and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater
+terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to
+themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand.  For all which
+reasons may we not say that thus shall our State be ordered, and that these
+shall be the regulations appointed by us for guardians concerning their
+houses and all other matters?
+
+Yes, said Glaucon.
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+Here Adeimantus interposed a question:  How would you answer, Socrates,
+said he, if a person were to say that you are making these people
+miserable, and that they are the cause of their own unhappiness; the city
+in fact belongs to them, but they are none the better for it; whereas other
+men acquire lands, and build large and handsome houses, and have everything
+handsome about them, offering sacrifices to the gods on their own account,
+and practising hospitality; moreover, as you were saying just now, they
+have gold and silver, and all that is usual among the favourites of
+fortune; but our poor citizens are no better than mercenaries who are
+quartered in the city and are always mounting guard?
+
+Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in
+addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if they
+would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on a
+mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is thought
+to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature might be
+added.
+
+But, said he, let us suppose all this to be included in the charge.
+
+You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?
+
+Yes.
+
+If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall find
+the answer.  And our answer will be that, even as they are, our guardians
+may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in founding the
+State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the
+greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is
+ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to
+find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice:  and, having found
+them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier.  At present, I
+take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not piecemeal, or with a view
+of making a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will
+proceed to view the opposite kind of State.  Suppose that we were painting
+a statue, and some one came up to us and said, Why do you not put the most
+beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body--the eyes ought
+to be purple, but you have made them black--to him we might fairly answer,
+Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that
+they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the
+other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful.  And so I
+say to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of happiness
+which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can clothe our
+husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their heads, and bid
+them till the ground as much as they like, and no more.  Our potters also
+might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside, passing
+round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand, and working
+at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might make every class
+happy--and then, as you imagine, the whole State would be happy.  But do
+not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman
+will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and
+no one will have the character of any distinct class in the State.  Now
+this is not of much consequence where the corruption of society, and
+pretension to be what you are not, is confined to cobblers; but when the
+guardians of the laws and of the government are only seeming and not real
+guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down; and on the other
+hand they alone have the power of giving order and happiness to the State. 
+We mean our guardians to be true saviours and not the destroyers of the
+State, whereas our opponent is thinking of peasants at a festival, who are
+enjoying a life of revelry, not of citizens who are doing their duty to the
+State.  But, if so, we mean different things, and he is speaking of
+something which is not a State.  And therefore we must consider whether in
+appointing our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness
+individually, or whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside
+in the State as a whole.  But if the latter be the truth, then the
+guardians and auxiliaries, and all others equally with them, must be
+compelled or induced to do their own work in the best way.  And thus the
+whole State will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will
+receive the proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them.
+
+I think that you are quite right.
+
+I wonder whether you will agree with another remark which occurs to me.
+
+What may that be?
+
+There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts.
+
+What are they?
+
+Wealth, I said, and poverty.
+
+How do they act?
+
+The process is as follows:  When a potter becomes rich, will he, think you,
+any longer take the same pains with his art?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+He will grow more and more indolent and careless?
+
+Very true.
+
+And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter?
+
+Yes; he greatly deteriorates.
+
+But, on the other hand, if he has no money, and cannot provide himself with
+tools or instruments, he will not work equally well himself, nor will he
+teach his sons or apprentices to work equally well.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then, under the influence either of poverty or of wealth, workmen and their
+work are equally liable to degenerate?
+
+That is evident.
+
+Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the
+guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved.
+
+What evils?
+
+Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence,
+and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
+
+That is very true, he replied; but still I should like to know, Socrates,
+how our city will be able to go to war, especially against an enemy who is
+rich and powerful, if deprived of the sinews of war.
+
+There would certainly be a difficulty, I replied, in going to war with one
+such enemy; but there is no difficulty where there are two of them.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+In the first place, I said, if we have to fight, our side will be trained
+warriors fighting against an army of rich men.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was perfect in
+his art would easily be a match for two stout and well-to-do gentlemen who
+were not boxers?
+
+Hardly, if they came upon him at once.
+
+What, now, I said, if he were able to run away and then turn and strike at
+the one who first came up?  And supposing he were to do this several times
+under the heat of a scorching sun, might he not, being an expert, overturn
+more than one stout personage?
+
+Certainly, he said, there would be nothing wonderful in that.
+
+And yet rich men probably have a greater superiority in the science and
+practise of boxing than they have in military qualities.
+
+Likely enough.
+
+Then we may assume that our athletes will be able to fight with two or
+three times their own number?
+
+I agree with you, for I think you right.
+
+And suppose that, before engaging, our citizens send an embassy to one of
+the two cities, telling them what is the truth:  Silver and gold we neither
+have nor are permitted to have, but you may; do you therefore come and help
+us in war, and take the spoils of the other city:  Who, on hearing these
+words, would choose to fight against lean wiry dogs, rather than, with the
+dogs on their side, against fat and tender sheep?
+
+That is not likely; and yet there might be a danger to the poor State if
+the wealth of many States were to be gathered into one.
+
+But how simple of you to use the term State at all of any but our own!
+
+Why so?
+
+You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of them is
+a city, but many cities, as they say in the game.  For indeed any city,
+however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the
+other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in either there
+are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if
+you treated them all as a single State.  But if you deal with them as many,
+and give the wealth or power or persons of the one to the others, you will
+always have a great many friends and not many enemies.  And your State,
+while the wise order which has now been prescribed continues to prevail in
+her, will be the greatest of States, I do not mean to say in reputation or
+appearance, but in deed and truth, though she number not more than a
+thousand defenders.  A single State which is her equal you will hardly
+find, either among Hellenes or barbarians, though many that appear to be as
+great and many times greater.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they
+are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which
+they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?
+
+What limit would you propose?
+
+I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity;
+that, I think, is the proper limit.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to our
+guardians:  Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and
+self-sufficing.
+
+And surely, said he, this is not a very severe order which we impose upon
+them.
+
+And the other, said I, of which we were speaking before is lighter still,--
+I mean the duty of degrading the offspring of the guardians when inferior,
+and of elevating into the rank of guardians the offspring of the lower
+classes, when naturally superior.  The intention was, that, in the case of
+the citizens generally, each individual should be put to the use for which
+nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man would do his own
+business, and be one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and
+not many.
+
+Yes, he said; that is not so difficult.
+
+The regulations which we are prescribing, my good Adeimantus, are not, as
+might be supposed, a number of great principles, but trifles all, if care
+be taken, as the saying is, of the one great thing,--a thing, however,
+which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our purpose.
+
+What may that be? he asked.
+
+Education, I said, and nurture:  If our citizens are well educated, and
+grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these,
+as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the
+possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow
+the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the
+proverb says.
+
+That will be the best way of settling them.
+
+Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating
+force like a wheel.  For good nurture and education implant good
+constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good education
+improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed in man as in
+other animals.
+
+Very possibly, he said.
+
+Then to sum up:  This is the point to which, above all, the attention of
+our rulers should be directed,--that music and gymnastic be preserved in
+their original form, and no innovation made.  They must do their utmost to
+maintain them intact.  And when any one says that mankind most regard
+
+'The newest song which the singers have,'
+
+they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind
+of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning
+of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole
+State, and ought to be prohibited.  So Damon tells me, and I can quite
+believe him;--he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws
+of the State always change with them.
+
+Yes, said Adeimantus; and you may add my suffrage to Damon's and your own.
+
+Then, I said, our guardians must lay the foundations of their fortress in
+music?
+
+Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.
+
+Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears
+harmless.
+
+Why, yes, he said, and there is no harm; were it not that little by little
+this spirit of licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into
+manners and customs; whence, issuing with greater force, it invades
+contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to laws and
+constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last, Socrates, by an
+overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.
+
+Is that true? I said.
+
+That is my belief, he replied.
+
+Then, as I was saying, our youth should be trained from the first in a
+stricter system, for if amusements become lawless, and the youths
+themselves become lawless, they can never grow up into well-conducted and
+virtuous citizens.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And when they have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of music
+have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in a manner
+how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them in all their
+actions and be a principle of growth to them, and if there be any fallen
+places in the State will raise them up again.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Thus educated, they will invent for themselves any lesser rules which their
+predecessors have altogether neglected.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean such things as these:--when the young are to be silent before their
+elders; how they are to show respect to them by standing and making them
+sit; what honour is due to parents; what garments or shoes are to be worn;
+the mode of dressing the hair; deportment and manners in general.  You
+would agree with me?
+
+Yes.
+
+But there is, I think, small wisdom in legislating about such matters,--I
+doubt if it is ever done; nor are any precise written enactments about them
+likely to be lasting.
+
+Impossible.
+
+It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts a
+man, will determine his future life.  Does not like always attract like?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Until some one rare and grand result is reached which may be good, and may
+be the reverse of good?
+
+That is not to be denied.
+
+And for this reason, I said, I shall not attempt to legislate further about
+them.
+
+Naturally enough, he replied.
+
+Well, and about the business of the agora, and the ordinary dealings
+between man and man, or again about agreements with artisans; about insult
+and injury, or the commencement of actions, and the appointment of juries,
+what would you say? there may also arise questions about any impositions
+and exactions of market and harbour dues which may be required, and in
+general about the regulations of markets, police, harbours, and the like. 
+But, oh heavens! shall we condescend to legislate on any of these
+particulars?
+
+I think, he said, that there is no need to impose laws about them on good
+men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for
+themselves.
+
+Yes, I said, my friend, if God will only preserve to them the laws which we
+have given them.
+
+And without divine help, said Adeimantus, they will go on for ever making
+and mending their laws and their lives in the hope of attaining perfection.
+
+You would compare them, I said, to those invalids who, having no self-
+restraint, will not leave off their habits of intemperance?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Yes, I said; and what a delightful life they lead! they are always
+doctoring and increasing and complicating their disorders, and always
+fancying that they will be cured by any nostrum which anybody advises them
+to try.
+
+Such cases are very common, he said, with invalids of this sort.
+
+Yes, I replied; and the charming thing is that they deem him their worst
+enemy who tells them the truth, which is simply that, unless they give up
+eating and drinking and wenching and idling, neither drug nor cautery nor
+spell nor amulet nor any other remedy will avail.
+
+Charming! he replied.  I see nothing charming in going into a passion with
+a man who tells you what is right.
+
+These gentlemen, I said, do not seem to be in your good graces.
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+Nor would you praise the behaviour of States which act like the men whom I
+was just now describing.  For are there not ill-ordered States in which the
+citizens are forbidden under pain of death to alter the constitution; and
+yet he who most sweetly courts those who live under this regime and
+indulges them and fawns upon them and is skilful in anticipating and
+gratifying their humours is held to be a great and good statesman--do not
+these States resemble the persons whom I was describing?
+
+Yes, he said; the States are as bad as the men; and I am very far from
+praising them.
+
+But do you not admire, I said, the coolness and dexterity of these ready
+ministers of political corruption?
+
+Yes, he said, I do; but not of all of them, for there are some whom the
+applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really
+statesmen, and these are not much to be admired.
+
+What do you mean? I said; you should have more feeling for them.  When a
+man cannot measure, and a great many others who cannot measure declare that
+he is four cubits high, can he help believing what they say?
+
+Nay, he said, certainly not in that case.
+
+Well, then, do not be angry with them; for are they not as good as a play,
+trying their hand at paltry reforms such as I was describing; they are
+always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds in
+contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not knowing
+that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra?
+
+Yes, he said; that is just what they are doing.
+
+I conceive, I said, that the true legislator will not trouble himself with
+this class of enactments whether concerning laws or the constitution either
+in an ill-ordered or in a well-ordered State; for in the former they are
+quite useless, and in the latter there will be no difficulty in devising
+them; and many of them will naturally flow out of our previous regulations.
+
+What, then, he said, is still remaining to us of the work of legislation?
+
+Nothing to us, I replied; but to Apollo, the God of Delphi, there remains
+the ordering of the greatest and noblest and chiefest things of all.
+
+Which are they? he said.
+
+The institution of temples and sacrifices, and the entire service of gods,
+demigods, and heroes; also the ordering of the repositories of the dead,
+and the rites which have to be observed by him who would propitiate the
+inhabitants of the world below.  These are matters of which we are ignorant
+ourselves, and as founders of a city we should be unwise in trusting them
+to any interpreter but our ancestral deity.  He is the god who sits in the
+centre, on the navel of the earth, and he is the interpreter of religion to
+all mankind.
+
+You are right, and we will do as you propose.
+
+But where, amid all this, is justice? son of Ariston, tell me where.  Now
+that our city has been made habitable, light a candle and search, and get
+your brother and Polemarchus and the rest of our friends to help, and let
+us see where in it we can discover justice and where injustice, and in what
+they differ from one another, and which of them the man who would be happy
+should have for his portion, whether seen or unseen by gods and men.
+
+Nonsense, said Glaucon:  did you not promise to search yourself, saying
+that for you not to help justice in her need would be an impiety?
+
+I do not deny that I said so, and as you remind me, I will be as good as my
+word; but you must join.
+
+We will, he replied.
+
+Well, then, I hope to make the discovery in this way:  I mean to begin with
+the assumption that our State, if rightly ordered, is perfect.
+
+That is most certain.
+
+And being perfect, is therefore wise and valiant and temperate and just.
+
+That is likewise clear.
+
+And whichever of these qualities we find in the State, the one which is not
+found will be the residue?
+
+Very good.
+
+If there were four things, and we were searching for one of them, wherever
+it might be, the one sought for might be known to us from the first, and
+there would be no further trouble; or we might know the other three first,
+and then the fourth would clearly be the one left.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And is not a similar method to be pursued about the virtues, which are also
+four in number?
+
+Clearly.
+
+First among the virtues found in the State, wisdom comes into view, and in
+this I detect a certain peculiarity.
+
+What is that?
+
+The State which we have been describing is said to be wise as being good in
+counsel?
+
+Very true.
+
+And good counsel is clearly a kind of knowledge, for not by ignorance, but
+by knowledge, do men counsel well?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the kinds of knowledge in a State are many and diverse?
+
+Of course.
+
+There is the knowledge of the carpenter; but is that the sort of knowledge
+which gives a city the title of wise and good in counsel?
+
+Certainly not; that would only give a city the reputation of skill in
+carpentering.
+
+Then a city is not to be called wise because possessing a knowledge which
+counsels for the best about wooden implements?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Nor by reason of a knowledge which advises about brazen pots, I said, nor
+as possessing any other similar knowledge?
+
+Not by reason of any of them, he said.
+
+Nor yet by reason of a knowledge which cultivates the earth; that would
+give the city the name of agricultural?
+
+Yes.
+
+Well, I said, and is there any knowledge in our recently-founded State
+among any of the citizens which advises, not about any particular thing in
+the State, but about the whole, and considers how a State can best deal
+with itself and with other States?
+
+There certainly is.
+
+And what is this knowledge, and among whom is it found? I asked.
+
+It is the knowledge of the guardians, he replied, and is found among those
+whom we were just now describing as perfect guardians.
+
+And what is the name which the city derives from the possession of this
+sort of knowledge?
+
+The name of good in counsel and truly wise.
+
+And will there be in our city more of these true guardians or more smiths?
+
+The smiths, he replied, will be far more numerous.
+
+Will not the guardians be the smallest of all the classes who receive a
+name from the profession of some kind of knowledge?
+
+Much the smallest.
+
+And so by reason of the smallest part or class, and of the knowledge which
+resides in this presiding and ruling part of itself, the whole State, being
+thus constituted according to nature, will be wise; and this, which has the
+only knowledge worthy to be called wisdom, has been ordained by nature to
+be of all classes the least.
+
+Most true.
+
+Thus, then, I said, the nature and place in the State of one of the four
+virtues has somehow or other been discovered.
+
+And, in my humble opinion, very satisfactorily discovered, he replied.
+
+Again, I said, there is no difficulty in seeing the nature of courage, and
+in what part that quality resides which gives the name of courageous to the
+State.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+Why, I said, every one who calls any State courageous or cowardly, will be
+thinking of the part which fights and goes out to war on the State's
+behalf.
+
+No one, he replied, would ever think of any other.
+
+The rest of the citizens may be courageous or may be cowardly, but their
+courage or cowardice will not, as I conceive, have the effect of making the
+city either the one or the other.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+The city will be courageous in virtue of a portion of herself which
+preserves under all circumstances that opinion about the nature of things
+to be feared and not to be feared in which our legislator educated them;
+and this is what you term courage.
+
+I should like to hear what you are saying once more, for I do not think
+that I perfectly understand you.
+
+I mean that courage is a kind of salvation.
+
+Salvation of what?
+
+Of the opinion respecting things to be feared, what they are and of what
+nature, which the law implants through education; and I mean by the words
+'under all circumstances' to intimate that in pleasure or in pain, or under
+the influence of desire or fear, a man preserves, and does not lose this
+opinion.  Shall I give you an illustration?
+
+If you please.
+
+You know, I said, that dyers, when they want to dye wool for making the
+true sea-purple, begin by selecting their white colour first; this they
+prepare and dress with much care and pains, in order that the white ground
+may take the purple hue in full perfection.  The dyeing then proceeds; and
+whatever is dyed in this manner becomes a fast colour, and no washing
+either with lyes or without them can take away the bloom.  But, when the
+ground has not been duly prepared, you will have noticed how poor is the
+look either of purple or of any other colour.
+
+Yes, he said; I know that they have a washed-out and ridiculous appearance.
+
+Then now, I said, you will understand what our object was in selecting our
+soldiers, and educating them in music and gymnastic; we were contriving
+influences which would prepare them to take the dye of the laws in
+perfection, and the colour of their opinion about dangers and of every
+other opinion was to be indelibly fixed by their nurture and training, not
+to be washed away by such potent lyes as pleasure--mightier agent far in
+washing the soul than any soda or lye; or by sorrow, fear, and desire, the
+mightiest of all other solvents.  And this sort of universal saving power
+of true opinion in conformity with law about real and false dangers I call
+and maintain to be courage, unless you disagree.
+
+But I agree, he replied; for I suppose that you mean to exclude mere
+uninstructed courage, such as that of a wild beast or of a slave--this, in
+your opinion, is not the courage which the law ordains, and ought to have
+another name.
+
+Most certainly.
+
+Then I may infer courage to be such as you describe?
+
+Why, yes, said I, you may, and if you add the words 'of a citizen,' you
+will not be far wrong;--hereafter, if you like, we will carry the
+examination further, but at present we are seeking not for courage but
+justice; and for the purpose of our enquiry we have said enough.
+
+You are right, he replied.
+
+Two virtues remain to be discovered in the State--first, temperance, and
+then justice which is the end of our search.
+
+Very true.
+
+Now, can we find justice without troubling ourselves about temperance?
+
+I do not know how that can be accomplished, he said, nor do I desire that
+justice should be brought to light and temperance lost sight of; and
+therefore I wish that you would do me the favour of considering temperance
+first.
+
+Certainly, I replied, I should not be justified in refusing your request.
+
+Then consider, he said.
+
+Yes, I replied; I will; and as far as I can at present see, the virtue of
+temperance has more of the nature of harmony and symphony than the
+preceding.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+Temperance, I replied, is the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures
+and desires; this is curiously enough implied in the saying of 'a man being
+his own master;' and other traces of the same notion may be found in
+language.
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+There is something ridiculous in the expression 'master of himself;' for
+the master is also the servant and the servant the master; and in all these
+modes of speaking the same person is denoted.
+
+Certainly.
+
+The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and
+also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control,
+then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise: 
+but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle,
+which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse
+--in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and
+unprincipled.
+
+Yes, there is reason in that.
+
+And now, I said, look at our newly-created State, and there you will find
+one of these two conditions realized; for the State, as you will
+acknowledge, may be justly called master of itself, if the words
+'temperance' and 'self-mastery' truly express the rule of the better part
+over the worse.
+
+Yes, he said, I see that what you say is true.
+
+Let me further note that the manifold and complex pleasures and desires and
+pains are generally found in children and women and servants, and in the
+freemen so called who are of the lowest and more numerous class.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Whereas the simple and moderate desires which follow reason, and are under
+the guidance of mind and true opinion, are to be found only in a few, and
+those the best born and best educated.
+
+Very true.
+
+These two, as you may perceive, have a place in our State; and the meaner
+desires of the many are held down by the virtuous desires and wisdom of the
+few.
+
+That I perceive, he said.
+
+Then if there be any city which may be described as master of its own
+pleasures and desires, and master of itself, ours may claim such a
+designation?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+It may also be called temperate, and for the same reasons?
+
+Yes.
+
+And if there be any State in which rulers and subjects will be agreed as to
+the question who are to rule, that again will be our State?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And the citizens being thus agreed among themselves, in which class will
+temperance be found--in the rulers or in the subjects?
+
+In both, as I should imagine, he replied.
+
+Do you observe that we were not far wrong in our guess that temperance was
+a sort of harmony?
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, because temperance is unlike courage and wisdom, each of which resides
+in a part only, the one making the State wise and the other valiant; not so
+temperance, which extends to the whole, and runs through all the notes of
+the scale, and produces a harmony of the weaker and the stronger and the
+middle class, whether you suppose them to be stronger or weaker in wisdom
+or power or numbers or wealth, or anything else.  Most truly then may we
+deem temperance to be the agreement of the naturally superior and inferior,
+as to the right to rule of either, both in states and individuals.
+
+I entirely agree with you.
+
+And so, I said, we may consider three out of the four virtues to have been
+discovered in our State.  The last of those qualities which make a state
+virtuous must be justice, if we only knew what that was.
+
+The inference is obvious.
+
+The time then has arrived, Glaucon, when, like huntsmen, we should surround
+the cover, and look sharp that justice does not steal away, and pass out of
+sight and escape us; for beyond a doubt she is somewhere in this country: 
+watch therefore and strive to catch a sight of her, and if you see her
+first, let me know.
+
+Would that I could! but you should regard me rather as a follower who has
+just eyes enough to see what you show him--that is about as much as I am
+good for.
+
+Offer up a prayer with me and follow.
+
+I will, but you must show me the way.
+
+Here is no path, I said, and the wood is dark and perplexing; still we must
+push on.
+
+Let us push on.
+
+Here I saw something:  Halloo! I said, I begin to perceive a track, and I
+believe that the quarry will not escape.
+
+Good news, he said.
+
+Truly, I said, we are stupid fellows.
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, my good sir, at the beginning of our enquiry, ages ago, there was
+justice tumbling out at our feet, and we never saw her; nothing could be
+more ridiculous.  Like people who go about looking for what they have in
+their hands--that was the way with us--we looked not at what we were
+seeking, but at what was far off in the distance; and therefore, I suppose,
+we missed her.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean to say that in reality for a long time past we have been talking of
+justice, and have failed to recognise her.
+
+I grow impatient at the length of your exordium.
+
+Well then, tell me, I said, whether I am right or not:  You remember the
+original principle which we were always laying down at the foundation of
+the State, that one man should practise one thing only, the thing to which
+his nature was best adapted;--now justice is this principle or a part of
+it.
+
+Yes, we often said that one man should do one thing only.
+
+Further, we affirmed that justice was doing one's own business, and not
+being a busybody; we said so again and again, and many others have said the
+same to us.
+
+Yes, we said so.
+
+Then to do one's own business in a certain way may be assumed to be
+justice.  Can you tell me whence I derive this inference?
+
+I cannot, but I should like to be told.
+
+Because I think that this is the only virtue which remains in the State
+when the other virtues of temperance and courage and wisdom are abstracted;
+and, that this is the ultimate cause and condition of the existence of all
+of them, and while remaining in them is also their preservative; and we
+were saying that if the three were discovered by us, justice would be the
+fourth or remaining one.
+
+That follows of necessity.
+
+If we are asked to determine which of these four qualities by its presence
+contributes most to the excellence of the State, whether the agreement of
+rulers and subjects, or the preservation in the soldiers of the opinion
+which the law ordains about the true nature of dangers, or wisdom and
+watchfulness in the rulers, or whether this other which I am mentioning,
+and which is found in children and women, slave and freeman, artisan,
+ruler, subject,--the quality, I mean, of every one doing his own work, and
+not being a busybody, would claim the palm--the question is not so easily
+answered.
+
+Certainly, he replied, there would be a difficulty in saying which.
+
+Then the power of each individual in the State to do his own work appears
+to compete with the other political virtues, wisdom, temperance, courage.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And the virtue which enters into this competition is justice?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Let us look at the question from another point of view:  Are not the rulers
+in a State those to whom you would entrust the office of determining suits
+at law?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And are suits decided on any other ground but that a man may neither take
+what is another's, nor be deprived of what is his own?
+
+Yes; that is their principle.
+
+Which is a just principle?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then on this view also justice will be admitted to be the having and doing
+what is a man's own, and belongs to him?
+
+Very true.
+
+Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not.  Suppose a carpenter
+to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a carpenter; and
+suppose them to exchange their implements or their duties, or the same
+person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be the change; do you
+think that any great harm would result to the State?
+
+Not much.
+
+But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader,
+having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his
+followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into the class
+of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and guardians, for which
+he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the
+other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and warrior all in one, then
+I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this
+meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State.
+
+Most true.
+
+Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any meddling of
+one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest harm
+to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing?
+
+Precisely.
+
+And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed by
+you injustice?
+
+Certainly.
+
+This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the
+auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice,
+and will make the city just.
+
+I agree with you.
+
+We will not, I said, be over-positive as yet; but if, on trial, this
+conception of justice be verified in the individual as well as in the
+State, there will be no longer any room for doubt; if it be not verified,
+we must have a fresh enquiry.  First let us complete the old investigation,
+which we began, as you remember, under the impression that, if we could
+previously examine justice on the larger scale, there would be less
+difficulty in discerning her in the individual.  That larger example
+appeared to be the State, and accordingly we constructed as good a one as
+we could, knowing well that in the good State justice would be found.  Let
+the discovery which we made be now applied to the individual--if they
+agree, we shall be satisfied; or, if there be a difference in the
+individual, we will come back to the State and have another trial of the
+theory.  The friction of the two when rubbed together may possibly strike a
+light in which justice will shine forth, and the vision which is then
+revealed we will fix in our souls.
+
+That will be in regular course; let us do as you say.
+
+I proceeded to ask:  When two things, a greater and less, are called by the
+same name, are they like or unlike in so far as they are called the same?
+
+Like, he replied.
+
+The just man then, if we regard the idea of justice only, will be like the
+just State?
+
+He will.
+
+And a State was thought by us to be just when the three classes in the
+State severally did their own business; and also thought to be temperate
+and valiant and wise by reason of certain other affections and qualities of
+these same classes?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And so of the individual; we may assume that he has the same three
+principles in his own soul which are found in the State; and he may be
+rightly described in the same terms, because he is affected in the same
+manner?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Once more then, O my friend, we have alighted upon an easy question--
+whether the soul has these three principles or not?
+
+An easy question!  Nay, rather, Socrates, the proverb holds that hard is
+the good.
+
+Very true, I said; and I do not think that the method which we are
+employing is at all adequate to the accurate solution of this question; the
+true method is another and a longer one.  Still we may arrive at a solution
+not below the level of the previous enquiry.
+
+May we not be satisfied with that? he said;--under the circumstances, I am
+quite content.
+
+I too, I replied, shall be extremely well satisfied.
+
+Then faint not in pursuing the speculation, he said.
+
+Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same
+principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the
+individual they pass into the State?--how else can they come there?  Take
+the quality of passion or spirit;--it would be ridiculous to imagine that
+this quality, when found in States, is not derived from the individuals who
+are supposed to possess it, e.g. the Thracians, Scythians, and in general
+the northern nations; and the same may be said of the love of knowledge,
+which is the special characteristic of our part of the world, or of the
+love of money, which may, with equal truth, be attributed to the
+Phoenicians and Egyptians.
+
+Exactly so, he said.
+
+There is no difficulty in understanding this.
+
+None whatever.
+
+But the question is not quite so easy when we proceed to ask whether these
+principles are three or one; whether, that is to say, we learn with one
+part of our nature, are angry with another, and with a third part desire
+the satisfaction of our natural appetites; or whether the whole soul comes
+into play in each sort of action--to determine that is the difficulty.
+
+Yes, he said; there lies the difficulty.
+
+Then let us now try and determine whether they are the same or different.
+
+How can we? he asked.
+
+I replied as follows:  The same thing clearly cannot act or be acted upon
+in the same part or in relation to the same thing at the same time, in
+contrary ways; and therefore whenever this contradiction occurs in things
+apparently the same, we know that they are really not the same, but
+different.
+
+Good.
+
+For example, I said, can the same thing be at rest and in motion at the
+same time in the same part?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Still, I said, let us have a more precise statement of terms, lest we
+should hereafter fall out by the way.  Imagine the case of a man who is
+standing and also moving his hands and his head, and suppose a person to
+say that one and the same person is in motion and at rest at the same
+moment--to such a mode of speech we should object, and should rather say
+that one part of him is in motion while another is at rest.
+
+Very true.
+
+And suppose the objector to refine still further, and to draw the nice
+distinction that not only parts of tops, but whole tops, when they spin
+round with their pegs fixed on the spot, are at rest and in motion at the
+same time (and he may say the same of anything which revolves in the same
+spot), his objection would not be admitted by us, because in such cases
+things are not at rest and in motion in the same parts of themselves; we
+should rather say that they have both an axis and a circumference, and that
+the axis stands still, for there is no deviation from the perpendicular;
+and that the circumference goes round.  But if, while revolving, the axis
+inclines either to the right or left, forwards or backwards, then in no
+point of view can they be at rest.
+
+That is the correct mode of describing them, he replied.
+
+Then none of these objections will confuse us, or incline us to believe
+that the same thing at the same time, in the same part or in relation to
+the same thing, can act or be acted upon in contrary ways.
+
+Certainly not, according to my way of thinking.
+
+Yet, I said, that we may not be compelled to examine all such objections,
+and prove at length that they are untrue, let us assume their absurdity,
+and go forward on the understanding that hereafter, if this assumption turn
+out to be untrue, all the consequences which follow shall be withdrawn.
+
+Yes, he said, that will be the best way.
+
+Well, I said, would you not allow that assent and dissent, desire and
+aversion, attraction and repulsion, are all of them opposites, whether they
+are regarded as active or passive (for that makes no difference in the fact
+of their opposition)?
+
+Yes, he said, they are opposites.
+
+Well, I said, and hunger and thirst, and the desires in general, and again
+willing and wishing,--all these you would refer to the classes already
+mentioned.  You would say--would you not?--that the soul of him who desires
+is seeking after the object of his desire; or that he is drawing to himself
+the thing which he wishes to possess:  or again, when a person wants
+anything to be given him, his mind, longing for the realization of his
+desire, intimates his wish to have it by a nod of assent, as if he had been
+asked a question?
+
+Very true.
+
+And what would you say of unwillingness and dislike and the absence of
+desire; should not these be referred to the opposite class of repulsion and
+rejection?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Admitting this to be true of desire generally, let us suppose a particular
+class of desires, and out of these we will select hunger and thirst, as
+they are termed, which are the most obvious of them?
+
+Let us take that class, he said.
+
+The object of one is food, and of the other drink?
+
+Yes.
+
+And here comes the point:  is not thirst the desire which the soul has of
+drink, and of drink only; not of drink qualified by anything else; for
+example, warm or cold, or much or little, or, in a word, drink of any
+particular sort:  but if the thirst be accompanied by heat, then the desire
+is of cold drink; or, if accompanied by cold, then of warm drink; or, if
+the thirst be excessive, then the drink which is desired will be excessive;
+or, if not great, the quantity of drink will also be small:  but thirst
+pure and simple will desire drink pure and simple, which is the natural
+satisfaction of thirst, as food is of hunger?
+
+Yes, he said; the simple desire is, as you say, in every case of the simple
+object, and the qualified desire of the qualified object.
+
+But here a confusion may arise; and I should wish to guard against an
+opponent starting up and saying that no man desires drink only, but good
+drink, or food only, but good food; for good is the universal object of
+desire, and thirst being a desire, will necessarily be thirst after good
+drink; and the same is true of every other desire.
+
+Yes, he replied, the opponent might have something to say.
+
+Nevertheless I should still maintain, that of relatives some have a quality
+attached to either term of the relation; others are simple and have their
+correlatives simple.
+
+I do not know what you mean.
+
+Well, you know of course that the greater is relative to the less?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the much greater to the much less?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the sometime greater to the sometime less, and the greater that is to
+be to the less that is to be?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And so of more and less, and of other correlative terms, such as the double
+and the half, or again, the heavier and the lighter, the swifter and the
+slower; and of hot and cold, and of any other relatives;--is not this true
+of all of them?
+
+Yes.
+
+And does not the same principle hold in the sciences?  The object of
+science is knowledge (assuming that to be the true definition), but the
+object of a particular science is a particular kind of knowledge; I mean,
+for example, that the science of house-building is a kind of knowledge
+which is defined and distinguished from other kinds and is therefore termed
+architecture.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Because it has a particular quality which no other has?
+
+Yes.
+
+And it has this particular quality because it has an object of a particular
+kind; and this is true of the other arts and sciences?
+
+Yes.
+
+Now, then, if I have made myself clear, you will understand my original
+meaning in what I said about relatives.  My meaning was, that if one term
+of a relation is taken alone, the other is taken alone; if one term is
+qualified, the other is also qualified.  I do not mean to say that
+relatives may not be disparate, or that the science of health is healthy,
+or of disease necessarily diseased, or that the sciences of good and evil
+are therefore good and evil; but only that, when the term science is no
+longer used absolutely, but has a qualified object which in this case is
+the nature of health and disease, it becomes defined, and is hence called
+not merely science, but the science of medicine.
+
+I quite understand, and I think as you do.
+
+Would you not say that thirst is one of these essentially relative terms,
+having clearly a relation--
+
+Yes, thirst is relative to drink.
+
+And a certain kind of thirst is relative to a certain kind of drink; but
+thirst taken alone is neither of much nor little, nor of good nor bad, nor
+of any particular kind of drink, but of drink only?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the soul of the thirsty one, in so far as he is thirsty, desires only
+drink; for this he yearns and tries to obtain it?
+
+That is plain.
+
+And if you suppose something which pulls a thirsty soul away from drink,
+that must be different from the thirsty principle which draws him like a
+beast to drink; for, as we were saying, the same thing cannot at the same
+time with the same part of itself act in contrary ways about the same.
+
+Impossible.
+
+No more than you can say that the hands of the archer push and pull the bow
+at the same time, but what you say is that one hand pushes and the other
+pulls.
+
+Exactly so, he replied.
+
+And might a man be thirsty, and yet unwilling to drink?
+
+Yes, he said, it constantly happens.
+
+And in such a case what is one to say?  Would you not say that there was
+something in the soul bidding a man to drink, and something else forbidding
+him, which is other and stronger than the principle which bids him?
+
+I should say so.
+
+And the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which bids
+and attracts proceeds from passion and disease?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Then we may fairly assume that they are two, and that they differ from one
+another; the one with which a man reasons, we may call the rational
+principle of the soul, the other, with which he loves and hungers and
+thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed the
+irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions?
+
+Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.
+
+Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in the
+soul.  And what of passion, or spirit?  Is it a third, or akin to one of
+the preceding?
+
+I should be inclined to say--akin to desire.
+
+Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which
+I put faith.  The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up
+one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed
+some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution.  He felt a
+desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he
+struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of
+him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye
+wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.
+
+I have heard the story myself, he said.
+
+The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as
+though they were two distinct things.
+
+Yes; that is the meaning, he said.
+
+And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a man's
+desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry
+at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is like the
+struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason;--
+but for the passionate or spirited element to take part with the desires
+when reason decides that she should not be opposed, is a sort of thing
+which I believe that you never observed occurring in yourself, nor, as I
+should imagine, in any one else?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Suppose that a man thinks he has done a wrong to another, the nobler he is
+the less able is he to feel indignant at any suffering, such as hunger, or
+cold, or any other pain which the injured person may inflict upon him--
+these he deems to be just, and, as I say, his anger refuses to be excited
+by them.
+
+True, he said.
+
+But when he thinks that he is the sufferer of the wrong, then he boils and
+chafes, and is on the side of what he believes to be justice; and because
+he suffers hunger or cold or other pain he is only the more determined to
+persevere and conquer.  His noble spirit will not be quelled until he
+either slays or is slain; or until he hears the voice of the shepherd, that
+is, reason, bidding his dog bark no more.
+
+The illustration is perfect, he replied; and in our State, as we were
+saying, the auxiliaries were to be dogs, and to hear the voice of the
+rulers, who are their shepherds.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you quite understand me; there is, however, a
+further point which I wish you to consider.
+
+What point?
+
+You remember that passion or spirit appeared at first sight to be a kind of
+desire, but now we should say quite the contrary; for in the conflict of
+the soul spirit is arrayed on the side of the rational principle.
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+But a further question arises:  Is passion different from reason also, or
+only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three principles in
+the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the concupiscent; or
+rather, as the State was composed of three classes, traders, auxiliaries,
+counsellors, so may there not be in the individual soul a third element
+which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad education is the
+natural auxiliary of reason?
+
+Yes, he said, there must be a third.
+
+Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be different
+from desire, turn out also to be different from reason.
+
+But that is easily proved:--We may observe even in young children that they
+are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them
+never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough.
+
+Excellent, I said, and you may see passion equally in brute animals, which
+is a further proof of the truth of what you are saying.  And we may once
+more appeal to the words of Homer, which have been already quoted by us,
+
+'He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul,'
+
+for in this verse Homer has clearly supposed the power which reasons about
+the better and worse to be different from the unreasoning anger which is
+rebuked by it.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And so, after much tossing, we have reached land, and are fairly agreed
+that the same principles which exist in the State exist also in the
+individual, and that they are three in number.
+
+Exactly.
+
+Must we not then infer that the individual is wise in the same way, and in
+virtue of the same quality which makes the State wise?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Also that the same quality which constitutes courage in the State
+constitutes courage in the individual, and that both the State and the
+individual bear the same relation to all the other virtues?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And the individual will be acknowledged by us to be just in the same way in
+which the State is just?
+
+That follows, of course.
+
+We cannot but remember that the justice of the State consisted in each of
+the three classes doing the work of its own class?
+
+We are not very likely to have forgotten, he said.
+
+We must recollect that the individual in whom the several qualities of his
+nature do their own work will be just, and will do his own work?
+
+Yes, he said, we must remember that too.
+
+And ought not the rational principle, which is wise, and has the care of
+the whole soul, to rule, and the passionate or spirited principle to be the
+subject and ally?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And, as we were saying, the united influence of music and gymnastic will
+bring them into accord, nerving and sustaining the reason with noble words
+and lessons, and moderating and soothing and civilizing the wildness of
+passion by harmony and rhythm?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+And these two, thus nurtured and educated, and having learned truly to know
+their own functions, will rule over the concupiscent, which in each of us
+is the largest part of the soul and by nature most insatiable of gain; over
+this they will keep guard, lest, waxing great and strong with the fulness
+of bodily pleasures, as they are termed, the concupiscent soul, no longer
+confined to her own sphere, should attempt to enslave and rule those who
+are not her natural-born subjects, and overturn the whole life of man?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Both together will they not be the best defenders of the whole soul and the
+whole body against attacks from without; the one counselling, and the other
+fighting under his leader, and courageously executing his commands and
+counsels?
+
+True.
+
+And he is to be deemed courageous whose spirit retains in pleasure and in
+pain the commands of reason about what he ought or ought not to fear?
+
+Right, he replied.
+
+And him we call wise who has in him that little part which rules, and which
+proclaims these commands; that part too being supposed to have a knowledge
+of what is for the interest of each of the three parts and of the whole?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And would you not say that he is temperate who has these same elements in
+friendly harmony, in whom the one ruling principle of reason, and the two
+subject ones of spirit and desire are equally agreed that reason ought to
+rule, and do not rebel?
+
+Certainly, he said, that is the true account of temperance whether in the
+State or individual.
+
+And surely, I said, we have explained again and again how and by virtue of
+what quality a man will be just.
+
+That is very certain.
+
+And is justice dimmer in the individual, and is her form different, or is
+she the same which we found her to be in the State?
+
+There is no difference in my opinion, he said.
+
+Because, if any doubt is still lingering in our minds, a few commonplace
+instances will satisfy us of the truth of what I am saying.
+
+What sort of instances do you mean?
+
+If the case is put to us, must we not admit that the just State, or the man
+who is trained in the principles of such a State, will be less likely than
+the unjust to make away with a deposit of gold or silver?  Would any one
+deny this?
+
+No one, he replied.
+
+Will the just man or citizen ever be guilty of sacrilege or theft, or
+treachery either to his friends or to his country?
+
+Never.
+
+Neither will he ever break faith where there have been oaths or agreements?
+
+Impossible.
+
+No one will be less likely to commit adultery, or to dishonour his father
+and mother, or to fail in his religious duties?
+
+No one.
+
+And the reason is that each part of him is doing its own business, whether
+in ruling or being ruled?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+Are you satisfied then that the quality which makes such men and such
+states is justice, or do you hope to discover some other?
+
+Not I, indeed.
+
+Then our dream has been realized; and the suspicion which we entertained at
+the beginning of our work of construction, that some divine power must have
+conducted us to a primary form of justice, has now been verified?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And the division of labour which required the carpenter and the shoemaker
+and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own business, and not
+another's, was a shadow of justice, and for that reason it was of use?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned
+however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true
+self and concernment of man:  for the just man does not permit the several
+elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the
+work of others,--he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master
+and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together
+the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher,
+lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals--when
+he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one
+entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act,
+if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of
+the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always
+thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this
+harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which
+presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this
+condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over
+it ignorance.
+
+You have said the exact truth, Socrates.
+
+Very good; and if we were to affirm that we had discovered the just man and
+the just State, and the nature of justice in each of them, we should not be
+telling a falsehood?
+
+Most certainly not.
+
+May we say so, then?
+
+Let us say so.
+
+And now, I said, injustice has to be considered.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Must not injustice be a strife which arises among the three principles--a
+meddlesomeness, and interference, and rising up of a part of the soul
+against the whole, an assertion of unlawful authority, which is made by a
+rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he is the natural
+vassal,--what is all this confusion and delusion but injustice, and
+intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form of vice?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And if the nature of justice and injustice be known, then the meaning of
+acting unjustly and being unjust, or, again, of acting justly, will also be
+perfectly clear?
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+Why, I said, they are like disease and health; being in the soul just what
+disease and health are in the body.
+
+How so? he said.
+
+Why, I said, that which is healthy causes health, and that which is
+unhealthy causes disease.
+
+Yes.
+
+And just actions cause justice, and unjust actions cause injustice?
+
+That is certain.
+
+And the creation of health is the institution of a natural order and
+government of one by another in the parts of the body; and the creation of
+disease is the production of a state of things at variance with this
+natural order?
+
+True.
+
+And is not the creation of justice the institution of a natural order and
+government of one by another in the parts of the soul, and the creation of
+injustice the production of a state of things at variance with the natural
+order?
+
+Exactly so, he said.
+
+Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice
+the disease and weakness and deformity of the same?
+
+True.
+
+And do not good practices lead to virtue, and evil practices to vice?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Still our old question of the comparative advantage of justice and
+injustice has not been answered:  Which is the more profitable, to be just
+and act justly and practise virtue, whether seen or unseen of gods and men,
+or to be unjust and act unjustly, if only unpunished and unreformed?
+
+In my judgment, Socrates, the question has now become ridiculous.  We know
+that, when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer endurable,
+though pampered with all kinds of meats and drinks, and having all wealth
+and all power; and shall we be told that when the very essence of the vital
+principle is undermined and corrupted, life is still worth having to a man,
+if only he be allowed to do whatever he likes with the single exception
+that he is not to acquire justice and virtue, or to escape from injustice
+and vice; assuming them both to be such as we have described?
+
+Yes, I said, the question is, as you say, ridiculous.  Still, as we are
+near the spot at which we may see the truth in the clearest manner with our
+own eyes, let us not faint by the way.
+
+Certainly not, he replied.
+
+Come up hither, I said, and behold the various forms of vice, those of
+them, I mean, which are worth looking at.
+
+I am following you, he replied:  proceed.
+
+I said, The argument seems to have reached a height from which, as from
+some tower of speculation, a man may look down and see that virtue is one,
+but that the forms of vice are innumerable; there being four special ones
+which are deserving of note.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean, I replied, that there appear to be as many forms of the soul as
+there are distinct forms of the State.
+
+How many?
+
+There are five of the State, and five of the soul, I said.
+
+What are they?
+
+The first, I said, is that which we have been describing, and which may be
+said to have two names, monarchy and aristocracy, accordingly as rule is
+exercised by one distinguished man or by many.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+But I regard the two names as describing one form only; for whether the
+government is in the hands of one or many, if the governors have been
+trained in the manner which we have supposed, the fundamental laws of the
+State will be maintained.
+
+That is true, he replied.
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+Such is the good and true City or State, and the good and true man is of
+the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil
+is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the
+regulation of the individual soul, and is exhibited in four forms.
+
+What are they? he said.
+
+I was proceeding to tell the order in which the four evil forms appeared to
+me to succeed one another, when Polemarchus, who was sitting a little way
+off, just beyond Adeimantus, began to whisper to him:  stretching forth his
+hand, he took hold of the upper part of his coat by the shoulder, and drew
+him towards him, leaning forward himself so as to be quite close and saying
+something in his ear, of which I only caught the words, 'Shall we let him
+off, or what shall we do?'
+
+Certainly not, said Adeimantus, raising his voice.
+
+Who is it, I said, whom you are refusing to let off?
+
+You, he said.
+
+I repeated, Why am I especially not to be let off?
+
+Why, he said, we think that you are lazy, and mean to cheat us out of a
+whole chapter which is a very important part of the story; and you fancy
+that we shall not notice your airy way of proceeding; as if it were
+self-evident to everybody, that in the matter of women and children
+'friends have all things in common.'
+
+And was I not right, Adeimantus?
+
+Yes, he said; but what is right in this particular case, like everything
+else, requires to be explained; for community may be of many kinds. 
+Please, therefore, to say what sort of community you mean.  We have been
+long expecting that you would tell us something about the family life of
+your citizens--how they will bring children into the world, and rear them
+when they have arrived, and, in general, what is the nature of this
+community of women and children--for we are of opinion that the right or
+wrong management of such matters will have a great and paramount influence
+on the State for good or for evil.  And now, since the question is still
+undetermined, and you are taking in hand another State, we have resolved,
+as you heard, not to let you go until you give an account of all this.
+
+To that resolution, said Glaucon, you may regard me as saying Agreed.
+
+And without more ado, said Thrasymachus, you may consider us all to be
+equally agreed.
+
+I said, You know not what you are doing in thus assailing me:  What an
+argument are you raising about the State!  Just as I thought that I had
+finished, and was only too glad that I had laid this question to sleep, and
+was reflecting how fortunate I was in your acceptance of what I then said,
+you ask me to begin again at the very foundation, ignorant of what a
+hornet's nest of words you are stirring.  Now I foresaw this gathering
+trouble, and avoided it.
+
+For what purpose do you conceive that we have come here, said Thrasymachus,
+--to look for gold, or to hear discourse?
+
+Yes, but discourse should have a limit.
+
+Yes, Socrates, said Glaucon, and the whole of life is the only limit which
+wise men assign to the hearing of such discourses.  But never mind about
+us; take heart yourself and answer the question in your own way:  What sort
+of community of women and children is this which is to prevail among our
+guardians? and how shall we manage the period between birth and education,
+which seems to require the greatest care?  Tell us how these things will
+be.
+
+Yes, my simple friend, but the answer is the reverse of easy; many more
+doubts arise about this than about our previous conclusions.  For the
+practicability of what is said may be doubted; and looked at in another
+point of view, whether the scheme, if ever so practicable, would be for the
+best, is also doubtful.  Hence I feel a reluctance to approach the subject,
+lest our aspiration, my dear friend, should turn out to be a dream only.
+
+Fear not, he replied, for your audience will not be hard upon you; they are
+not sceptical or hostile.
+
+I said:  My good friend, I suppose that you mean to encourage me by these
+words.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+Then let me tell you that you are doing just the reverse; the encouragement
+which you offer would have been all very well had I myself believed that I
+knew what I was talking about:  to declare the truth about matters of high
+interest which a man honours and loves among wise men who love him need
+occasion no fear or faltering in his mind; but to carry on an argument when
+you are yourself only a hesitating enquirer, which is my condition, is a
+dangerous and slippery thing; and the danger is not that I shall be laughed
+at (of which the fear would be childish), but that I shall miss the truth
+where I have most need to be sure of my footing, and drag my friends after
+me in my fall.  And I pray Nemesis not to visit upon me the words which I
+am going to utter.  For I do indeed believe that to be an involuntary
+homicide is a less crime than to be a deceiver about beauty or goodness or
+justice in the matter of laws.  And that is a risk which I would rather run
+among enemies than among friends, and therefore you do well to encourage
+me.
+
+Glaucon laughed and said:  Well then, Socrates, in case you and your
+argument do us any serious injury you shall be acquitted beforehand of the
+homicide, and shall not be held to be a deceiver; take courage then and
+speak.
+
+Well, I said, the law says that when a man is acquitted he is free from
+guilt, and what holds at law may hold in argument.
+
+Then why should you mind?
+
+Well, I replied, I suppose that I must retrace my steps and say what I
+perhaps ought to have said before in the proper place.  The part of the men
+has been played out, and now properly enough comes the turn of the women. 
+Of them I will proceed to speak, and the more readily since I am invited by
+you.
+
+For men born and educated like our citizens, the only way, in my opinion,
+of arriving at a right conclusion about the possession and use of women and
+children is to follow the path on which we originally started, when we said
+that the men were to be the guardians and watchdogs of the herd.
+
+True.
+
+Let us further suppose the birth and education of our women to be subject
+to similar or nearly similar regulations; then we shall see whether the
+result accords with our design.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+What I mean may be put into the form of a question, I said:  Are dogs
+divided into hes and shes, or do they both share equally in hunting and in
+keeping watch and in the other duties of dogs? or do we entrust to the
+males the entire and exclusive care of the flocks, while we leave the
+females at home, under the idea that the bearing and suckling their puppies
+is labour enough for them?
+
+No, he said, they share alike; the only difference between them is that the
+males are stronger and the females weaker.
+
+But can you use different animals for the same purpose, unless they are
+bred and fed in the same way?
+
+You cannot.
+
+Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same
+nurture and education?
+
+Yes.
+
+The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic.
+
+Yes.
+
+Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war,
+which they must practise like the men?
+
+That is the inference, I suppose.
+
+I should rather expect, I said, that several of our proposals, if they are
+carried out, being unusual, may appear ridiculous.
+
+No doubt of it.
+
+Yes, and the most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women naked
+in the palaestra, exercising with the men, especially when they are no
+longer young; they certainly will not be a vision of beauty, any more than
+the enthusiastic old men who in spite of wrinkles and ugliness continue to
+frequent the gymnasia.
+
+Yes, indeed, he said:  according to present notions the proposal would be
+thought ridiculous.
+
+But then, I said, as we have determined to speak our minds, we must not
+fear the jests of the wits which will be directed against this sort of
+innovation; how they will talk of women's attainments both in music and
+gymnastic, and above all about their wearing armour and riding upon
+horseback!
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Yet having begun we must go forward to the rough places of the law; at the
+same time begging of these gentlemen for once in their life to be serious. 
+Not long ago, as we shall remind them, the Hellenes were of the opinion,
+which is still generally received among the barbarians, that the sight of a
+naked man was ridiculous and improper; and when first the Cretans and then
+the Lacedaemonians introduced the custom, the wits of that day might
+equally have ridiculed the innovation.
+
+No doubt.
+
+But when experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far
+better than to cover them up, and the ludicrous effect to the outward eye
+vanished before the better principle which reason asserted, then the man
+was perceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of his ridicule at any
+other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously inclines to weigh the
+beautiful by any other standard but that of the good.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+First, then, whether the question is to be put in jest or in earnest, let
+us come to an understanding about the nature of woman:  Is she capable of
+sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or not at all? 
+And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or can not share? 
+That will be the best way of commencing the enquiry, and will probably lead
+to the fairest conclusion.
+
+That will be much the best way.
+
+Shall we take the other side first and begin by arguing against ourselves;
+in this manner the adversary's position will not be undefended.
+
+Why not? he said.
+
+Then let us put a speech into the mouths of our opponents.  They will say: 
+'Socrates and Glaucon, no adversary need convict you, for you yourselves,
+at the first foundation of the State, admitted the principle that everybody
+was to do the one work suited to his own nature.'  And certainly, if I am
+not mistaken, such an admission was made by us.  'And do not the natures of
+men and women differ very much indeed?'  And we shall reply:  Of course
+they do.  Then we shall be asked, 'Whether the tasks assigned to men and to
+women should not be different, and such as are agreeable to their different
+natures?'  Certainly they should.  'But if so, have you not fallen into a
+serious inconsistency in saying that men and women, whose natures are so
+entirely different, ought to perform the same actions?'--What defence will
+you make for us, my good Sir, against any one who offers these objections?
+
+That is not an easy question to answer when asked suddenly; and I shall and
+I do beg of you to draw out the case on our side.
+
+These are the objections, Glaucon, and there are many others of a like
+kind, which I foresaw long ago; they made me afraid and reluctant to take
+in hand any law about the possession and nurture of women and children.
+
+By Zeus, he said, the problem to be solved is anything but easy.
+
+Why yes, I said, but the fact is that when a man is out of his depth,
+whether he has fallen into a little swimming bath or into mid ocean, he has
+to swim all the same.
+
+Very true.
+
+And must not we swim and try to reach the shore:  we will hope that Arion's
+dolphin or some other miraculous help may save us?
+
+I suppose so, he said.
+
+Well then, let us see if any way of escape can be found.  We acknowledged--
+did we not? that different natures ought to have different pursuits, and
+that men's and women's natures are different.  And now what are we saying?
+--that different natures ought to have the same pursuits,--this is the
+inconsistency which is charged upon us.
+
+Precisely.
+
+Verily, Glaucon, I said, glorious is the power of the art of contradiction!
+
+Why do you say so?
+
+Because I think that many a man falls into the practice against his will. 
+When he thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just because he
+cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is speaking; and he
+will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of contention and not
+of fair discussion.
+
+Yes, he replied, such is very often the case; but what has that to do with
+us and our argument?
+
+A great deal; for there is certainly a danger of our getting
+unintentionally into a verbal opposition.
+
+In what way?
+
+Why we valiantly and pugnaciously insist upon the verbal truth, that
+different natures ought to have different pursuits, but we never considered
+at all what was the meaning of sameness or difference of nature, or why we
+distinguished them when we assigned different pursuits to different natures
+and the same to the same natures.
+
+Why, no, he said, that was never considered by us.
+
+I said:  Suppose that by way of illustration we were to ask the question
+whether there is not an opposition in nature between bald men and hairy
+men; and if this is admitted by us, then, if bald men are cobblers, we
+should forbid the hairy men to be cobblers, and conversely?
+
+That would be a jest, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, a jest; and why? because we never meant when we constructed
+the State, that the opposition of natures should extend to every
+difference, but only to those differences which affected the pursuit in
+which the individual is engaged; we should have argued, for example, that a
+physician and one who is in mind a physician may be said to have the same
+nature.
+
+True.
+
+Whereas the physician and the carpenter have different natures?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if, I said, the male and female sex appear to differ in their fitness
+for any art or pursuit, we should say that such pursuit or art ought to be
+assigned to one or the other of them; but if the difference consists only
+in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to a
+proof that a woman differs from a man in respect of the sort of education
+she should receive; and we shall therefore continue to maintain that our
+guardians and their wives ought to have the same pursuits.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Next, we shall ask our opponent how, in reference to any of the pursuits or
+arts of civic life, the nature of a woman differs from that of a man?
+
+That will be quite fair.
+
+And perhaps he, like yourself, will reply that to give a sufficient answer
+on the instant is not easy; but after a little reflection there is no
+difficulty.
+
+Yes, perhaps.
+
+Suppose then that we invite him to accompany us in the argument, and then
+we may hope to show him that there is nothing peculiar in the constitution
+of women which would affect them in the administration of the State.
+
+By all means.
+
+Let us say to him:  Come now, and we will ask you a question:--when you
+spoke of a nature gifted or not gifted in any respect, did you mean to say
+that one man will acquire a thing easily, another with difficulty; a little
+learning will lead the one to discover a great deal; whereas the other,
+after much study and application, no sooner learns than he forgets; or
+again, did you mean, that the one has a body which is a good servant to his
+mind, while the body of the other is a hindrance to him?--would not these
+be the sort of differences which distinguish the man gifted by nature from
+the one who is ungifted?
+
+No one will deny that.
+
+And can you mention any pursuit of mankind in which the male sex has not
+all these gifts and qualities in a higher degree than the female?  Need I
+waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the management of
+pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be great,
+and in which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the most
+absurd?
+
+You are quite right, he replied, in maintaining the general inferiority of
+the female sex:  although many women are in many things superior to many
+men, yet on the whole what you say is true.
+
+And if so, my friend, I said, there is no special faculty of administration
+in a state which a woman has because she is a woman, or which a man has by
+virtue of his sex, but the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all
+the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a
+woman is inferior to a man.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then are we to impose all our enactments on men and none of them on women?
+
+That will never do.
+
+One woman has a gift of healing, another not; one is a musician, and
+another has no music in her nature?
+
+Very true.
+
+And one woman has a turn for gymnastic and military exercises, and another
+is unwarlike and hates gymnastics?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy of philosophy; one
+has spirit, and another is without spirit?
+
+That is also true.
+
+Then one woman will have the temper of a guardian, and another not.  Was
+not the selection of the male guardians determined by differences of this
+sort?
+
+Yes.
+
+Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they
+differ only in their comparative strength or weakness.
+
+Obviously.
+
+And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the
+companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they
+resemble in capacity and in character?
+
+Very true.
+
+And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits?
+
+They ought.
+
+Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning
+music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians--to that point we come
+round again.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore not an
+impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice, which prevails
+at present, is in reality a violation of nature.
+
+That appears to be true.
+
+We had to consider, first, whether our proposals were possible, and
+secondly whether they were the most beneficial?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the possibility has been acknowledged?
+
+Yes.
+
+The very great benefit has next to be established?
+
+Quite so.
+
+You will admit that the same education which makes a man a good guardian
+will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature is the same?
+
+Yes.
+
+I should like to ask you a question.
+
+What is it?
+
+Would you say that all men are equal in excellence, or is one man better
+than another?
+
+The latter.
+
+And in the commonwealth which we were founding do you conceive the
+guardians who have been brought up on our model system to be more perfect
+men, or the cobblers whose education has been cobbling?
+
+What a ridiculous question!
+
+You have answered me, I replied:  Well, and may we not further say that our
+guardians are the best of our citizens?
+
+By far the best.
+
+And will not their wives be the best women?
+
+Yes, by far the best.
+
+And can there be anything better for the interests of the State than that
+the men and women of a State should be as good as possible?
+
+There can be nothing better.
+
+And this is what the arts of music and gymnastic, when present in such
+manner as we have described, will accomplish?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest degree
+beneficial to the State?
+
+True.
+
+Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their
+robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their
+country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned
+to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their
+duties are to be the same.  And as for the man who laughs at naked women
+exercising their bodies from the best of motives, in his laughter he is
+plucking
+
+'A fruit of unripe wisdom,'
+
+and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is about;
+--for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the useful is
+the noble and the hurtful is the base.
+
+Very true.
+
+Here, then, is one difficulty in our law about women, which we may say that
+we have now escaped; the wave has not swallowed us up alive for enacting
+that the guardians of either sex should have all their pursuits in common;
+to the utility and also to the possibility of this arrangement the
+consistency of the argument with itself bears witness.
+
+Yes, that was a mighty wave which you have escaped.
+
+Yes, I said, but a greater is coming; you will not think much of this when
+you see the next.
+
+Go on; let me see.
+
+The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has preceded,
+is to the following effect,--'that the wives of our guardians are to be
+common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his
+own child, nor any child his parent.'
+
+Yes, he said, that is a much greater wave than the other; and the
+possibility as well as the utility of such a law are far more questionable.
+
+I do not think, I said, that there can be any dispute about the very great
+utility of having wives and children in common; the possibility is quite
+another matter, and will be very much disputed.
+
+I think that a good many doubts may be raised about both.
+
+You imply that the two questions must be combined, I replied.  Now I meant
+that you should admit the utility; and in this way, as I thought, I should
+escape from one of them, and then there would remain only the possibility.
+
+But that little attempt is detected, and therefore you will please to give
+a defence of both.
+
+Well, I said, I submit to my fate.  Yet grant me a little favour:  let me
+feast my mind with the dream as day dreamers are in the habit of feasting
+themselves when they are walking alone; for before they have discovered any
+means of effecting their wishes--that is a matter which never troubles
+them--they would rather not tire themselves by thinking about
+possibilities; but assuming that what they desire is already granted to
+them, they proceed with their plan, and delight in detailing what they mean
+to do when their wish has come true--that is a way which they have of not
+doing much good to a capacity which was never good for much.  Now I myself
+am beginning to lose heart, and I should like, with your permission, to
+pass over the question of possibility at present.  Assuming therefore the
+possibility of the proposal, I shall now proceed to enquire how the rulers
+will carry out these arrangements, and I shall demonstrate that our plan,
+if executed, will be of the greatest benefit to the State and to the
+guardians.  First of all, then, if you have no objection, I will endeavour
+with your help to consider the advantages of the measure; and hereafter the
+question of possibility.
+
+I have no objection; proceed.
+
+First, I think that if our rulers and their auxiliaries are to be worthy of
+the name which they bear, there must be willingness to obey in the one and
+the power of command in the other; the guardians must themselves obey the
+laws, and they must also imitate the spirit of them in any details which
+are entrusted to their care.
+
+That is right, he said.
+
+You, I said, who are their legislator, having selected the men, will now
+select the women and give them to them;--they must be as far as possible of
+like natures with them; and they must live in common houses and meet at
+common meals.  None of them will have anything specially his or her own;
+they will be together, and will be brought up together, and will associate
+at gymnastic exercises.  And so they will be drawn by a necessity of their
+natures to have intercourse with each other--necessity is not too strong a
+word, I think?
+
+Yes, he said;--necessity, not geometrical, but another sort of necessity
+which lovers know, and which is far more convincing and constraining to the
+mass of mankind.
+
+True, I said; and this, Glaucon, like all the rest, must proceed after an
+orderly fashion; in a city of the blessed, licentiousness is an unholy
+thing which the rulers will forbid.
+
+Yes, he said, and it ought not to be permitted.
+
+Then clearly the next thing will be to make matrimony sacred in the highest
+degree, and what is most beneficial will be deemed sacred?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And how can marriages be made most beneficial?--that is a question which I
+put to you, because I see in your house dogs for hunting, and of the nobler
+sort of birds not a few.  Now, I beseech you, do tell me, have you ever
+attended to their pairing and breeding?
+
+In what particulars?
+
+Why, in the first place, although they are all of a good sort, are not some
+better than others?
+
+True.
+
+And do you breed from them all indifferently, or do you take care to breed
+from the best only?
+
+From the best.
+
+And do you take the oldest or the youngest, or only those of ripe age?
+
+I choose only those of ripe age.
+
+And if care was not taken in the breeding, your dogs and birds would
+greatly deteriorate?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the same of horses and animals in general?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Good heavens! my dear friend, I said, what consummate skill will our rulers
+need if the same principle holds of the human species!
+
+Certainly, the same principle holds; but why does this involve any
+particular skill?
+
+Because, I said, our rulers will often have to practise upon the body
+corporate with medicines.  Now you know that when patients do not require
+medicines, but have only to be put under a regimen, the inferior sort of
+practitioner is deemed to be good enough; but when medicine has to be
+given, then the doctor should be more of a man.
+
+That is quite true, he said; but to what are you alluding?
+
+I mean, I replied, that our rulers will find a considerable dose of
+falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects:  we were
+saying that the use of all these things regarded as medicines might be of
+advantage.
+
+And we were very right.
+
+And this lawful use of them seems likely to be often needed in the
+regulations of marriages and births.
+
+How so?
+
+Why, I said, the principle has been already laid down that the best of
+either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with
+the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the
+offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is
+to be maintained in first-rate condition.  Now these goings on must be a
+secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our
+herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion.
+
+Very true.
+
+Had we not better appoint certain festivals at which we will bring together
+the brides and bridegrooms, and sacrifices will be offered and suitable
+hymeneal songs composed by our poets:  the number of weddings is a matter
+which must be left to the discretion of the rulers, whose aim will be to
+preserve the average of population?  There are many other things which they
+will have to consider, such as the effects of wars and diseases and any
+similar agencies, in order as far as this is possible to prevent the State
+from becoming either too large or too small.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+We shall have to invent some ingenious kind of lots which the less worthy
+may draw on each occasion of our bringing them together, and then they will
+accuse their own ill-luck and not the rulers.
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And I think that our braver and better youth, besides their other honours
+and rewards, might have greater facilities of intercourse with women given
+them; their bravery will be a reason, and such fathers ought to have as
+many sons as possible.
+
+True.
+
+And the proper officers, whether male or female or both, for offices are to
+be held by women as well as by men--
+
+Yes--
+
+The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen
+or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in
+a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better
+when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious,
+unknown place, as they should be.
+
+Yes, he said, that must be done if the breed of the guardians is to be kept
+pure.
+
+They will provide for their nurture, and will bring the mothers to the fold
+when they are full of milk, taking the greatest possible care that no
+mother recognises her own child; and other wet-nurses may be engaged if
+more are required.  Care will also be taken that the process of suckling
+shall not be protracted too long; and the mothers will have no getting up
+at night or other trouble, but will hand over all this sort of thing to the
+nurses and attendants.
+
+You suppose the wives of our guardians to have a fine easy time of it when
+they are having children.
+
+Why, said I, and so they ought.  Let us, however, proceed with our scheme. 
+We were saying that the parents should be in the prime of life?
+
+Very true.
+
+And what is the prime of life?  May it not be defined as a period of about
+twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?
+
+Which years do you mean to include?
+
+A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the
+State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at five-and-
+twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of life beats
+quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five.
+
+Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of
+physical as well as of intellectual vigour.
+
+Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public
+hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing; the
+child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have been
+conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers, which at
+each hymeneal priestesses and priest and the whole city will offer, that
+the new generation may be better and more useful than their good and useful
+parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of darkness and strange
+lust.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed age
+who forms a connection with any woman in the prime of life without the
+sanction of the rulers; for we shall say that he is raising up a bastard to
+the State, uncertified and unconsecrated.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age: 
+after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not marry
+his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his mother's
+mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from marrying their
+sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so on in either
+direction.  And we grant all this, accompanying the permission with strict
+orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the
+light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand
+that the offspring of such an union cannot be maintained, and arrange
+accordingly.
+
+That also, he said, is a reasonable proposition.  But how will they know
+who are fathers and daughters, and so on?
+
+They will never know.  The way will be this:--dating from the day of the
+hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the male
+children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards his sons,
+and the female children his daughters, and they will call him father, and
+he will call their children his grandchildren, and they will call the elder
+generation grandfathers and grandmothers.  All who were begotten at the
+time when their fathers and mothers came together will be called their
+brothers and sisters, and these, as I was saying, will be forbidden to
+inter-marry.  This, however, is not to be understood as an absolute
+prohibition of the marriage of brothers and sisters; if the lot favours
+them, and they receive the sanction of the Pythian oracle, the law will
+allow them.
+
+Quite right, he replied.
+
+Such is the scheme, Glaucon, according to which the guardians of our State
+are to have their wives and families in common.  And now you would have the
+argument show that this community is consistent with the rest of our
+polity, and also that nothing can be better--would you not?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+Shall we try to find a common basis by asking of ourselves what ought to be
+the chief aim of the legislator in making laws and in the organization of a
+State,--what is the greatest good, and what is the greatest evil, and then
+consider whether our previous description has the stamp of the good or of
+the evil?
+
+By all means.
+
+Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality
+where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity?
+
+There cannot.
+
+And there is unity where there is community of pleasures and pains--where
+all the citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions of joy and
+sorrow?
+
+No doubt.
+
+Yes; and where there is no common but only private feeling a State is
+disorganized--when you have one half of the world triumphing and the other
+plunged in grief at the same events happening to the city or the citizens?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of the
+terms 'mine' and 'not mine,' 'his' and 'not his.'
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of
+persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the same
+thing?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the
+individual--as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the
+whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a centre and forming one kingdom
+under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all together
+with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in his finger;
+and the same expression is used about any other part of the body, which has
+a sensation of pain at suffering or of pleasure at the alleviation of
+suffering.
+
+Very true, he replied; and I agree with you that in the best-ordered State
+there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you describe.
+
+Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole
+State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with
+him?
+
+Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.
+
+It will now be time, I said, for us to return to our State and see whether
+this or some other form is most in accordance with these fundamental
+principles.
+
+Very good.
+
+Our State like every other has rulers and subjects?
+
+True.
+
+All of whom will call one another citizens?
+
+Of course.
+
+But is there not another name which people give to their rulers in other
+States?
+
+Generally they call them masters, but in democratic States they simply call
+them rulers.
+
+And in our State what other name besides that of citizens do the people
+give the rulers?
+
+They are called saviours and helpers, he replied.
+
+And what do the rulers call the people?
+
+Their maintainers and foster-fathers.
+
+And what do they call them in other States?
+
+Slaves.
+
+And what do the rulers call one another in other States?
+
+Fellow-rulers.
+
+And what in ours?
+
+Fellow-guardians.
+
+Did you ever know an example in any other State of a ruler who would speak
+of one of his colleagues as his friend and of another as not being his
+friend?
+
+Yes, very often.
+
+And the friend he regards and describes as one in whom he has an interest,
+and the other as a stranger in whom he has no interest?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But would any of your guardians think or speak of any other guardian as a
+stranger?
+
+Certainly he would not; for every one whom they meet will be regarded by
+them either as a brother or sister, or father or mother, or son or
+daughter, or as the child or parent of those who are thus connected with
+him.
+
+Capital, I said; but let me ask you once more:  Shall they be a family in
+name only; or shall they in all their actions be true to the name?  For
+example, in the use of the word 'father,' would the care of a father be
+implied and the filial reverence and duty and obedience to him which the
+law commands; and is the violator of these duties to be regarded as an
+impious and unrighteous person who is not likely to receive much good
+either at the hands of God or of man?  Are these to be or not to be the
+strains which the children will hear repeated in their ears by all the
+citizens about those who are intimated to them to be their parents and the
+rest of their kinsfolk?
+
+These, he said, and none other; for what can be more ridiculous than for
+them to utter the names of family ties with the lips only and not to act in
+the spirit of them?
+
+Then in our city the language of harmony and concord will be more often
+heard than in any other.  As I was describing before, when any one is well
+or ill, the universal word will be 'with me it is well' or 'it is ill.'
+
+Most true.
+
+And agreeably to this mode of thinking and speaking, were we not saying
+that they will have their pleasures and pains in common?
+
+Yes, and so they will.
+
+And they will have a common interest in the same thing which they will
+alike call 'my own,' and having this common interest they will have a
+common feeling of pleasure and pain?
+
+Yes, far more so than in other States.
+
+And the reason of this, over and above the general constitution of the
+State, will be that the guardians will have a community of women and
+children?
+
+That will be the chief reason.
+
+And this unity of feeling we admitted to be the greatest good, as was
+implied in our own comparison of a well-ordered State to the relation of
+the body and the members, when affected by pleasure or pain?
+
+That we acknowledged, and very rightly.
+
+Then the community of wives and children among our citizens is clearly the
+source of the greatest good to the State?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this agrees with the other principle which we were affirming,--that the
+guardians were not to have houses or lands or any other property; their pay
+was to be their food, which they were to receive from the other citizens,
+and they were to have no private expenses; for we intended them to preserve
+their true character of guardians.
+
+Right, he replied.
+
+Both the community of property and the community of families, as I am
+saying, tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear the city
+in pieces by differing about 'mine' and 'not mine;' each man dragging any
+acquisition which he has made into a separate house of his own, where he
+has a separate wife and children and private pleasures and pains; but all
+will be affected as far as may be by the same pleasures and pains because
+they are all of one opinion about what is near and dear to them, and
+therefore they all tend towards a common end.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And as they have nothing but their persons which they can call their own,
+suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will be
+delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or relations
+are the occasion.
+
+Of course they will.
+
+Neither will trials for assault or insult ever be likely to occur among
+them.  For that equals should defend themselves against equals we shall
+maintain to be honourable and right; we shall make the protection of the
+person a matter of necessity.
+
+That is good, he said.
+
+Yes; and there is a further good in the law; viz. that if a man has a
+quarrel with another he will satisfy his resentment then and there, and not
+proceed to more dangerous lengths.
+
+Certainly.
+
+To the elder shall be assigned the duty of ruling and chastising the
+younger.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Nor can there be a doubt that the younger will not strike or do any other
+violence to an elder, unless the magistrates command him; nor will he
+slight him in any way.  For there are two guardians, shame and fear, mighty
+to prevent him:  shame, which makes men refrain from laying hands on those
+who are to them in the relation of parents; fear, that the injured one will
+be succoured by the others who are his brothers, sons, fathers.
+
+That is true, he replied.
+
+Then in every way the laws will help the citizens to keep the peace with
+one another?
+
+Yes, there will be no want of peace.
+
+And as the guardians will never quarrel among themselves there will be no
+danger of the rest of the city being divided either against them or against
+one another.
+
+None whatever.
+
+I hardly like even to mention the little meannesses of which they will be
+rid, for they are beneath notice:  such, for example, as the flattery of
+the rich by the poor, and all the pains and pangs which men experience in
+bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy necessaries for their
+household, borrowing and then repudiating, getting how they can, and giving
+the money into the hands of women and slaves to keep--the many evils of so
+many kinds which people suffer in this way are mean enough and obvious
+enough, and not worth speaking of.
+
+Yes, he said, a man has no need of eyes in order to perceive that.
+
+And from all these evils they will be delivered, and their life will be
+blessed as the life of Olympic victors and yet more blessed.
+
+How so?
+
+The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of the
+blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more glorious
+victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public cost.  For the
+victory which they have won is the salvation of the whole State; and the
+crown with which they and their children are crowned is the fulness of all
+that life needs; they receive rewards from the hands of their country while
+living, and after death have an honourable burial.
+
+Yes, he said, and glorious rewards they are.
+
+Do you remember, I said, how in the course of the previous discussion some
+one who shall be nameless accused us of making our guardians unhappy--they
+had nothing and might have possessed all things--to whom we replied that,
+if an occasion offered, we might perhaps hereafter consider this question,
+but that, as at present advised, we would make our guardians truly
+guardians, and that we were fashioning the State with a view to the
+greatest happiness, not of any particular class, but of the whole?
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+And what do you say, now that the life of our protectors is made out to be
+far better and nobler than that of Olympic victors--is the life of
+shoemakers, or any other artisans, or of husbandmen, to be compared with
+it?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+At the same time I ought here to repeat what I have said elsewhere, that if
+any of our guardians shall try to be happy in such a manner that he will
+cease to be a guardian, and is not content with this safe and harmonious
+life, which, in our judgment, is of all lives the best, but infatuated by
+some youthful conceit of happiness which gets up into his head shall seek
+to appropriate the whole state to himself, then he will have to learn how
+wisely Hesiod spoke, when he said, 'half is more than the whole.'
+
+If he were to consult me, I should say to him:  Stay where you are, when
+you have the offer of such a life.
+
+You agree then, I said, that men and women are to have a common way of life
+such as we have described--common education, common children; and they are
+to watch over the citizens in common whether abiding in the city or going
+out to war; they are to keep watch together, and to hunt together like
+dogs; and always and in all things, as far as they are able, women are to
+share with the men?  And in so doing they will do what is best, and will
+not violate, but preserve the natural relation of the sexes.
+
+I agree with you, he replied.
+
+The enquiry, I said, has yet to be made, whether such a community be found
+possible--as among other animals, so also among men--and if possible, in
+what way possible?
+
+You have anticipated the question which I was about to suggest.
+
+There is no difficulty, I said, in seeing how war will be carried on by
+them.
+
+How?
+
+Why, of course they will go on expeditions together; and will take with
+them any of their children who are strong enough, that, after the manner of
+the artisan's child, they may look on at the work which they will have to
+do when they are grown up; and besides looking on they will have to help
+and be of use in war, and to wait upon their fathers and mothers.  Did you
+never observe in the arts how the potters' boys look on and help, long
+before they touch the wheel?
+
+Yes, I have.
+
+And shall potters be more careful in educating their children and in giving
+them the opportunity of seeing and practising their duties than our
+guardians will be?
+
+The idea is ridiculous, he said.
+
+There is also the effect on the parents, with whom, as with other animals,
+the presence of their young ones will be the greatest incentive to valour.
+
+That is quite true, Socrates; and yet if they are defeated, which may often
+happen in war, how great the danger is! the children will be lost as well
+as their parents, and the State will never recover.
+
+True, I said; but would you never allow them to run any risk?
+
+I am far from saying that.
+
+Well, but if they are ever to run a risk should they not do so on some
+occasion when, if they escape disaster, they will be the better for it?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Whether the future soldiers do or do not see war in the days of their youth
+is a very important matter, for the sake of which some risk may fairly be
+incurred.
+
+Yes, very important.
+
+This then must be our first step,--to make our children spectators of war;
+but we must also contrive that they shall be secured against danger; then
+all will be well.
+
+True.
+
+Their parents may be supposed not to be blind to the risks of war, but to
+know, as far as human foresight can, what expeditions are safe and what
+dangerous?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+And they will take them on the safe expeditions and be cautious about the
+dangerous ones?
+
+True.
+
+And they will place them under the command of experienced veterans who will
+be their leaders and teachers?
+
+Very properly.
+
+Still, the dangers of war cannot be always foreseen; there is a good deal
+of chance about them?
+
+True.
+
+Then against such chances the children must be at once furnished with
+wings, in order that in the hour of need they may fly away and escape.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean that we must mount them on horses in their earliest youth, and when
+they have learnt to ride, take them on horseback to see war:  the horses
+must not be spirited and warlike, but the most tractable and yet the
+swiftest that can be had.  In this way they will get an excellent view of
+what is hereafter to be their own business; and if there is danger they
+have only to follow their elder leaders and escape.
+
+I believe that you are right, he said.
+
+Next, as to war; what are to be the relations of your soldiers to one
+another and to their enemies?  I should be inclined to propose that the
+soldier who leaves his rank or throws away his arms, or is guilty of any
+other act of cowardice, should be degraded into the rank of a husbandman or
+artisan.  What do you think?
+
+By all means, I should say.
+
+And he who allows himself to be taken prisoner may as well be made a
+present of to his enemies; he is their lawful prey, and let them do what
+they like with him.
+
+Certainly.
+
+But the hero who has distinguished himself, what shall be done to him?  In
+the first place, he shall receive honour in the army from his youthful
+comrades; every one of them in succession shall crown him.  What do you
+say?
+
+I approve.
+
+And what do you say to his receiving the right hand of fellowship?
+
+To that too, I agree.
+
+But you will hardly agree to my next proposal.
+
+What is your proposal?
+
+That he should kiss and be kissed by them.
+
+Most certainly, and I should be disposed to go further, and say:  Let no
+one whom he has a mind to kiss refuse to be kissed by him while the
+expedition lasts.  So that if there be a lover in the army, whether his
+love be youth or maiden, he may be more eager to win the prize of valour.
+
+Capital, I said.  That the brave man is to have more wives than others has
+been already determined:  and he is to have first choices in such matters
+more than others, in order that he may have as many children as possible?
+
+Agreed.
+
+Again, there is another manner in which, according to Homer, brave youths
+should be honoured; for he tells how Ajax, after he had distinguished
+himself in battle, was rewarded with long chines, which seems to be a
+compliment appropriate to a hero in the flower of his age, being not only a
+tribute of honour but also a very strengthening thing.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Then in this, I said, Homer shall be our teacher; and we too, at sacrifices
+and on the like occasions, will honour the brave according to the measure
+of their valour, whether men or women, with hymns and those other
+distinctions which we were mentioning; also with
+
+'seats of precedence, and meats and full cups;'
+
+and in honouring them, we shall be at the same time training them.
+
+That, he replied, is excellent.
+
+Yes, I said; and when a man dies gloriously in war shall we not say, in the
+first place, that he is of the golden race?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Nay, have we not the authority of Hesiod for affirming that when they are
+dead
+
+'They are holy angels upon the earth, authors of good, averters of evil,
+the guardians of speech-gifted men'?
+
+Yes; and we accept his authority.
+
+We must learn of the god how we are to order the sepulture of divine and
+heroic personages, and what is to be their special distinction; and we must
+do as he bids?
+
+By all means.
+
+And in ages to come we will reverence them and kneel before their
+sepulchres as at the graves of heroes.  And not only they but any who are
+deemed pre-eminently good, whether they die from age, or in any other way,
+shall be admitted to the same honours.
+
+That is very right, he said.
+
+Next, how shall our soldiers treat their enemies?  What about this?
+
+In what respect do you mean?
+
+First of all, in regard to slavery?  Do you think it right that Hellenes
+should enslave Hellenic States, or allow others to enslave them, if they
+can help?  Should not their custom be to spare them, considering the danger
+which there is that the whole race may one day fall under the yoke of the
+barbarians?
+
+To spare them is infinitely better.
+
+Then no Hellene should be owned by them as a slave; that is a rule which
+they will observe and advise the other Hellenes to observe.
+
+Certainly, he said; they will in this way be united against the barbarians
+and will keep their hands off one another.
+
+Next as to the slain; ought the conquerors, I said, to take anything but
+their armour?  Does not the practice of despoiling an enemy afford an
+excuse for not facing the battle?  Cowards skulk about the dead, pretending
+that they are fulfilling a duty, and many an army before now has been lost
+from this love of plunder.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is there not illiberality and avarice in robbing a corpse, and also a
+degree of meanness and womanishness in making an enemy of the dead body
+when the real enemy has flown away and left only his fighting gear behind
+him,--is not this rather like a dog who cannot get at his assailant,
+quarrelling with the stones which strike him instead?
+
+Very like a dog, he said.
+
+Then we must abstain from spoiling the dead or hindering their burial?
+
+Yes, he replied, we most certainly must.
+
+Neither shall we offer up arms at the temples of the gods, least of all the
+arms of Hellenes, if we care to maintain good feeling with other Hellenes;
+and, indeed, we have reason to fear that the offering of spoils taken from
+kinsmen may be a pollution unless commanded by the god himself?
+
+Very true.
+
+Again, as to the devastation of Hellenic territory or the burning of
+houses, what is to be the practice?
+
+May I have the pleasure, he said, of hearing your opinion?
+
+Both should be forbidden, in my judgment; I would take the annual produce
+and no more.  Shall I tell you why?
+
+Pray do.
+
+Why, you see, there is a difference in the names 'discord' and 'war,' and I
+imagine that there is also a difference in their natures; the one is
+expressive of what is internal and domestic, the other of what is external
+and foreign; and the first of the two is termed discord, and only the
+second, war.
+
+That is a very proper distinction, he replied.
+
+And may I not observe with equal propriety that the Hellenic race is all
+united together by ties of blood and friendship, and alien and strange to
+the barbarians?
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+And therefore when Hellenes fight with barbarians and barbarians with
+Hellenes, they will be described by us as being at war when they fight, and
+by nature enemies, and this kind of antagonism should be called war; but
+when Hellenes fight with one another we shall say that Hellas is then in a
+state of disorder and discord, they being by nature friends; and such
+enmity is to be called discord.
+
+I agree.
+
+Consider then, I said, when that which we have acknowledged to be discord
+occurs, and a city is divided, if both parties destroy the lands and burn
+the houses of one another, how wicked does the strife appear!  No true
+lover of his country would bring himself to tear in pieces his own nurse
+and mother:  There might be reason in the conqueror depriving the conquered
+of their harvest, but still they would have the idea of peace in their
+hearts and would not mean to go on fighting for ever.
+
+Yes, he said, that is a better temper than the other.
+
+And will not the city, which you are founding, be an Hellenic city?
+
+It ought to be, he replied.
+
+Then will not the citizens be good and civilized?
+
+Yes, very civilized.
+
+And will they not be lovers of Hellas, and think of Hellas as their own
+land, and share in the common temples?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+And any difference which arises among them will be regarded by them as
+discord only--a quarrel among friends, which is not to be called a war?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then they will quarrel as those who intend some day to be reconciled?
+
+Certainly.
+
+They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy their
+opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?
+
+Just so.
+
+And as they are Hellenes themselves they will not devastate Hellas, nor
+will they burn houses, nor ever suppose that the whole population of a
+city--men, women, and children--are equally their enemies, for they know
+that the guilt of war is always confined to a few persons and that the many
+are their friends.  And for all these reasons they will be unwilling to
+waste their lands and rase their houses; their enmity to them will only
+last until the many innocent sufferers have compelled the guilty few to
+give satisfaction?
+
+I agree, he said, that our citizens should thus deal with their Hellenic
+enemies; and with barbarians as the Hellenes now deal with one another.
+
+Then let us enact this law also for our guardians:--that they are neither
+to devastate the lands of Hellenes nor to burn their houses.
+
+Agreed; and we may agree also in thinking that these, like all our previous
+enactments, are very good.
+
+But still I must say, Socrates, that if you are allowed to go on in this
+way you will entirely forget the other question which at the commencement
+of this discussion you thrust aside:--Is such an order of things possible,
+and how, if at all?  For I am quite ready to acknowledge that the plan
+which you propose, if only feasible, would do all sorts of good to the
+State.  I will add, what you have omitted, that your citizens will be the
+bravest of warriors, and will never leave their ranks, for they will all
+know one another, and each will call the other father, brother, son; and if
+you suppose the women to join their armies, whether in the same rank or in
+the rear, either as a terror to the enemy, or as auxiliaries in case of
+need, I know that they will then be absolutely invincible; and there are
+many domestic advantages which might also be mentioned and which I also
+fully acknowledge:  but, as I admit all these advantages and as many more
+as you please, if only this State of yours were to come into existence, we
+need say no more about them; assuming then the existence of the State, let
+us now turn to the question of possibility and ways and means--the rest may
+be left.
+
+If I loiter for a moment, you instantly make a raid upon me, I said, and
+have no mercy; I have hardly escaped the first and second waves, and you
+seem not to be aware that you are now bringing upon me the third, which is
+the greatest and heaviest.  When you have seen and heard the third wave, I
+think you will be more considerate and will acknowledge that some fear and
+hesitation was natural respecting a proposal so extraordinary as that which
+I have now to state and investigate.
+
+The more appeals of this sort which you make, he said, the more determined
+are we that you shall tell us how such a State is possible:  speak out and
+at once.
+
+Let me begin by reminding you that we found our way hither in the search
+after justice and injustice.
+
+True, he replied; but what of that?
+
+I was only going to ask whether, if we have discovered them, we are to
+require that the just man should in nothing fail of absolute justice; or
+may we be satisfied with an approximation, and the attainment in him of a
+higher degree of justice than is to be found in other men?
+
+The approximation will be enough.
+
+We were enquiring into the nature of absolute justice and into the
+character of the perfectly just, and into injustice and the perfectly
+unjust, that we might have an ideal.  We were to look at these in order
+that we might judge of our own happiness and unhappiness according to the
+standard which they exhibited and the degree in which we resembled them,
+but not with any view of showing that they could exist in fact.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Would a painter be any the worse because, after having delineated with
+consummate art an ideal of a perfectly beautiful man, he was unable to show
+that any such man could ever have existed?
+
+He would be none the worse.
+
+Well, and were we not creating an ideal of a perfect State?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And is our theory a worse theory because we are unable to prove the
+possibility of a city being ordered in the manner described?
+
+Surely not, he replied.
+
+That is the truth, I said.  But if, at your request, I am to try and show
+how and under what conditions the possibility is highest, I must ask you,
+having this in view, to repeat your former admissions.
+
+What admissions?
+
+I want to know whether ideals are ever fully realized in language?  Does
+not the word express more than the fact, and must not the actual, whatever
+a man may think, always, in the nature of things, fall short of the truth? 
+What do you say?
+
+I agree.
+
+Then you must not insist on my proving that the actual State will in every
+respect coincide with the ideal:  if we are only able to discover how a
+city may be governed nearly as we proposed, you will admit that we have
+discovered the possibility which you demand; and will be contented.  I am
+sure that I should be contented--will not you?
+
+Yes, I will.
+
+Let me next endeavour to show what is that fault in States which is the
+cause of their present maladministration, and what is the least change
+which will enable a State to pass into the truer form; and let the change,
+if possible, be of one thing only, or, if not, of two; at any rate, let the
+changes be as few and slight as possible.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+I think, I said, that there might be a reform of the State if only one
+change were made, which is not a slight or easy though still a possible
+one.
+
+What is it? he said.
+
+Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I liken to the greatest of the
+waves; yet shall the word be spoken, even though the wave break and drown
+me in laughter and dishonour; and do you mark my words.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I said:  'Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this
+world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and
+wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the
+exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have
+rest from their evils,--nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only
+will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of
+day.'  Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have
+uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in
+no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard
+thing.
+
+Socrates, what do you mean?  I would have you consider that the word which
+you have uttered is one at which numerous persons, and very respectable
+persons too, in a figure pulling off their coats all in a moment, and
+seizing any weapon that comes to hand, will run at you might and main,
+before you know where you are, intending to do heaven knows what; and if
+you don't prepare an answer, and put yourself in motion, you will be 'pared
+by their fine wits,' and no mistake.
+
+You got me into the scrape, I said.
+
+And I was quite right; however, I will do all I can to get you out of it;
+but I can only give you good-will and good advice, and, perhaps, I may be
+able to fit answers to your questions better than another--that is all. 
+And now, having such an auxiliary, you must do your best to show the
+unbelievers that you are right.
+
+I ought to try, I said, since you offer me such invaluable assistance.  And
+I think that, if there is to be a chance of our escaping, we must explain
+to them whom we mean when we say that philosophers are to rule in the
+State; then we shall be able to defend ourselves:  There will be discovered
+to be some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the
+State; and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be
+followers rather than leaders.
+
+Then now for a definition, he said.
+
+Follow me, I said, and I hope that I may in some way or other be able to
+give you a satisfactory explanation.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I dare say that you remember, and therefore I need not remind you, that a
+lover, if he is worthy of the name, ought to show his love, not to some one
+part of that which he loves, but to the whole.
+
+I really do not understand, and therefore beg of you to assist my memory.
+
+Another person, I said, might fairly reply as you do; but a man of pleasure
+like yourself ought to know that all who are in the flower of youth do
+somehow or other raise a pang or emotion in a lover's breast, and are
+thought by him to be worthy of his affectionate regards.  Is not this a way
+which you have with the fair:  one has a snub nose, and you praise his
+charming face; the hook-nose of another has, you say, a royal look; while
+he who is neither snub nor hooked has the grace of regularity:  the dark
+visage is manly, the fair are children of the gods; and as to the sweet
+'honey pale,' as they are called, what is the very name but the invention
+of a lover who talks in diminutives, and is not averse to paleness if
+appearing on the cheek of youth?  In a word, there is no excuse which you
+will not make, and nothing which you will not say, in order not to lose a
+single flower that blooms in the spring-time of youth.
+
+If you make me an authority in matters of love, for the sake of the
+argument, I assent.
+
+And what do you say of lovers of wine?  Do you not see them doing the same? 
+They are glad of any pretext of drinking any wine.
+
+Very good.
+
+And the same is true of ambitious men; if they cannot command an army, they
+are willing to command a file; and if they cannot be honoured by really
+great and important persons, they are glad to be honoured by lesser and
+meaner people,--but honour of some kind they must have.
+
+Exactly.
+
+Once more let me ask:  Does he who desires any class of goods, desire the
+whole class or a part only?
+
+The whole.
+
+And may we not say of the philosopher that he is a lover, not of a part of
+wisdom only, but of the whole?
+
+Yes, of the whole.
+
+And he who dislikes learning, especially in youth, when he has no power of
+judging what is good and what is not, such an one we maintain not to be a
+philosopher or a lover of knowledge, just as he who refuses his food is not
+hungry, and may be said to have a bad appetite and not a good one?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Whereas he who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and who is curious
+to learn and is never satisfied, may be justly termed a philosopher?  Am I
+not right?
+
+Glaucon said:  If curiosity makes a philosopher, you will find many a
+strange being will have a title to the name.  All the lovers of sights have
+a delight in learning, and must therefore be included.  Musical amateurs,
+too, are a folk strangely out of place among philosophers, for they are the
+last persons in the world who would come to anything like a philosophical
+discussion, if they could help, while they run about at the Dionysiac
+festivals as if they had let out their ears to hear every chorus; whether
+the performance is in town or country--that makes no difference--they are
+there.  Now are we to maintain that all these and any who have similar
+tastes, as well as the professors of quite minor arts, are philosophers?
+
+Certainly not, I replied; they are only an imitation.
+
+He said:  Who then are the true philosophers?
+
+Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth.
+
+That is also good, he said; but I should like to know what you mean?
+
+To another, I replied, I might have a difficulty in explaining; but I am
+sure that you will admit a proposition which I am about to make.
+
+What is the proposition?
+
+That since beauty is the opposite of ugliness, they are two?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And inasmuch as they are two, each of them is one?
+
+True again.
+
+And of just and unjust, good and evil, and of every other class, the same
+remark holds:  taken singly, each of them is one; but from the various
+combinations of them with actions and things and with one another, they are
+seen in all sorts of lights and appear many?
+
+Very true.
+
+And this is the distinction which I draw between the sight-loving,
+art-loving, practical class and those of whom I am speaking, and who are
+alone worthy of the name of philosophers.
+
+How do you distinguish them? he said.
+
+The lovers of sounds and sights, I replied, are, as I conceive, fond of
+fine tones and colours and forms and all the artificial products that are
+made out of them, but their mind is incapable of seeing or loving absolute
+beauty.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+Few are they who are able to attain to the sight of this.
+
+Very true.
+
+And he who, having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute
+beauty, or who, if another lead him to a knowledge of that beauty is unable
+to follow--of such an one I ask, Is he awake or in a dream only?  Reflect: 
+is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things,
+who puts the copy in the place of the real object?
+
+I should certainly say that such an one was dreaming.
+
+But take the case of the other, who recognises the existence of absolute
+beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which
+participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the
+idea nor the idea in the place of the objects--is he a dreamer, or is he
+awake?
+
+He is wide awake.
+
+And may we not say that the mind of the one who knows has knowledge, and
+that the mind of the other, who opines only, has opinion?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But suppose that the latter should quarrel with us and dispute our
+statement, can we administer any soothing cordial or advice to him, without
+revealing to him that there is sad disorder in his wits?
+
+We must certainly offer him some good advice, he replied.
+
+Come, then, and let us think of something to say to him.  Shall we begin by
+assuring him that he is welcome to any knowledge which he may have, and
+that we are rejoiced at his having it?  But we should like to ask him a
+question:  Does he who has knowledge know something or nothing?  (You must
+answer for him.)
+
+I answer that he knows something.
+
+Something that is or is not?
+
+Something that is; for how can that which is not ever be known?
+
+And are we assured, after looking at the matter from many points of view,
+that absolute being is or may be absolutely known, but that the utterly
+non-existent is utterly unknown?
+
+Nothing can be more certain.
+
+Good.  But if there be anything which is of such a nature as to be and not
+to be, that will have a place intermediate between pure being and the
+absolute negation of being?
+
+Yes, between them.
+
+And, as knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to
+not-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has to
+be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and knowledge,
+if there be such?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Do we admit the existence of opinion?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+As being the same with knowledge, or another faculty?
+
+Another faculty.
+
+Then opinion and knowledge have to do with different kinds of matter
+corresponding to this difference of faculties?
+
+Yes.
+
+And knowledge is relative to being and knows being.  But before I proceed
+further I will make a division.
+
+What division?
+
+I will begin by placing faculties in a class by themselves:  they are
+powers in us, and in all other things, by which we do as we do.  Sight and
+hearing, for example, I should call faculties.  Have I clearly explained
+the class which I mean?
+
+Yes, I quite understand.
+
+Then let me tell you my view about them.  I do not see them, and therefore
+the distinctions of figure, colour, and the like, which enable me to
+discern the differences of some things, do not apply to them.  In speaking
+of a faculty I think only of its sphere and its result; and that which has
+the same sphere and the same result I call the same faculty, but that which
+has another sphere and another result I call different.  Would that be your
+way of speaking?
+
+Yes.
+
+And will you be so very good as to answer one more question?  Would you say
+that knowledge is a faculty, or in what class would you place it?
+
+Certainly knowledge is a faculty, and the mightiest of all faculties.
+
+And is opinion also a faculty?
+
+Certainly, he said; for opinion is that with which we are able to form an
+opinion.
+
+And yet you were acknowledging a little while ago that knowledge is not the
+same as opinion?
+
+Why, yes, he said:  how can any reasonable being ever identify that which
+is infallible with that which errs?
+
+An excellent answer, proving, I said, that we are quite conscious of a
+distinction between them.
+
+Yes.
+
+Then knowledge and opinion having distinct powers have also distinct
+spheres or subject-matters?
+
+That is certain.
+
+Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge, and knowledge is to
+know the nature of being?
+
+Yes.
+
+And opinion is to have an opinion?
+
+Yes.
+
+And do we know what we opine? or is the subject-matter of opinion the same
+as the subject-matter of knowledge?
+
+Nay, he replied, that has been already disproven; if difference in faculty
+implies difference in the sphere or subject-matter, and if, as we were
+saying, opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties, then the sphere of
+knowledge and of opinion cannot be the same.
+
+Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must be
+the subject-matter of opinion?
+
+Yes, something else.
+
+Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how can
+there be an opinion at all about not-being?  Reflect:  when a man has an
+opinion, has he not an opinion about something?  Can he have an opinion
+which is an opinion about nothing?
+
+Impossible.
+
+He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one thing?
+
+Yes.
+
+And not-being is not one thing but, properly speaking, nothing?
+
+True.
+
+Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative; of
+being, knowledge?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being?
+
+Not with either.
+
+And can therefore neither be ignorance nor knowledge?
+
+That seems to be true.
+
+But is opinion to be sought without and beyond either of them, in a greater
+clearness than knowledge, or in a greater darkness than ignorance?
+
+In neither.
+
+Then I suppose that opinion appears to you to be darker than knowledge, but
+lighter than ignorance?
+
+Both; and in no small degree.
+
+And also to be within and between them?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then you would infer that opinion is intermediate?
+
+No question.
+
+But were we not saying before, that if anything appeared to be of a sort
+which is and is not at the same time, that sort of thing would appear also
+to lie in the interval between pure being and absolute not-being; and that
+the corresponding faculty is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but will be
+found in the interval between them?
+
+True.
+
+And in that interval there has now been discovered something which we call
+opinion?
+
+There has.
+
+Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally of
+the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed either,
+pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we may truly call the
+subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper faculty,--the extremes
+to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to the faculty of the mean.
+
+True.
+
+This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that there
+is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty--in whose opinion the
+beautiful is the manifold--he, I say, your lover of beautiful sights, who
+cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the just is one, or
+that anything is one--to him I would appeal, saying, Will you be so very
+kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these beautiful things, there is
+one which will not be found ugly; or of the just, which will not be found
+unjust; or of the holy, which will not also be unholy?
+
+No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly; and
+the same is true of the rest.
+
+And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?--doubles, that is,
+of one thing, and halves of another?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will not
+be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?
+
+True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of them.
+
+And can any one of those many things which are called by particular names
+be said to be this rather than not to be this?
+
+He replied:  They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or
+the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit
+him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting.  The
+individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have a
+double sense:  nor can you fix them in your mind, either as being or
+not-being, or both, or neither.
+
+Then what will you do with them? I said.  Can they have a better place than
+between being and not-being?  For they are clearly not in greater darkness
+or negation than not-being, or more full of light and existence than being.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the
+multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are
+tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and pure
+not-being?
+
+We have.
+
+Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we might
+find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter of
+knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained by the
+intermediate faculty.
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see absolute
+beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither; who see the
+many just, and not absolute justice, and the like,--such persons may be
+said to have opinion but not knowledge?
+
+That is certain.
+
+But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to
+know, and not to have opinion only?
+
+Neither can that be denied.
+
+The one love and embrace the subjects of knowledge, the other those of
+opinion?  The latter are the same, as I dare say you will remember, who
+listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colours, but would not
+tolerate the existence of absolute beauty.
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of
+opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with us
+for thus describing them?
+
+I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is true.
+
+But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of
+wisdom and not lovers of opinion.
+
+Assuredly.
+
+
+BOOK VI.
+
+And thus, Glaucon, after the argument has gone a weary way, the true and
+the false philosophers have at length appeared in view.
+
+I do not think, he said, that the way could have been shortened.
+
+I suppose not, I said; and yet I believe that we might have had a better
+view of both of them if the discussion could have been confined to this one
+subject and if there were not many other questions awaiting us, which he
+who desires to see in what respect the life of the just differs from that
+of the unjust must consider.
+
+And what is the next question? he asked.
+
+Surely, I said, the one which follows next in order.  Inasmuch as
+philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those
+who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I
+must ask you which of the two classes should be the rulers of our State?
+
+And how can we rightly answer that question?
+
+Whichever of the two are best able to guard the laws and institutions of
+our State--let them be our guardians.
+
+Very good.
+
+Neither, I said, can there be any question that the guardian who is to keep
+anything should have eyes rather than no eyes?
+
+There can be no question of that.
+
+And are not those who are verily and indeed wanting in the knowledge of the
+true being of each thing, and who have in their souls no clear pattern, and
+are unable as with a painter's eye to look at the absolute truth and to
+that original to repair, and having perfect vision of the other world to
+order the laws about beauty, goodness, justice in this, if not already
+ordered, and to guard and preserve the order of them--are not such persons,
+I ask, simply blind?
+
+Truly, he replied, they are much in that condition.
+
+And shall they be our guardians when there are others who, besides being
+their equals in experience and falling short of them in no particular of
+virtue, also know the very truth of each thing?
+
+There can be no reason, he said, for rejecting those who have this greatest
+of all great qualities; they must always have the first place unless they
+fail in some other respect.
+
+Suppose then, I said, that we determine how far they can unite this and the
+other excellences.
+
+By all means.
+
+In the first place, as we began by observing, the nature of the philosopher
+has to be ascertained.  We must come to an understanding about him, and,
+when we have done so, then, if I am not mistaken, we shall also acknowledge
+that such an union of qualities is possible, and that those in whom they
+are united, and those only, should be rulers in the State.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+Let us suppose that philosophical minds always love knowledge of a sort
+which shows them the eternal nature not varying from generation and
+corruption.
+
+Agreed.
+
+And further, I said, let us agree that they are lovers of all true being;
+there is no part whether greater or less, or more or less honourable, which
+they are willing to renounce; as we said before of the lover and the man of
+ambition.
+
+True.
+
+And if they are to be what we were describing, is there not another quality
+which they should also possess?
+
+What quality?
+
+Truthfulness:  they will never intentionally receive into their mind
+falsehood, which is their detestation, and they will love the truth.
+
+Yes, that may be safely affirmed of them.
+
+'May be,' my friend, I replied, is not the word; say rather 'must be
+affirmed:' for he whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving
+all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.
+
+Right, he said.
+
+And is there anything more akin to wisdom than truth?
+
+How can there be?
+
+Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood?
+
+Never.
+
+The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in
+him lies, desire all truth?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+But then again, as we know by experience, he whose desires are strong in
+one direction will have them weaker in others; they will be like a stream
+which has been drawn off into another channel.
+
+True.
+
+He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be absorbed
+in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasure--I mean,
+if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one.
+
+That is most certain.
+
+Such an one is sure to be temperate and the reverse of covetous; for the
+motives which make another man desirous of having and spending, have no
+place in his character.
+
+Very true.
+
+Another criterion of the philosophical nature has also to be considered.
+
+What is that?
+
+There should be no secret corner of illiberality; nothing can be more
+antagonistic than meanness to a soul which is ever longing after the whole
+of things both divine and human.
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+Then how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all
+time and all existence, think much of human life?
+
+He cannot.
+
+Or can such an one account death fearful?
+
+No indeed.
+
+Then the cowardly and mean nature has no part in true philosophy?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or again:  can he who is harmoniously constituted, who is not covetous or
+mean, or a boaster, or a coward--can he, I say, ever be unjust or hard in
+his dealings?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then you will soon observe whether a man is just and gentle, or rude and
+unsociable; these are the signs which distinguish even in youth the
+philosophical nature from the unphilosophical.
+
+True.
+
+There is another point which should be remarked.
+
+What point?
+
+Whether he has or has not a pleasure in learning; for no one will love that
+which gives him pain, and in which after much toil he makes little
+progress.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And again, if he is forgetful and retains nothing of what he learns, will
+he not be an empty vessel?
+
+That is certain.
+
+Labouring in vain, he must end in hating himself and his fruitless
+occupation?  Yes.
+
+Then a soul which forgets cannot be ranked among genuine philosophic
+natures; we must insist that the philosopher should have a good memory?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And once more, the inharmonious and unseemly nature can only tend to
+disproportion?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And do you consider truth to be akin to proportion or to disproportion?
+
+To proportion.
+
+Then, besides other qualities, we must try to find a naturally
+well-proportioned and gracious mind, which will move spontaneously towards
+the true being of everything.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating, go
+together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which is to
+have a full and perfect participation of being?
+
+They are absolutely necessary, he replied.
+
+And must not that be a blameless study which he only can pursue who has the
+gift of a good memory, and is quick to learn,--noble, gracious, the friend
+of truth, justice, courage, temperance, who are his kindred?
+
+The god of jealousy himself, he said, could find no fault with such a
+study.
+
+And to men like him, I said, when perfected by years and education, and to
+these only you will entrust the State.
+
+Here Adeimantus interposed and said:  To these statements, Socrates, no one
+can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling passes
+over the minds of your hearers:  They fancy that they are led astray a
+little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of skill in
+asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and at the end of
+the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty overthrow and all
+their former notions appear to be turned upside down.  And as unskilful
+players of draughts are at last shut up by their more skilful adversaries
+and have no piece to move, so they too find themselves shut up at last; for
+they have nothing to say in this new game of which words are the counters;
+and yet all the time they are in the right.  The observation is suggested
+to me by what is now occurring.  For any one of us might say, that although
+in words he is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees
+as a fact that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study,
+not only in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their
+maturer years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter
+rogues, and that those who may be considered the best of them are made
+useless to the world by the very study which you extol.
+
+Well, and do you think that those who say so are wrong?
+
+I cannot tell, he replied; but I should like to know what is your opinion.
+
+Hear my answer; I am of opinion that they are quite right.
+
+Then how can you be justified in saying that cities will not cease from
+evil until philosophers rule in them, when philosophers are acknowledged by
+us to be of no use to them?
+
+You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a
+parable.
+
+Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all
+accustomed, I suppose.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you are vastly amused at having plunged me into
+such a hopeless discussion; but now hear the parable, and then you will be
+still more amused at the meagreness of my imagination:  for the manner in
+which the best men are treated in their own States is so grievous that no
+single thing on earth is comparable to it; and therefore, if I am to plead
+their cause, I must have recourse to fiction, and put together a figure
+made up of many things, like the fabulous unions of goats and stags which
+are found in pictures.  Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a
+captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little
+deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation
+is not much better.  The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the
+steering--every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he
+has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or
+when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they
+are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary.  They throng
+about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and
+if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they
+kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the
+noble captain's senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and
+take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and
+drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such manner as might be expected
+of them.  Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot
+for getting the ship out of the captain's hands into their own whether by
+force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able
+seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing;
+but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky
+and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to
+be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be
+the steerer, whether other people like or not--the possibility of this
+union of authority with the steerer's art has never seriously entered into
+their thoughts or been made part of their calling.  Now in vessels which
+are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the
+true pilot be regarded?  Will he not be called by them a prater, a
+star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?
+
+Of course, said Adeimantus.
+
+Then you will hardly need, I said, to hear the interpretation of the
+figure, which describes the true philosopher in his relation to the State;
+for you understand already.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then suppose you now take this parable to the gentleman who is surprised at
+finding that philosophers have no honour in their cities; explain it to him
+and try to convince him that their having honour would be far more
+extraordinary.
+
+I will.
+
+Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless
+to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their
+uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to
+themselves.  The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by
+him--that is not the order of nature; neither are 'the wise to go to the
+doors of the rich'--the ingenious author of this saying told a lie--but the
+truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the
+physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able
+to govern.  The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his
+subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors of mankind are
+of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors,
+and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them good-for-nothings and
+star-gazers.
+
+Precisely so, he said.
+
+For these reasons, and among men like these, philosophy, the noblest
+pursuit of all, is not likely to be much esteemed by those of the opposite
+faction; not that the greatest and most lasting injury is done to her by
+her opponents, but by her own professing followers, the same of whom you
+suppose the accuser to say, that the greater number of them are arrant
+rogues, and the best are useless; in which opinion I agreed.
+
+Yes.
+
+And the reason why the good are useless has now been explained?
+
+True.
+
+Then shall we proceed to show that the corruption of the majority is also
+unavoidable, and that this is not to be laid to the charge of philosophy
+any more than the other?
+
+By all means.
+
+And let us ask and answer in turn, first going back to the description of
+the gentle and noble nature.  Truth, as you will remember, was his leader,
+whom he followed always and in all things; failing in this, he was an
+impostor, and had no part or lot in true philosophy.
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Well, and is not this one quality, to mention no others, greatly at
+variance with present notions of him?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And have we not a right to say in his defence, that the true lover of
+knowledge is always striving after being--that is his nature; he will not
+rest in the multiplicity of individuals which is an appearance only, but
+will go on--the keen edge will not be blunted, nor the force of his desire
+abate until he have attained the knowledge of the true nature of every
+essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul, and by that power
+drawing near and mingling and becoming incorporate with very being, having
+begotten mind and truth, he will have knowledge and will live and grow
+truly, and then, and not till then, will he cease from his travail.
+
+Nothing, he said, can be more just than such a description of him.
+
+And will the love of a lie be any part of a philosopher's nature?  Will he
+not utterly hate a lie?
+
+He will.
+
+And when truth is the captain, we cannot suspect any evil of the band which
+he leads?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Justice and health of mind will be of the company, and temperance will
+follow after?
+
+True, he replied.
+
+Neither is there any reason why I should again set in array the
+philosopher's virtues, as you will doubtless remember that courage,
+magnificence, apprehension, memory, were his natural gifts.  And you
+objected that, although no one could deny what I then said, still, if you
+leave words and look at facts, the persons who are thus described are some
+of them manifestly useless, and the greater number utterly depraved; we
+were then led to enquire into the grounds of these accusations, and have
+now arrived at the point of asking why are the majority bad, which question
+of necessity brought us back to the examination and definition of the true
+philosopher.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And we have next to consider the corruptions of the philosophic nature, why
+so many are spoiled and so few escape spoiling--I am speaking of those who
+were said to be useless but not wicked--and, when we have done with them,
+we will speak of the imitators of philosophy, what manner of men are they
+who aspire after a profession which is above them and of which they are
+unworthy, and then, by their manifold inconsistencies, bring upon
+philosophy, and upon all philosophers, that universal reprobation of which
+we speak.
+
+What are these corruptions? he said.
+
+I will see if I can explain them to you.  Every one will admit that a
+nature having in perfection all the qualities which we required in a
+philosopher, is a rare plant which is seldom seen among men.
+
+Rare indeed.
+
+And what numberless and powerful causes tend to destroy these rare natures!
+
+What causes?
+
+In the first place there are their own virtues, their courage, temperance,
+and the rest of them, every one of which praiseworthy qualities (and this
+is a most singular circumstance) destroys and distracts from philosophy the
+soul which is the possessor of them.
+
+That is very singular, he replied.
+
+Then there are all the ordinary goods of life--beauty, wealth, strength,
+rank, and great connections in the State--you understand the sort of
+things--these also have a corrupting and distracting effect.
+
+I understand; but I should like to know more precisely what you mean about
+them.
+
+Grasp the truth as a whole, I said, and in the right way; you will then
+have no difficulty in apprehending the preceding remarks, and they will no
+longer appear strange to you.
+
+And how am I to do so? he asked.
+
+Why, I said, we know that all germs or seeds, whether vegetable or animal,
+when they fail to meet with proper nutriment or climate or soil, in
+proportion to their vigour, are all the more sensitive to the want of a
+suitable environment, for evil is a greater enemy to what is good than to
+what is not.
+
+Very true.
+
+There is reason in supposing that the finest natures, when under alien
+conditions, receive more injury than the inferior, because the contrast is
+greater.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they are
+ill-educated, become pre-eminently bad?  Do not great crimes and the spirit
+of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by education rather
+than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are scarcely capable of any
+very great good or very great evil?
+
+There I think that you are right.
+
+And our philosopher follows the same analogy--he is like a plant which,
+having proper nurture, must necessarily grow and mature into all virtue,
+but, if sown and planted in an alien soil, becomes the most noxious of all
+weeds, unless he be preserved by some divine power.  Do you really think,
+as people so often say, that our youth are corrupted by Sophists, or that
+private teachers of the art corrupt them in any degree worth speaking of? 
+Are not the public who say these things the greatest of all Sophists?  And
+do they not educate to perfection young and old, men and women alike, and
+fashion them after their own hearts?
+
+When is this accomplished? he said.
+
+When they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in a
+court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular resort, and
+there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which are being said
+or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both, shouting and
+clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the place in which they
+are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise or blame--at such a time
+will not a young man's heart, as they say, leap within him?  Will any
+private training enable him to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of
+popular opinion? or will he be carried away by the stream?  Will he not
+have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have--he will
+do as they do, and as they are, such will he be?
+
+Yes, Socrates; necessity will compel him.
+
+And yet, I said, there is a still greater necessity, which has not been
+mentioned.
+
+What is that?
+
+The gentle force of attainder or confiscation or death, which, as you are
+aware, these new Sophists and educators, who are the public, apply when
+their words are powerless.
+
+Indeed they do; and in right good earnest.
+
+Now what opinion of any other Sophist, or of any private person, can be
+expected to overcome in such an unequal contest?
+
+None, he replied.
+
+No, indeed, I said, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly;
+there neither is, nor has been, nor is ever likely to be, any different
+type of character which has had no other training in virtue but that which
+is supplied by public opinion--I speak, my friend, of human virtue only;
+what is more than human, as the proverb says, is not included:  for I would
+not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments,
+whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God, as we may
+truly say.
+
+I quite assent, he replied.
+
+Then let me crave your assent also to a further observation.
+
+What are you going to say?
+
+Why, that all those mercenary individuals, whom the many call Sophists and
+whom they deem to be their adversaries, do, in fact, teach nothing but the
+opinion of the many, that is to say, the opinions of their assemblies; and
+this is their wisdom.  I might compare them to a man who should study the
+tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him--he would
+learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what
+causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his
+several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed
+or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually
+attending upon him, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his
+knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to
+teach, although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or
+passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that
+dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with
+the tastes and tempers of the great brute.  Good he pronounces to be that
+in which the beast delights and evil to be that which he dislikes; and he
+can give no other account of them except that the just and noble are the
+necessary, having never himself seen, and having no power of explaining to
+others the nature of either, or the difference between them, which is
+immense.  By heaven, would not such an one be a rare educator?
+
+Indeed he would.
+
+And in what way does he who thinks that wisdom is the discernment of the
+tempers and tastes of the motley multitude, whether in painting or music,
+or, finally, in politics, differ from him whom I have been describing?  For
+when a man consorts with the many, and exhibits to them his poem or other
+work of art or the service which he has done the State, making them his
+judges when he is not obliged, the so-called necessity of Diomede will
+oblige him to produce whatever they praise.  And yet the reasons are
+utterly ludicrous which they give in confirmation of their own notions
+about the honourable and good.  Did you ever hear any of them which were
+not?
+
+No, nor am I likely to hear.
+
+You recognise the truth of what I have been saying?  Then let me ask you to
+consider further whether the world will ever be induced to believe in the
+existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many beautiful, or of the
+absolute in each kind rather than of the many in each kind?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of the
+world?
+
+They must.
+
+And of individuals who consort with the mob and seek to please them?
+
+That is evident.
+
+Then, do you see any way in which the philosopher can be preserved in his
+calling to the end? and remember what we were saying of him, that he was to
+have quickness and memory and courage and magnificence--these were admitted
+by us to be the true philosopher's gifts.
+
+Yes.
+
+Will not such an one from his early childhood be in all things first among
+all, especially if his bodily endowments are like his mental ones?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And his friends and fellow-citizens will want to use him as he gets older
+for their own purposes?
+
+No question.
+
+Falling at his feet, they will make requests to him and do him honour and
+flatter him, because they want to get into their hands now, the power which
+he will one day possess.
+
+That often happens, he said.
+
+And what will a man such as he is be likely to do under such circumstances,
+especially if he be a citizen of a great city, rich and noble, and a tall
+proper youth?  Will he not be full of boundless aspirations, and fancy
+himself able to manage the affairs of Hellenes and of barbarians, and
+having got such notions into his head will he not dilate and elevate
+himself in the fulness of vain pomp and senseless pride?
+
+To be sure he will.
+
+Now, when he is in this state of mind, if some one gently comes to him and
+tells him that he is a fool and must get understanding, which can only be
+got by slaving for it, do you think that, under such adverse circumstances,
+he will be easily induced to listen?
+
+Far otherwise.
+
+And even if there be some one who through inherent goodness or natural
+reasonableness has had his eyes opened a little and is humbled and taken
+captive by philosophy, how will his friends behave when they think that
+they are likely to lose the advantage which they were hoping to reap from
+his companionship?  Will they not do and say anything to prevent him from
+yielding to his better nature and to render his teacher powerless, using to
+this end private intrigues as well as public prosecutions?
+
+There can be no doubt of it.
+
+And how can one who is thus circumstanced ever become a philosopher?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then were we not right in saying that even the very qualities which make a
+man a philosopher may, if he be ill-educated, divert him from philosophy,
+no less than riches and their accompaniments and the other so-called goods
+of life?
+
+We were quite right.
+
+Thus, my excellent friend, is brought about all that ruin and failure which
+I have been describing of the natures best adapted to the best of all
+pursuits; they are natures which we maintain to be rare at any time; this
+being the class out of which come the men who are the authors of the
+greatest evil to States and individuals; and also of the greatest good when
+the tide carries them in that direction; but a small man never was the doer
+of any great thing either to individuals or to States.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And so philosophy is left desolate, with her marriage rite incomplete:  for
+her own have fallen away and forsaken her, and while they are leading a
+false and unbecoming life, other unworthy persons, seeing that she has no
+kinsmen to be her protectors, enter in and dishonour her; and fasten upon
+her the reproaches which, as you say, her reprovers utter, who affirm of
+her votaries that some are good for nothing, and that the greater number
+deserve the severest punishment.
+
+That is certainly what people say.
+
+Yes; and what else would you expect, I said, when you think of the puny
+creatures who, seeing this land open to them--a land well stocked with fair
+names and showy titles--like prisoners running out of prison into a
+sanctuary, take a leap out of their trades into philosophy; those who do so
+being probably the cleverest hands at their own miserable crafts?  For,
+although philosophy be in this evil case, still there remains a dignity
+about her which is not to be found in the arts.  And many are thus
+attracted by her whose natures are imperfect and whose souls are maimed and
+disfigured by their meannesses, as their bodies are by their trades and
+crafts.  Is not this unavoidable?
+
+Yes.
+
+Are they not exactly like a bald little tinker who has just got out of
+durance and come into a fortune; he takes a bath and puts on a new coat,
+and is decked out as a bridegroom going to marry his master's daughter, who
+is left poor and desolate?
+
+A most exact parallel.
+
+What will be the issue of such marriages?  Will they not be vile and
+bastard?
+
+There can be no question of it.
+
+And when persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and make
+an alliance with her who is in a rank above them what sort of ideas and
+opinions are likely to be generated?  Will they not be sophisms captivating
+to the ear, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or akin to true
+wisdom?
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a
+small remnant:  perchance some noble and well-educated person, detained by
+exile in her service, who in the absence of corrupting influences remains
+devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the politics of
+which he contemns and neglects; and there may be a gifted few who leave the
+arts, which they justly despise, and come to her;--or peradventure there
+are some who are restrained by our friend Theages' bridle; for everything
+in the life of Theages conspired to divert him from philosophy; but
+ill-health kept him away from politics.  My own case of the internal sign
+is hardly worth mentioning, for rarely, if ever, has such a monitor been
+given to any other man.  Those who belong to this small class have tasted
+how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough
+of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is
+honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight
+and be saved.  Such an one may be compared to a man who has fallen among
+wild beasts--he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither
+is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore seeing
+that he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and reflecting
+that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to
+himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way.  He is like
+one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries
+along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind
+full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be
+pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good-will, with
+bright hopes.
+
+Yes, he said, and he will have done a great work before he departs.
+
+A great work--yes; but not the greatest, unless he find a State suitable to
+him; for in a State which is suitable to him, he will have a larger growth
+and be the saviour of his country, as well as of himself.
+
+The causes why philosophy is in such an evil name have now been
+sufficiently explained:  the injustice of the charges against her has been
+shown--is there anything more which you wish to say?
+
+Nothing more on that subject, he replied; but I should like to know which
+of the governments now existing is in your opinion the one adapted to her.
+
+Not any of them, I said; and that is precisely the accusation which I bring
+against them--not one of them is worthy of the philosophic nature, and
+hence that nature is warped and estranged;--as the exotic seed which is
+sown in a foreign land becomes denaturalized, and is wont to be overpowered
+and to lose itself in the new soil, even so this growth of philosophy,
+instead of persisting, degenerates and receives another character.  But if
+philosophy ever finds in the State that perfection which she herself is,
+then will be seen that she is in truth divine, and that all other things,
+whether natures of men or institutions, are but human;--and now, I know,
+that you are going to ask, What that State is:
+
+No, he said; there you are wrong, for I was going to ask another question--
+whether it is the State of which we are the founders and inventors, or some
+other?
+
+Yes, I replied, ours in most respects; but you may remember my saying
+before, that some living authority would always be required in the State
+having the same idea of the constitution which guided you when as
+legislator you were laying down the laws.
+
+That was said, he replied.
+
+Yes, but not in a satisfactory manner; you frightened us by interposing
+objections, which certainly showed that the discussion would be long and
+difficult; and what still remains is the reverse of easy.
+
+What is there remaining?
+
+The question how the study of philosophy may be so ordered as not to be the
+ruin of the State:  All great attempts are attended with risk; 'hard is the
+good,' as men say.
+
+Still, he said, let the point be cleared up, and the enquiry will then be
+complete.
+
+I shall not be hindered, I said, by any want of will, but, if at all, by a
+want of power:  my zeal you may see for yourselves; and please to remark in
+what I am about to say how boldly and unhesitatingly I declare that States
+should pursue philosophy, not as they do now, but in a different spirit.
+
+In what manner?
+
+At present, I said, the students of philosophy are quite young; beginning
+when they are hardly past childhood, they devote only the time saved from
+moneymaking and housekeeping to such pursuits; and even those of them who
+are reputed to have most of the philosophic spirit, when they come within
+sight of the great difficulty of the subject, I mean dialectic, take
+themselves off.  In after life when invited by some one else, they may,
+perhaps, go and hear a lecture, and about this they make much ado, for
+philosophy is not considered by them to be their proper business:  at last,
+when they grow old, in most cases they are extinguished more truly than
+Heracleitus' sun, inasmuch as they never light up again.  (Heraclitus said
+that the sun was extinguished every evening and relighted every morning.)
+
+But what ought to be their course?
+
+Just the opposite.  In childhood and youth their study, and what philosophy
+they learn, should be suited to their tender years:  during this period
+while they are growing up towards manhood, the chief and special care
+should be given to their bodies that they may have them to use in the
+service of philosophy; as life advances and the intellect begins to mature,
+let them increase the gymnastics of the soul; but when the strength of our
+citizens fails and is past civil and military duties, then let them range
+at will and engage in no serious labour, as we intend them to live happily
+here, and to crown this life with a similar happiness in another.
+
+How truly in earnest you are, Socrates! he said; I am sure of that; and yet
+most of your hearers, if I am not mistaken, are likely to be still more
+earnest in their opposition to you, and will never be convinced;
+Thrasymachus least of all.
+
+Do not make a quarrel, I said, between Thrasymachus and me, who have
+recently become friends, although, indeed, we were never enemies; for I
+shall go on striving to the utmost until I either convert him and other
+men, or do something which may profit them against the day when they live
+again, and hold the like discourse in another state of existence.
+
+You are speaking of a time which is not very near.
+
+Rather, I replied, of a time which is as nothing in comparison with
+eternity.  Nevertheless, I do not wonder that the many refuse to believe;
+for they have never seen that of which we are now speaking realized; they
+have seen only a conventional imitation of philosophy, consisting of words
+artificially brought together, not like these of ours having a natural
+unity.  But a human being who in word and work is perfectly moulded, as far
+as he can be, into the proportion and likeness of virtue--such a man ruling
+in a city which bears the same image, they have never yet seen, neither one
+nor many of them--do you think that they ever did?
+
+No indeed.
+
+No, my friend, and they have seldom, if ever, heard free and noble
+sentiments; such as men utter when they are earnestly and by every means in
+their power seeking after truth for the sake of knowledge, while they look
+coldly on the subtleties of controversy, of which the end is opinion and
+strife, whether they meet with them in the courts of law or in society.
+
+They are strangers, he said, to the words of which you speak.
+
+And this was what we foresaw, and this was the reason why truth forced us
+to admit, not without fear and hesitation, that neither cities nor States
+nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small class of
+philosophers whom we termed useless but not corrupt are providentially
+compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the State, and until a
+like necessity be laid on the State to obey them; or until kings, or if not
+kings, the sons of kings or princes, are divinely inspired with a true love
+of true philosophy.  That either or both of these alternatives are
+impossible, I see no reason to affirm:  if they were so, we might indeed be
+justly ridiculed as dreamers and visionaries.  Am I not right?
+
+Quite right.
+
+If then, in the countless ages of the past, or at the present hour in some
+foreign clime which is far away and beyond our ken, the perfected
+philosopher is or has been or hereafter shall be compelled by a superior
+power to have the charge of the State, we are ready to assert to the death,
+that this our constitution has been, and is--yea, and will be whenever the
+Muse of Philosophy is queen.  There is no impossibility in all this; that
+there is a difficulty, we acknowledge ourselves.
+
+My opinion agrees with yours, he said.
+
+But do you mean to say that this is not the opinion of the multitude?
+
+I should imagine not, he replied.
+
+O my friend, I said, do not attack the multitude:  they will change their
+minds, if, not in an aggressive spirit, but gently and with the view of
+soothing them and removing their dislike of over-education, you show them
+your philosophers as they really are and describe as you were just now
+doing their character and profession, and then mankind will see that he of
+whom you are speaking is not such as they supposed--if they view him in
+this new light, they will surely change their notion of him, and answer in
+another strain.  Who can be at enmity with one who loves them, who that is
+himself gentle and free from envy will be jealous of one in whom there is
+no jealousy?  Nay, let me answer for you, that in a few this harsh temper
+may be found but not in the majority of mankind.
+
+I quite agree with you, he said.
+
+And do you not also think, as I do, that the harsh feeling which the many
+entertain towards philosophy originates in the pretenders, who rush in
+uninvited, and are always abusing them, and finding fault with them, who
+make persons instead of things the theme of their conversation? and nothing
+can be more unbecoming in philosophers than this.
+
+It is most unbecoming.
+
+For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no time
+to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and
+envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed towards things fixed
+and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another,
+but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to
+these he will, as far as he can, conform himself.  Can a man help imitating
+that with which he holds reverential converse?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the philosopher holding converse with the divine order, becomes orderly
+and divine, as far as the nature of man allows; but like every one else, he
+will suffer from detraction.
+
+Of course.
+
+And if a necessity be laid upon him of fashioning, not only himself, but
+human nature generally, whether in States or individuals, into that which
+he beholds elsewhere, will he, think you, be an unskilful artificer of
+justice, temperance, and every civil virtue?
+
+Anything but unskilful.
+
+And if the world perceives that what we are saying about him is the truth,
+will they be angry with philosophy?  Will they disbelieve us, when we tell
+them that no State can be happy which is not designed by artists who
+imitate the heavenly pattern?
+
+They will not be angry if they understand, he said.  But how will they draw
+out the plan of which you are speaking?
+
+They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which, as
+from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface. 
+This is no easy task.  But whether easy or not, herein will lie the
+difference between them and every other legislator,--they will have nothing
+to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until
+they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface.
+
+They will be very right, he said.
+
+Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the
+constitution?
+
+No doubt.
+
+And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often turn
+their eyes upwards and downwards:  I mean that they will first look at
+absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy;
+and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a
+man; and this they will conceive according to that other image, which, when
+existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness of God.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they
+have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of
+God?
+
+Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture.
+
+And now, I said, are we beginning to persuade those whom you described as
+rushing at us with might and main, that the painter of constitutions is
+such an one as we are praising; at whom they were so very indignant because
+to his hands we committed the State; and are they growing a little calmer
+at what they have just heard?
+
+Much calmer, if there is any sense in them.
+
+Why, where can they still find any ground for objection?  Will they doubt
+that the philosopher is a lover of truth and being?
+
+They would not be so unreasonable.
+
+Or that his nature, being such as we have delineated, is akin to the
+highest good?
+
+Neither can they doubt this.
+
+But again, will they tell us that such a nature, placed under favourable
+circumstances, will not be perfectly good and wise if any ever was?  Or
+will they prefer those whom we have rejected?
+
+Surely not.
+
+Then will they still be angry at our saying, that, until philosophers bear
+rule, States and individuals will have no rest from evil, nor will this our
+imaginary State ever be realized?
+
+I think that they will be less angry.
+
+Shall we assume that they are not only less angry but quite gentle, and
+that they have been converted and for very shame, if for no other reason,
+cannot refuse to come to terms?
+
+By all means, he said.
+
+Then let us suppose that the reconciliation has been effected.  Will any
+one deny the other point, that there may be sons of kings or princes who
+are by nature philosophers?
+
+Surely no man, he said.
+
+And when they have come into being will any one say that they must of
+necessity be destroyed; that they can hardly be saved is not denied even by
+us; but that in the whole course of ages no single one of them can escape--
+who will venture to affirm this?
+
+Who indeed!
+
+But, said I, one is enough; let there be one man who has a city obedient to
+his will, and he might bring into existence the ideal polity about which
+the world is so incredulous.
+
+Yes, one is enough.
+
+The ruler may impose the laws and institutions which we have been
+describing, and the citizens may possibly be willing to obey them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that others should approve, of what we approve, is no miracle or
+impossibility?
+
+I think not.
+
+But we have sufficiently shown, in what has preceded, that all this, if
+only possible, is assuredly for the best.
+
+We have.
+
+And now we say not only that our laws, if they could be enacted, would be
+for the best, but also that the enactment of them, though difficult, is not
+impossible.
+
+Very good.
+
+And so with pain and toil we have reached the end of one subject, but more
+remains to be discussed;--how and by what studies and pursuits will the
+saviours of the constitution be created, and at what ages are they to apply
+themselves to their several studies?
+
+Certainly.
+
+I omitted the troublesome business of the possession of women, and the
+procreation of children, and the appointment of the rulers, because I knew
+that the perfect State would be eyed with jealousy and was difficult of
+attainment; but that piece of cleverness was not of much service to me, for
+I had to discuss them all the same.  The women and children are now
+disposed of, but the other question of the rulers must be investigated from
+the very beginning.  We were saying, as you will remember, that they were
+to be lovers of their country, tried by the test of pleasures and pains,
+and neither in hardships, nor in dangers, nor at any other critical moment
+were to lose their patriotism--he was to be rejected who failed, but he who
+always came forth pure, like gold tried in the refiner's fire, was to be
+made a ruler, and to receive honours and rewards in life and after death. 
+This was the sort of thing which was being said, and then the argument
+turned aside and veiled her face; not liking to stir the question which has
+now arisen.
+
+I perfectly remember, he said.
+
+Yes, my friend, I said, and I then shrank from hazarding the bold word; but
+now let me dare to say--that the perfect guardian must be a philosopher.
+
+Yes, he said, let that be affirmed.
+
+And do not suppose that there will be many of them; for the gifts which
+were deemed by us to be essential rarely grow together; they are mostly
+found in shreds and patches.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+You are aware, I replied, that quick intelligence, memory, sagacity,
+cleverness, and similar qualities, do not often grow together, and that
+persons who possess them and are at the same time high-spirited and
+magnanimous are not so constituted by nature as to live orderly and in a
+peaceful and settled manner; they are driven any way by their impulses, and
+all solid principle goes out of them.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+On the other hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended
+upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are equally
+immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are always in a torpid
+state, and are apt to yawn and go to sleep over any intellectual toil.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And yet we were saying that both qualities were necessary in those to whom
+the higher education is to be imparted, and who are to share in any office
+or command.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And will they be a class which is rarely found?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+Then the aspirant must not only be tested in those labours and dangers and
+pleasures which we mentioned before, but there is another kind of probation
+which we did not mention--he must be exercised also in many kinds of
+knowledge, to see whether the soul will be able to endure the highest of
+all, or will faint under them, as in any other studies and exercises.
+
+Yes, he said, you are quite right in testing him.  But what do you mean by
+the highest of all knowledge?
+
+You may remember, I said, that we divided the soul into three parts; and
+distinguished the several natures of justice, temperance, courage, and
+wisdom?
+
+Indeed, he said, if I had forgotten, I should not deserve to hear more.
+
+And do you remember the word of caution which preceded the discussion of
+them?
+
+To what do you refer?
+
+We were saying, if I am not mistaken, that he who wanted to see them in
+their perfect beauty must take a longer and more circuitous way, at the end
+of which they would appear; but that we could add on a popular exposition
+of them on a level with the discussion which had preceded.  And you replied
+that such an exposition would be enough for you, and so the enquiry was
+continued in what to me seemed to be a very inaccurate manner; whether you
+were satisfied or not, it is for you to say.
+
+Yes, he said, I thought and the others thought that you gave us a fair
+measure of truth.
+
+But, my friend, I said, a measure of such things which in any degree falls
+short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing imperfect is the
+measure of anything, although persons are too apt to be contented and think
+that they need search no further.
+
+Not an uncommon case when people are indolent.
+
+Yes, I said; and there cannot be any worse fault in a guardian of the State
+and of the laws.
+
+True.
+
+The guardian then, I said, must be required to take the longer circuit, and
+toil at learning as well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach the
+highest knowledge of all which, as we were just now saying, is his proper
+calling.
+
+What, he said, is there a knowledge still higher than this--higher than
+justice and the other virtues?
+
+Yes, I said, there is.  And of the virtues too we must behold not the
+outline merely, as at present--nothing short of the most finished picture
+should satisfy us.  When little things are elaborated with an infinity of
+pains, in order that they may appear in their full beauty and utmost
+clearness, how ridiculous that we should not think the highest truths
+worthy of attaining the highest accuracy!
+
+A right noble thought; but do you suppose that we shall refrain from asking
+you what is this highest knowledge?
+
+Nay, I said, ask if you will; but I am certain that you have heard the
+answer many times, and now you either do not understand me or, as I rather
+think, you are disposed to be troublesome; for you have often been told
+that the idea of good is the highest knowledge, and that all other things
+become useful and advantageous only by their use of this.  You can hardly
+be ignorant that of this I was about to speak, concerning which, as you
+have often heard me say, we know so little; and, without which, any other
+knowledge or possession of any kind will profit us nothing.  Do you think
+that the possession of all other things is of any value if we do not
+possess the good? or the knowledge of all other things if we have no
+knowledge of beauty and goodness?
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+You are further aware that most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but
+the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you are aware too that the latter cannot explain what they mean by
+knowledge, but are obliged after all to say knowledge of the good?
+
+How ridiculous!
+
+Yes, I said, that they should begin by reproaching us with our ignorance of
+the good, and then presume our knowledge of it--for the good they define to
+be knowledge of the good, just as if we understood them when they use the
+term 'good'--this is of course ridiculous.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+And those who make pleasure their good are in equal perplexity; for they
+are compelled to admit that there are bad pleasures as well as good.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And therefore to acknowledge that bad and good are the same?
+
+True.
+
+There can be no doubt about the numerous difficulties in which this
+question is involved.
+
+There can be none.
+
+Further, do we not see that many are willing to do or to have or to seem to
+be what is just and honourable without the reality; but no one is satisfied
+with the appearance of good--the reality is what they seek; in the case of
+the good, appearance is despised by every one.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Of this then, which every soul of man pursues and makes the end of all his
+actions, having a presentiment that there is such an end, and yet
+hesitating because neither knowing the nature nor having the same assurance
+of this as of other things, and therefore losing whatever good there is in
+other things,--of a principle such and so great as this ought the best men
+in our State, to whom everything is entrusted, to be in the darkness of
+ignorance?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+I am sure, I said, that he who does not know how the beautiful and the just
+are likewise good will be but a sorry guardian of them; and I suspect that
+no one who is ignorant of the good will have a true knowledge of them.
+
+That, he said, is a shrewd suspicion of yours.
+
+And if we only have a guardian who has this knowledge our State will be
+perfectly ordered?
+
+Of course, he replied; but I wish that you would tell me whether you
+conceive this supreme principle of the good to be knowledge or pleasure, or
+different from either?
+
+Aye, I said, I knew all along that a fastidious gentleman like you would
+not be contented with the thoughts of other people about these matters.
+
+True, Socrates; but I must say that one who like you has passed a lifetime
+in the study of philosophy should not be always repeating the opinions of
+others, and never telling his own.
+
+Well, but has any one a right to say positively what he does not know?
+
+Not, he said, with the assurance of positive certainty; he has no right to
+do that:  but he may say what he thinks, as a matter of opinion.
+
+And do you not know, I said, that all mere opinions are bad, and the best
+of them blind?  You would not deny that those who have any true notion
+without intelligence are only like blind men who feel their way along the
+road?
+
+Very true.
+
+And do you wish to behold what is blind and crooked and base, when others
+will tell you of brightness and beauty?
+
+Still, I must implore you, Socrates, said Glaucon, not to turn away just as
+you are reaching the goal; if you will only give such an explanation of the
+good as you have already given of justice and temperance and the other
+virtues, we shall be satisfied.
+
+Yes, my friend, and I shall be at least equally satisfied, but I cannot
+help fearing that I shall fail, and that my indiscreet zeal will bring
+ridicule upon me.  No, sweet sirs, let us not at present ask what is the
+actual nature of the good, for to reach what is now in my thoughts would be
+an effort too great for me.  But of the child of the good who is likest
+him, I would fain speak, if I could be sure that you wished to hear--
+otherwise, not.
+
+By all means, he said, tell us about the child, and you shall remain in our
+debt for the account of the parent.
+
+I do indeed wish, I replied, that I could pay, and you receive, the account
+of the parent, and not, as now, of the offspring only; take, however, this
+latter by way of interest, and at the same time have a care that I do not
+render a false account, although I have no intention of deceiving you.
+
+Yes, we will take all the care that we can:  proceed.
+
+Yes, I said, but I must first come to an understanding with you, and remind
+you of what I have mentioned in the course of this discussion, and at many
+other times.
+
+What?
+
+The old story, that there is a many beautiful and a many good, and so of
+other things which we describe and define; to all of them the term 'many'
+is applied.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, and of other things
+to which the term 'many' is applied there is an absolute; for they may be
+brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of each.
+
+Very true.
+
+The many, as we say, are seen but not known, and the ideas are known but
+not seen.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And what is the organ with which we see the visible things?
+
+The sight, he said.
+
+And with the hearing, I said, we hear, and with the other senses perceive
+the other objects of sense?
+
+True.
+
+But have you remarked that sight is by far the most costly and complex
+piece of workmanship which the artificer of the senses ever contrived?
+
+No, I never have, he said.
+
+Then reflect; has the ear or voice need of any third or additional nature
+in order that the one may be able to hear and the other to be heard?
+
+Nothing of the sort.
+
+No, indeed, I replied; and the same is true of most, if not all, the other
+senses--you would not say that any of them requires such an addition?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+But you see that without the addition of some other nature there is no
+seeing or being seen?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+Sight being, as I conceive, in the eyes, and he who has eyes wanting to
+see; colour being also present in them, still unless there be a third
+nature specially adapted to the purpose, the owner of the eyes will see
+nothing and the colours will be invisible.
+
+Of what nature are you speaking?
+
+Of that which you term light, I replied.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight and visibility, and
+great beyond other bonds by no small difference of nature; for light is
+their bond, and light is no ignoble thing?
+
+Nay, he said, the reverse of ignoble.
+
+And which, I said, of the gods in heaven would you say was the lord of this
+element?  Whose is that light which makes the eye to see perfectly and the
+visible to appear?
+
+You mean the sun, as you and all mankind say.
+
+May not the relation of sight to this deity be described as follows?
+
+How?
+
+Neither sight nor the eye in which sight resides is the sun?
+
+No.
+
+Yet of all the organs of sense the eye is the most like the sun?
+
+By far the most like.
+
+And the power which the eye possesses is a sort of effluence which is
+dispensed from the sun?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Then the sun is not sight, but the author of sight who is recognised by
+sight?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And this is he whom I call the child of the good, whom the good begat in
+his own likeness, to be in the visible world, in relation to sight and the
+things of sight, what the good is in the intellectual world in relation to
+mind and the things of mind:
+
+Will you be a little more explicit? he said.
+
+Why, you know, I said, that the eyes, when a person directs them towards
+objects on which the light of day is no longer shining, but the moon and
+stars only, see dimly, and are nearly blind; they seem to have no clearness
+of vision in them?
+
+Very true.
+
+But when they are directed towards objects on which the sun shines, they
+see clearly and there is sight in them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the soul is like the eye:  when resting upon that on which truth and
+being shine, the soul perceives and understands, and is radiant with
+intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and
+perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first
+of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence?
+
+Just so.
+
+Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the
+knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this you will
+deem to be the cause of science, and of truth in so far as the latter
+becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both truth and
+knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature as more
+beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light and sight
+may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so in this
+other sphere, science and truth may be deemed to be like the good, but not
+the good; the good has a place of honour yet higher.
+
+What a wonder of beauty that must be, he said, which is the author of
+science and truth, and yet surpasses them in beauty; for you surely cannot
+mean to say that pleasure is the good?
+
+God forbid, I replied; but may I ask you to consider the image in another
+point of view?
+
+In what point of view?
+
+You would say, would you not, that the sun is not only the author of
+visibility in all visible things, but of generation and nourishment and
+growth, though he himself is not generation?
+
+Certainly.
+
+In like manner the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge
+to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is
+not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.
+
+Glaucon said, with a ludicrous earnestness:  By the light of heaven, how
+amazing!
+
+Yes, I said, and the exaggeration may be set down to you; for you made me
+utter my fancies.
+
+And pray continue to utter them; at any rate let us hear if there is
+anything more to be said about the similitude of the sun.
+
+Yes, I said, there is a great deal more.
+
+Then omit nothing, however slight.
+
+I will do my best, I said; but I should think that a great deal will have
+to be omitted.
+
+I hope not, he said.
+
+You have to imagine, then, that there are two ruling powers, and that one
+of them is set over the intellectual world, the other over the visible.  I
+do not say heaven, lest you should fancy that I am playing upon the name
+('ourhanoz, orhatoz').  May I suppose that you have this distinction of the
+visible and intelligible fixed in your mind?
+
+I have.
+
+Now take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide each
+of them again in the same proportion, and suppose the two main divisions to
+answer, one to the visible and the other to the intelligible, and then
+compare the subdivisions in respect of their clearness and want of
+clearness, and you will find that the first section in the sphere of the
+visible consists of images.  And by images I mean, in the first place,
+shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth
+and polished bodies and the like:  Do you understand?
+
+Yes, I understand.
+
+Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance, to
+include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is made.
+
+Very good.
+
+Would you not admit that both the sections of this division have different
+degrees of truth, and that the copy is to the original as the sphere of
+opinion is to the sphere of knowledge?
+
+Most undoubtedly.
+
+Next proceed to consider the manner in which the sphere of the intellectual
+is to be divided.
+
+In what manner?
+
+Thus:--There are two subdivisions, in the lower of which the soul uses the
+figures given by the former division as images; the enquiry can only be
+hypothetical, and instead of going upwards to a principle descends to the
+other end; in the higher of the two, the soul passes out of hypotheses, and
+goes up to a principle which is above hypotheses, making no use of images
+as in the former case, but proceeding only in and through the ideas
+themselves.
+
+I do not quite understand your meaning, he said.
+
+Then I will try again; you will understand me better when I have made some
+preliminary remarks.  You are aware that students of geometry, arithmetic,
+and the kindred sciences assume the odd and the even and the figures and
+three kinds of angles and the like in their several branches of science;
+these are their hypotheses, which they and every body are supposed to know,
+and therefore they do not deign to give any account of them either to
+themselves or others; but they begin with them, and go on until they arrive
+at last, and in a consistent manner, at their conclusion?
+
+Yes, he said, I know.
+
+And do you not know also that although they make use of the visible forms
+and reason about them, they are thinking not of these, but of the ideals
+which they resemble; not of the figures which they draw, but of the
+absolute square and the absolute diameter, and so on--the forms which they
+draw or make, and which have shadows and reflections in water of their own,
+are converted by them into images, but they are really seeking to behold
+the things themselves, which can only be seen with the eye of the mind?
+
+That is true.
+
+And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible, although in the search after
+it the soul is compelled to use hypotheses; not ascending to a first
+principle, because she is unable to rise above the region of hypothesis,
+but employing the objects of which the shadows below are resemblances in
+their turn as images, they having in relation to the shadows and
+reflections of them a greater distinctness, and therefore a higher value.
+
+I understand, he said, that you are speaking of the province of geometry
+and the sister arts.
+
+And when I speak of the other division of the intelligible, you will
+understand me to speak of that other sort of knowledge which reason herself
+attains by the power of dialectic, using the hypotheses not as first
+principles, but only as hypotheses--that is to say, as steps and points of
+departure into a world which is above hypotheses, in order that she may
+soar beyond them to the first principle of the whole; and clinging to this
+and then to that which depends on this, by successive steps she descends
+again without the aid of any sensible object, from ideas, through ideas,
+and in ideas she ends.
+
+I understand you, he replied; not perfectly, for you seem to me to be
+describing a task which is really tremendous; but, at any rate, I
+understand you to say that knowledge and being, which the science of
+dialectic contemplates, are clearer than the notions of the arts, as they
+are termed, which proceed from hypotheses only:  these are also
+contemplated by the understanding, and not by the senses:  yet, because
+they start from hypotheses and do not ascend to a principle, those who
+contemplate them appear to you not to exercise the higher reason upon them,
+although when a first principle is added to them they are cognizable by the
+higher reason.  And the habit which is concerned with geometry and the
+cognate sciences I suppose that you would term understanding and not
+reason, as being intermediate between opinion and reason.
+
+You have quite conceived my meaning, I said; and now, corresponding to
+these four divisions, let there be four faculties in the soul--reason
+answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith (or
+conviction) to the third, and perception of shadows to the last--and let
+there be a scale of them, and let us suppose that the several faculties
+have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth.
+
+I understand, he replied, and give my assent, and accept your arrangement.
+
+
+BOOK VII.
+
+And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened
+or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which
+has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here
+they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained
+so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by
+the chains from turning round their heads.  Above and behind them a fire is
+blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a
+raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way,
+like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which
+they show the puppets.
+
+I see.
+
+And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of
+vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and
+various materials, which appear over the wall?  Some of them are talking,
+others silent.
+
+You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
+
+Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the
+shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the
+cave?
+
+True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were
+never allowed to move their heads?
+
+And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only
+see the shadows?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose
+that they were naming what was actually before them?
+
+Very true.
+
+And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other
+side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that
+the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
+
+No question, he replied.
+
+To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of
+the images.
+
+That is certain.
+
+And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are
+released and disabused of their error.  At first, when any of them is
+liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and
+walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will
+distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his
+former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to
+him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is
+approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real
+existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply?  And you may
+further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass
+and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed?  Will he not
+fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects
+which are now shown to him?
+
+Far truer.
+
+And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a
+pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the
+objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in
+reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged
+ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun
+himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated?  When he approaches
+the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything
+at all of what are now called realities.
+
+Not all in a moment, he said.
+
+He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world.  And
+first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other
+objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze
+upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he
+will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of
+the sun by day?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him
+in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in
+another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
+
+Certainly.
+
+He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the
+years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a
+certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been
+accustomed to behold?
+
+Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
+
+And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and
+his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself
+on the change, and pity them?
+
+Certainly, he would.
+
+And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on
+those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which
+of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and
+who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you
+think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the
+possessors of them?  Would he not say with Homer,
+
+'Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,'
+
+and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their
+manner?
+
+Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain
+these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
+
+Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be
+replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes
+full of darkness?
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows
+with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was
+still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would
+be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable),
+would he not be ridiculous?  Men would say of him that up he went and down
+he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of
+ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the
+light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
+
+No question, he said.
+
+This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the
+previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the
+fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the
+journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world
+according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed--
+whether rightly or wrongly God knows.  But, whether true or false, my
+opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of
+all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to
+be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light
+and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of
+reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which
+he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his
+eye fixed.
+
+I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
+
+Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this
+beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls
+are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which
+desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.
+
+Yes, very natural.
+
+And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine
+contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a
+ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become
+accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts
+of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of
+justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of those who have
+never yet seen absolute justice?
+
+Anything but surprising, he replied.
+
+Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the
+eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of
+the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye,
+quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees
+any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh;
+he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter
+life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having
+turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.  And he will
+count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity
+the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from
+below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh
+which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.
+
+That, he said, is a very just distinction.
+
+But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when
+they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there
+before, like sight into blind eyes.
+
+They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
+
+Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists
+in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from
+darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of
+knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the
+world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the
+sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words,
+of the good.
+
+Very true.
+
+And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest
+and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists
+already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away
+from the truth?
+
+Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.
+
+And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to
+bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be
+implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than
+anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this
+conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand,
+hurtful and useless.  Did you never observe the narrow intelligence
+flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue--how eager he is, how clearly
+his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but
+his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is
+mischievous in proportion to his cleverness?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of
+their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such
+as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them
+at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls
+upon the things that are below--if, I say, they had been released from
+these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same
+faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their
+eyes are turned to now.
+
+Very likely.
+
+Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or rather a
+necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and
+uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their
+education, will be able ministers of State; not the former, because they
+have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private
+as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except
+upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the
+islands of the blest.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be
+to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already
+shown to be the greatest of all--they must continue to ascend until they
+arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not
+allow them to do as they do now.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean that they remain in the upper world:  but this must not be allowed;
+they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and
+partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not.
+
+But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when
+they might have a better?
+
+You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the
+legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy
+above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the
+citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of
+the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created
+them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the
+State.
+
+True, he said, I had forgotten.
+
+Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our
+philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to
+them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in
+the toils of politics:  and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their
+own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them.  Being
+self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture
+which they have never received.  But we have brought you into the world to
+be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and
+have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been
+educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty.  Wherefore
+each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground
+abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark.  When you have acquired the
+habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the
+den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they
+represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their
+truth.  And thus our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not
+a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other
+States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are
+distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. 
+Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant
+to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in
+which they are most eager, the worst.
+
+Quite true, he replied.
+
+And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the
+toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their
+time with one another in the heavenly light?
+
+Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we
+impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them
+will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our
+present rulers of State.
+
+Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point.  You must contrive for
+your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then
+you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this,
+will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue
+and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life.  Whereas if they go to
+the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own
+private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good,
+order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the
+civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers
+themselves and of the whole State.
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is
+that of true philosophy.  Do you know of any other?
+
+Indeed, I do not, he said.
+
+And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task?  For, if they are,
+there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.
+
+No question.
+
+Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians?  Surely they will
+be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is
+best administered, and who at the same time have other honours and another
+and a better life than that of politics?
+
+They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied.
+
+And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced, and
+how they are to be brought from darkness to light,--as some are said to
+have ascended from the world below to the gods?
+
+By all means, he replied.
+
+The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell (In
+allusion to a game in which two parties fled or pursued according as an
+oyster-shell which was thrown into the air fell with the dark or light side
+uppermost.), but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is
+little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from
+below, which we affirm to be true philosophy?
+
+Quite so.
+
+And should we not enquire what sort of knowledge has the power of effecting
+such a change?
+
+Certainly.
+
+What sort of knowledge is there which would draw the soul from becoming to
+being?  And another consideration has just occurred to me:  You will
+remember that our young men are to be warrior athletes?
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Then this new kind of knowledge must have an additional quality?
+
+What quality?
+
+Usefulness in war.
+
+Yes, if possible.
+
+There were two parts in our former scheme of education, were there not?
+
+Just so.
+
+There was gymnastic which presided over the growth and decay of the body,
+and may therefore be regarded as having to do with generation and
+corruption?
+
+True.
+
+Then that is not the knowledge which we are seeking to discover?
+
+No.
+
+But what do you say of music, which also entered to a certain extent into
+our former scheme?
+
+Music, he said, as you will remember, was the counterpart of gymnastic, and
+trained the guardians by the influences of habit, by harmony making them
+harmonious, by rhythm rhythmical, but not giving them science; and the
+words, whether fabulous or possibly true, had kindred elements of rhythm
+and harmony in them.  But in music there was nothing which tended to that
+good which you are now seeking.
+
+You are most accurate, I said, in your recollection; in music there
+certainly was nothing of the kind.  But what branch of knowledge is there,
+my dear Glaucon, which is of the desired nature; since all the useful arts
+were reckoned mean by us?
+
+Undoubtedly; and yet if music and gymnastic are excluded, and the arts are
+also excluded, what remains?
+
+Well, I said, there may be nothing left of our special subjects; and then
+we shall have to take something which is not special, but of universal
+application.
+
+What may that be?
+
+A something which all arts and sciences and intelligences use in common,
+and which every one first has to learn among the elements of education.
+
+What is that?
+
+The little matter of distinguishing one, two, and three--in a word, number
+and calculation:--do not all arts and sciences necessarily partake of them?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the art of war partakes of them?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then Palamedes, whenever he appears in tragedy, proves Agamemnon
+ridiculously unfit to be a general.  Did you never remark how he declares
+that he had invented number, and had numbered the ships and set in array
+the ranks of the army at Troy; which implies that they had never been
+numbered before, and Agamemnon must be supposed literally to have been
+incapable of counting his own feet--how could he if he was ignorant of
+number?  And if that is true, what sort of general must he have been?
+
+I should say a very strange one, if this was as you say.
+
+Can we deny that a warrior should have a knowledge of arithmetic?
+
+Certainly he should, if he is to have the smallest understanding of
+military tactics, or indeed, I should rather say, if he is to be a man at
+all.
+
+I should like to know whether you have the same notion which I have of this
+study?
+
+What is your notion?
+
+It appears to me to be a study of the kind which we are seeking, and which
+leads naturally to reflection, but never to have been rightly used; for the
+true use of it is simply to draw the soul towards being.
+
+Will you explain your meaning? he said.
+
+I will try, I said; and I wish you would share the enquiry with me, and say
+'yes' or 'no' when I attempt to distinguish in my own mind what branches of
+knowledge have this attracting power, in order that we may have clearer
+proof that arithmetic is, as I suspect, one of them.
+
+Explain, he said.
+
+I mean to say that objects of sense are of two kinds; some of them do not
+invite thought because the sense is an adequate judge of them; while in the
+case of other objects sense is so untrustworthy that further enquiry is
+imperatively demanded.
+
+You are clearly referring, he said, to the manner in which the senses are
+imposed upon by distance, and by painting in light and shade.
+
+No, I said, that is not at all my meaning.
+
+Then what is your meaning?
+
+When speaking of uninviting objects, I mean those which do not pass from
+one sensation to the opposite; inviting objects are those which do; in this
+latter case the sense coming upon the object, whether at a distance or
+near, gives no more vivid idea of anything in particular than of its
+opposite.  An illustration will make my meaning clearer:--here are three
+fingers--a little finger, a second finger, and a middle finger.
+
+Very good.
+
+You may suppose that they are seen quite close:  And here comes the point.
+
+What is it?
+
+Each of them equally appears a finger, whether seen in the middle or at the
+extremity, whether white or black, or thick or thin--it makes no
+difference; a finger is a finger all the same.  In these cases a man is not
+compelled to ask of thought the question what is a finger? for the sight
+never intimates to the mind that a finger is other than a finger.
+
+True.
+
+And therefore, I said, as we might expect, there is nothing here which
+invites or excites intelligence.
+
+There is not, he said.
+
+But is this equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers? 
+Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the
+circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at the
+extremity?  And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the
+qualities of thickness or thinness, of softness or hardness?  And so of the
+other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters?  Is not
+their mode of operation on this wise--the sense which is concerned with the
+quality of hardness is necessarily concerned also with the quality of
+softness, and only intimates to the soul that the same thing is felt to be
+both hard and soft?
+
+You are quite right, he said.
+
+And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense gives
+of a hard which is also soft?  What, again, is the meaning of light and
+heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which is heavy,
+light?
+
+Yes, he said, these intimations which the soul receives are very curious
+and require to be explained.
+
+Yes, I said, and in these perplexities the soul naturally summons to her
+aid calculation and intelligence, that she may see whether the several
+objects announced to her are one or two.
+
+True.
+
+And if they turn out to be two, is not each of them one and different?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if each is one, and both are two, she will conceive the two as in a
+state of division, for if there were undivided they could only be conceived
+of as one?
+
+True.
+
+The eye certainly did see both small and great, but only in a confused
+manner; they were not distinguished.
+
+Yes.
+
+Whereas the thinking mind, intending to light up the chaos, was compelled
+to reverse the process, and look at small and great as separate and not
+confused.
+
+Very true.
+
+Was not this the beginning of the enquiry 'What is great?' and 'What is
+small?'
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And thus arose the distinction of the visible and the intelligible.
+
+Most true.
+
+This was what I meant when I spoke of impressions which invited the
+intellect, or the reverse--those which are simultaneous with opposite
+impressions, invite thought; those which are not simultaneous do not.
+
+I understand, he said, and agree with you.
+
+And to which class do unity and number belong?
+
+I do not know, he replied.
+
+Think a little and you will see that what has preceded will supply the
+answer; for if simple unity could be adequately perceived by the sight or
+by any other sense, then, as we were saying in the case of the finger,
+there would be nothing to attract towards being; but when there is some
+contradiction always present, and one is the reverse of one and involves
+the conception of plurality, then thought begins to be aroused within us,
+and the soul perplexed and wanting to arrive at a decision asks 'What is
+absolute unity?'  This is the way in which the study of the one has a power
+of drawing and converting the mind to the contemplation of true being.
+
+And surely, he said, this occurs notably in the case of one; for we see the
+same thing to be both one and infinite in multitude?
+
+Yes, I said; and this being true of one must be equally true of all number?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And all arithmetic and calculation have to do with number?
+
+Yes.
+
+And they appear to lead the mind towards truth?
+
+Yes, in a very remarkable manner.
+
+Then this is knowledge of the kind for which we are seeking, having a
+double use, military and philosophical; for the man of war must learn the
+art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the
+philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and lay
+hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.
+
+That is true.
+
+And our guardian is both warrior and philosopher?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then this is a kind of knowledge which legislation may fitly prescribe; and
+we must endeavour to persuade those who are to be the principal men of our
+State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs, but they must carry on
+the study until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only; nor
+again, like merchants or retail-traders, with a view to buying or selling,
+but for the sake of their military use, and of the soul herself; and
+because this will be the easiest way for her to pass from becoming to truth
+and being.
+
+That is excellent, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, and now having spoken of it, I must add how charming the
+science is! and in how many ways it conduces to our desired end, if pursued
+in the spirit of a philosopher, and not of a shopkeeper!
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I mean, as I was saying, that arithmetic has a very great and elevating
+effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling
+against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into the argument. 
+You know how steadily the masters of the art repel and ridicule any one who
+attempts to divide absolute unity when he is calculating, and if you
+divide, they multiply (Meaning either (1) that they integrate the number
+because they deny the possibility of fractions; or (2) that division is
+regarded by them as a process of multiplication, for the fractions of one
+continue to be units.), taking care that one shall continue one and not
+become lost in fractions.
+
+That is very true.
+
+Now, suppose a person were to say to them:  O my friends, what are these
+wonderful numbers about which you are reasoning, in which, as you say,
+there is a unity such as you demand, and each unit is equal, invariable,
+indivisible,--what would they answer?
+
+They would answer, as I should conceive, that they were speaking of those
+numbers which can only be realized in thought.
+
+Then you see that this knowledge may be truly called necessary,
+necessitating as it clearly does the use of the pure intelligence in the
+attainment of pure truth?
+
+Yes; that is a marked characteristic of it.
+
+And have you further observed, that those who have a natural talent for
+calculation are generally quick at every other kind of knowledge; and even
+the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may
+derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they
+would otherwise have been.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And indeed, you will not easily find a more difficult study, and not many
+as difficult.
+
+You will not.
+
+And, for all these reasons, arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the
+best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.
+
+I agree.
+
+Let this then be made one of our subjects of education.  And next, shall we
+enquire whether the kindred science also concerns us?
+
+You mean geometry?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+Clearly, he said, we are concerned with that part of geometry which relates
+to war; for in pitching a camp, or taking up a position, or closing or
+extending the lines of an army, or any other military manoeuvre, whether in
+actual battle or on a march, it will make all the difference whether a
+general is or is not a geometrician.
+
+Yes, I said, but for that purpose a very little of either geometry or
+calculation will be enough; the question relates rather to the greater and
+more advanced part of geometry--whether that tends in any degree to make
+more easy the vision of the idea of good; and thither, as I was saying, all
+things tend which compel the soul to turn her gaze towards that place,
+where is the full perfection of being, which she ought, by all means, to
+behold.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then if geometry compels us to view being, it concerns us; if becoming
+only, it does not concern us?
+
+Yes, that is what we assert.
+
+Yet anybody who has the least acquaintance with geometry will not deny that
+such a conception of the science is in flat contradiction to the ordinary
+language of geometricians.
+
+How so?
+
+They have in view practice only, and are always speaking, in a narrow and
+ridiculous manner, of squaring and extending and applying and the like--
+they confuse the necessities of geometry with those of daily life; whereas
+knowledge is the real object of the whole science.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Then must not a further admission be made?
+
+What admission?
+
+That the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and
+not of aught perishing and transient.
+
+That, he replied, may be readily allowed, and is true.
+
+Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and
+create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily
+allowed to fall down.
+
+Nothing will be more likely to have such an effect.
+
+Then nothing should be more sternly laid down than that the inhabitants of
+your fair city should by all means learn geometry.  Moreover the science
+has indirect effects, which are not small.
+
+Of what kind? he said.
+
+There are the military advantages of which you spoke, I said; and in all
+departments of knowledge, as experience proves, any one who has studied
+geometry is infinitely quicker of apprehension than one who has not.
+
+Yes indeed, he said, there is an infinite difference between them.
+
+Then shall we propose this as a second branch of knowledge which our youth
+will study?
+
+Let us do so, he replied.
+
+And suppose we make astronomy the third--what do you say?
+
+I am strongly inclined to it, he said; the observation of the seasons and
+of months and years is as essential to the general as it is to the farmer
+or sailor.
+
+I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard
+against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite admit
+the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul
+which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these purified and
+re-illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for
+by it alone is truth seen.  Now there are two classes of persons:  one
+class of those who will agree with you and will take your words as a
+revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly unmeaning, and who
+will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they see no sort of profit
+which is to be obtained from them.  And therefore you had better decide at
+once with which of the two you are proposing to argue.  You will very
+likely say with neither, and that your chief aim in carrying on the
+argument is your own improvement; at the same time you do not grudge to
+others any benefit which they may receive.
+
+I think that I should prefer to carry on the argument mainly on my own
+behalf.
+
+Then take a step backward, for we have gone wrong in the order of the
+sciences.
+
+What was the mistake? he said.
+
+After plane geometry, I said, we proceeded at once to solids in revolution,
+instead of taking solids in themselves; whereas after the second dimension
+the third, which is concerned with cubes and dimensions of depth, ought to
+have followed.
+
+That is true, Socrates; but so little seems to be known as yet about these
+subjects.
+
+Why, yes, I said, and for two reasons:--in the first place, no government
+patronises them; this leads to a want of energy in the pursuit of them, and
+they are difficult; in the second place, students cannot learn them unless
+they have a director.  But then a director can hardly be found, and even if
+he could, as matters now stand, the students, who are very conceited, would
+not attend to him.  That, however, would be otherwise if the whole State
+became the director of these studies and gave honour to them; then
+disciples would want to come, and there would be continuous and earnest
+search, and discoveries would be made; since even now, disregarded as they
+are by the world, and maimed of their fair proportions, and although none
+of their votaries can tell the use of them, still these studies force their
+way by their natural charm, and very likely, if they had the help of the
+State, they would some day emerge into light.
+
+Yes, he said, there is a remarkable charm in them.  But I do not clearly
+understand the change in the order.  First you began with a geometry of
+plane surfaces?
+
+Yes, I said.
+
+And you placed astronomy next, and then you made a step backward?
+
+Yes, and I have delayed you by my hurry; the ludicrous state of solid
+geometry, which, in natural order, should have followed, made me pass over
+this branch and go on to astronomy, or motion of solids.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then assuming that the science now omitted would come into existence if
+encouraged by the State, let us go on to astronomy, which will be fourth.
+
+The right order, he replied.  And now, Socrates, as you rebuked the vulgar
+manner in which I praised astronomy before, my praise shall be given in
+your own spirit.  For every one, as I think, must see that astronomy
+compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
+
+Every one but myself, I said; to every one else this may be clear, but not
+to me.
+
+And what then would you say?
+
+I should rather say that those who elevate astronomy into philosophy appear
+to me to make us look downwards and not upwards.
+
+What do you mean? he asked.
+
+You, I replied, have in your mind a truly sublime conception of our
+knowledge of the things above.  And I dare say that if a person were to
+throw his head back and study the fretted ceiling, you would still think
+that his mind was the percipient, and not his eyes.  And you are very
+likely right, and I may be a simpleton:  but, in my opinion, that knowledge
+only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul look upwards,
+and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the ground, seeking to
+learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing
+of that sort is matter of science; his soul is looking downwards, not
+upwards, whether his way to knowledge is by water or by land, whether he
+floats, or only lies on his back.
+
+I acknowledge, he said, the justice of your rebuke.  Still, I should like
+to ascertain how astronomy can be learned in any manner more conducive to
+that knowledge of which we are speaking?
+
+I will tell you, I said:  The starry heaven which we behold is wrought upon
+a visible ground, and therefore, although the fairest and most perfect of
+visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to the true motions
+of absolute swiftness and absolute slowness, which are relative to each
+other, and carry with them that which is contained in them, in the true
+number and in every true figure.  Now, these are to be apprehended by
+reason and intelligence, but not by sight.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that
+higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures
+excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist,
+which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would
+appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never dream
+of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true double,
+or the truth of any other proportion.
+
+No, he replied, such an idea would be ridiculous.
+
+And will not a true astronomer have the same feeling when he looks at the
+movements of the stars?  Will he not think that heaven and the things in
+heaven are framed by the Creator of them in the most perfect manner?  But
+he will never imagine that the proportions of night and day, or of both to
+the month, or of the month to the year, or of the stars to these and to one
+another, and any other things that are material and visible can also be
+eternal and subject to no deviation--that would be absurd; and it is
+equally absurd to take so much pains in investigating their exact truth.
+
+I quite agree, though I never thought of this before.
+
+Then, I said, in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems, and
+let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and
+so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.
+
+That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers.
+
+Yes, I said; and there are many other things which must also have a similar
+extension given to them, if our legislation is to be of any value.  But can
+you tell me of any other suitable study?
+
+No, he said, not without thinking.
+
+Motion, I said, has many forms, and not one only; two of them are obvious
+enough even to wits no better than ours; and there are others, as I
+imagine, which may be left to wiser persons.
+
+But where are the two?
+
+There is a second, I said, which is the counterpart of the one already
+named.
+
+And what may that be?
+
+The second, I said, would seem relatively to the ears to be what the first
+is to the eyes; for I conceive that as the eyes are designed to look up at
+the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and these are sister
+sciences--as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon, agree with them?
+
+Yes, he replied.
+
+But this, I said, is a laborious study, and therefore we had better go and
+learn of them; and they will tell us whether there are any other
+applications of these sciences.  At the same time, we must not lose sight
+of our own higher object.
+
+What is that?
+
+There is a perfection which all knowledge ought to reach, and which our
+pupils ought also to attain, and not to fall short of, as I was saying that
+they did in astronomy.  For in the science of harmony, as you probably
+know, the same thing happens.  The teachers of harmony compare the sounds
+and consonances which are heard only, and their labour, like that of the
+astronomers, is in vain.
+
+Yes, by heaven! he said; and 'tis as good as a play to hear them talking
+about their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears close
+alongside of the strings like persons catching a sound from their
+neighbour's wall--one set of them declaring that they distinguish an
+intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be the
+unit of measurement; the others insisting that the two sounds have passed
+into the same--either party setting their ears before their understanding.
+
+You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and
+rack them on the pegs of the instrument:  I might carry on the metaphor and
+speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives, and make
+accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and forwardness to
+sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will only say that these
+are not the men, and that I am referring to the Pythagoreans, of whom I was
+just now proposing to enquire about harmony.  For they too are in error,
+like the astronomers; they investigate the numbers of the harmonies which
+are heard, but they never attain to problems--that is to say, they never
+reach the natural harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are
+harmonious and others not.
+
+That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.
+
+A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if sought
+after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in any other
+spirit, useless.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and
+connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual
+affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them have
+a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.
+
+I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.
+
+What do you mean? I said; the prelude or what?  Do you not know that all
+this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to learn?  For
+you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a dialectician?
+
+Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was
+capable of reasoning.
+
+But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason will
+have the knowledge which we require of them?
+
+Neither can this be supposed.
+
+And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of dialectic. 
+This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which the faculty
+of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight, as you may
+remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold the real animals and
+stars, and last of all the sun himself.  And so with dialectic; when a
+person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only,
+and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure
+intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last
+finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight
+at the end of the visible.
+
+Exactly, he said.
+
+Then this is the progress which you call dialectic?
+
+True.
+
+But the release of the prisoners from chains, and their translation from
+the shadows to the images and to the light, and the ascent from the
+underground den to the sun, while in his presence they are vainly trying to
+look on animals and plants and the light of the sun, but are able to
+perceive even with their weak eyes the images in the water (which are
+divine), and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows of images cast
+by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only an image)--this
+power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to the contemplation
+of that which is best in existence, with which we may compare the raising
+of that faculty which is the very light of the body to the sight of that
+which is brightest in the material and visible world--this power is given,
+as I was saying, by all that study and pursuit of the arts which has been
+described.
+
+I agree in what you are saying, he replied, which may be hard to believe,
+yet, from another point of view, is harder still to deny.  This, however,
+is not a theme to be treated of in passing only, but will have to be
+discussed again and again.  And so, whether our conclusion be true or
+false, let us assume all this, and proceed at once from the prelude or
+preamble to the chief strain (A play upon the Greek word, which means both
+'law' and 'strain.'), and describe that in like manner.  Say, then, what is
+the nature and what are the divisions of dialectic, and what are the paths
+which lead thither; for these paths will also lead to our final rest.
+
+Dear Glaucon, I said, you will not be able to follow me here, though I
+would do my best, and you should behold not an image only but the absolute
+truth, according to my notion.  Whether what I told you would or would not
+have been a reality I cannot venture to say; but you would have seen
+something like reality; of that I am confident.
+
+Doubtless, he replied.
+
+But I must also remind you, that the power of dialectic alone can reveal
+this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences.
+
+Of that assertion you may be as confident as of the last.
+
+And assuredly no one will argue that there is any other method of
+comprehending by any regular process all true existence or of ascertaining
+what each thing is in its own nature; for the arts in general are concerned
+with the desires or opinions of men, or are cultivated with a view to
+production and construction, or for the preservation of such productions
+and constructions; and as to the mathematical sciences which, as we were
+saying, have some apprehension of true being--geometry and the like--they
+only dream about being, but never can they behold the waking reality so
+long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable
+to give an account of them.  For when a man knows not his own first
+principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also
+constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a fabric
+of convention can ever become science?
+
+Impossible, he said.
+
+Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle
+and is the only science which does away with hypotheses in order to make
+her ground secure; the eye of the soul, which is literally buried in an
+outlandish slough, is by her gentle aid lifted upwards; and she uses as
+handmaids and helpers in the work of conversion, the sciences which we have
+been discussing.  Custom terms them sciences, but they ought to have some
+other name, implying greater clearness than opinion and less clearness than
+science:  and this, in our previous sketch, was called understanding.  But
+why should we dispute about names when we have realities of such importance
+to consider?
+
+Why indeed, he said, when any name will do which expresses the thought of
+the mind with clearness?
+
+At any rate, we are satisfied, as before, to have four divisions; two for
+intellect and two for opinion, and to call the first division science, the
+second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth perception of
+shadows, opinion being concerned with becoming, and intellect with being;
+and so to make a proportion:--
+
+As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion.
+And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and understanding
+to the perception of shadows.
+
+But let us defer the further correlation and subdivision of the subjects of
+opinion and of intellect, for it will be a long enquiry, many times longer
+than this has been.
+
+As far as I understand, he said, I agree.
+
+And do you also agree, I said, in describing the dialectician as one who
+attains a conception of the essence of each thing?  And he who does not
+possess and is therefore unable to impart this conception, in whatever
+degree he fails, may in that degree also be said to fail in intelligence? 
+Will you admit so much?
+
+Yes, he said; how can I deny it?
+
+And you would say the same of the conception of the good?  Until the person
+is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of good, and unless he
+can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is ready to disprove them, not
+by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth, never faltering at any step
+of the argument--unless he can do all this, you would say that he knows
+neither the idea of good nor any other good; he apprehends only a shadow,
+if anything at all, which is given by opinion and not by science;--dreaming
+and slumbering in this life, before he is well awake here, he arrives at
+the world below, and has his final quietus.
+
+In all that I should most certainly agree with you.
+
+And surely you would not have the children of your ideal State, whom you
+are nurturing and educating--if the ideal ever becomes a reality--you would
+not allow the future rulers to be like posts (Literally 'lines,' probably
+the starting-point of a race-course.), having no reason in them, and yet to
+be set in authority over the highest matters?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will
+enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions?
+
+Yes, he said, you and I together will make it.
+
+Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences,
+and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher--the nature of
+knowledge can no further go?
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+But to whom we are to assign these studies, and in what way they are to be
+assigned, are questions which remain to be considered.
+
+Yes, clearly.
+
+You remember, I said, how the rulers were chosen before?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+The same natures must still be chosen, and the preference again given to
+the surest and the bravest, and, if possible, to the fairest; and, having
+noble and generous tempers, they should also have the natural gifts which
+will facilitate their education.
+
+And what are these?
+
+Such gifts as keenness and ready powers of acquisition; for the mind more
+often faints from the severity of study than from the severity of
+gymnastics:  the toil is more entirely the mind's own, and is not shared
+with the body.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Further, he of whom we are in search should have a good memory, and be an
+unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in any line; or he will never
+be able to endure the great amount of bodily exercise and to go through all
+the intellectual discipline and study which we require of him.
+
+Certainly, he said; he must have natural gifts.
+
+The mistake at present is, that those who study philosophy have no
+vocation, and this, as I was before saying, is the reason why she has
+fallen into disrepute:  her true sons should take her by the hand and not
+bastards.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+In the first place, her votary should not have a lame or halting industry--
+I mean, that he should not be half industrious and half idle:  as, for
+example, when a man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting, and all other
+bodily exercises, but a hater rather than a lover of the labour of learning
+or listening or enquiring.  Or the occupation to which he devotes himself
+may be of an opposite kind, and he may have the other sort of lameness.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And as to truth, I said, is not a soul equally to be deemed halt and lame
+which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at herself and
+others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary falsehood, and
+does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire of ignorance, and
+has no shame at being detected?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And, again, in respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every
+other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son and
+the bastard? for where there is no discernment of such qualities states and
+individuals unconsciously err; and the state makes a ruler, and the
+individual a friend, of one who, being defective in some part of virtue, is
+in a figure lame or a bastard.
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+All these things, then, will have to be carefully considered by us; and if
+only those whom we introduce to this vast system of education and training
+are sound in body and mind, justice herself will have nothing to say
+against us, and we shall be the saviours of the constitution and of the
+State; but, if our pupils are men of another stamp, the reverse will
+happen, and we shall pour a still greater flood of ridicule on philosophy
+than she has to endure at present.
+
+That would not be creditable.
+
+Certainly not, I said; and yet perhaps, in thus turning jest into earnest I
+am equally ridiculous.
+
+In what respect?
+
+I had forgotten, I said, that we were not serious, and spoke with too much
+excitement.  For when I saw philosophy so undeservedly trampled under foot
+of men I could not help feeling a sort of indignation at the authors of her
+disgrace:  and my anger made me too vehement.
+
+Indeed!  I was listening, and did not think so.
+
+But I, who am the speaker, felt that I was.  And now let me remind you
+that, although in our former selection we chose old men, we must not do so
+in this.  Solon was under a delusion when he said that a man when he grows
+old may learn many things--for he can no more learn much than he can run
+much; youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.
+
+Of course.
+
+And, therefore, calculation and geometry and all the other elements of
+instruction, which are a preparation for dialectic, should be presented to
+the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing our system
+of education.
+
+Why not?
+
+Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge
+of any kind.  Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body;
+but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the
+mind.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then, my good friend, I said, do not use compulsion, but let early
+education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out
+the natural bent.
+
+That is a very rational notion, he said.
+
+Do you remember that the children, too, were to be taken to see the battle
+on horseback; and that if there were no danger they were to be brought
+close up and, like young hounds, have a taste of blood given them?
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+The same practice may be followed, I said, in all these things--labours,
+lessons, dangers--and he who is most at home in all of them ought to be
+enrolled in a select number.
+
+At what age?
+
+At the age when the necessary gymnastics are over:  the period whether of
+two or three years which passes in this sort of training is useless for any
+other purpose; for sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning; and the
+trial of who is first in gymnastic exercises is one of the most important
+tests to which our youth are subjected.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+After that time those who are selected from the class of twenty years old
+will be promoted to higher honour, and the sciences which they learned
+without any order in their early education will now be brought together,
+and they will be able to see the natural relationship of them to one
+another and to true being.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the only kind of knowledge which takes lasting root.
+
+Yes, I said; and the capacity for such knowledge is the great criterion of
+dialectical talent:  the comprehensive mind is always the dialectical.
+
+I agree with you, he said.
+
+These, I said, are the points which you must consider; and those who have
+most of this comprehension, and who are most steadfast in their learning,
+and in their military and other appointed duties, when they have arrived at
+the age of thirty have to be chosen by you out of the select class, and
+elevated to higher honour; and you will have to prove them by the help of
+dialectic, in order to learn which of them is able to give up the use of
+sight and the other senses, and in company with truth to attain absolute
+being:  And here, my friend, great caution is required.
+
+Why great caution?
+
+Do you not remark, I said, how great is the evil which dialectic has
+introduced?
+
+What evil? he said.
+
+The students of the art are filled with lawlessness.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Do you think that there is anything so very unnatural or inexcusable in
+their case? or will you make allowance for them?
+
+In what way make allowance?
+
+I want you, I said, by way of parallel, to imagine a supposititious son who
+is brought up in great wealth; he is one of a great and numerous family,
+and has many flatterers.  When he grows up to manhood, he learns that his
+alleged are not his real parents; but who the real are he is unable to
+discover.  Can you guess how he will be likely to behave towards his
+flatterers and his supposed parents, first of all during the period when he
+is ignorant of the false relation, and then again when he knows?  Or shall
+I guess for you?
+
+If you please.
+
+Then I should say, that while he is ignorant of the truth he will be likely
+to honour his father and his mother and his supposed relations more than
+the flatterers; he will be less inclined to neglect them when in need, or
+to do or say anything against them; and he will be less willing to disobey
+them in any important matter.
+
+He will.
+
+But when he has made the discovery, I should imagine that he would diminish
+his honour and regard for them, and would become more devoted to the
+flatterers; their influence over him would greatly increase; he would now
+live after their ways, and openly associate with them, and, unless he were
+of an unusually good disposition, he would trouble himself no more about
+his supposed parents or other relations.
+
+Well, all that is very probable.  But how is the image applicable to the
+disciples of philosophy?
+
+In this way:  you know that there are certain principles about justice and
+honour, which were taught us in childhood, and under their parental
+authority we have been brought up, obeying and honouring them.
+
+That is true.
+
+There are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and
+attract the soul, but do not influence those of us who have any sense of
+right, and they continue to obey and honour the maxims of their fathers.
+
+True.
+
+Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is
+fair or honourable, and he answers as the legislator has taught him, and
+then arguments many and diverse refute his words, until he is driven into
+believing that nothing is honourable any more than dishonourable, or just
+and good any more than the reverse, and so of all the notions which he most
+valued, do you think that he will still honour and obey them as before?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And when he ceases to think them honourable and natural as heretofore, and
+he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other
+than that which flatters his desires?
+
+He cannot.
+
+And from being a keeper of the law he is converted into a breaker of it?
+
+Unquestionably.
+
+Now all this is very natural in students of philosophy such as I have
+described, and also, as I was just now saying, most excusable.
+
+Yes, he said; and, I may add, pitiable.
+
+Therefore, that your feelings may not be moved to pity about our citizens
+who are now thirty years of age, every care must be taken in introducing
+them to dialectic.
+
+Certainly.
+
+There is a danger lest they should taste the dear delight too early; for
+youngsters, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in
+their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and
+refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; like puppy-dogs,
+they rejoice in pulling and tearing at all who come near them.
+
+Yes, he said, there is nothing which they like better.
+
+And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of
+many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything
+which they believed before, and hence, not only they, but philosophy and
+all that relates to it is apt to have a bad name with the rest of the
+world.
+
+Too true, he said.
+
+But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such
+insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and
+not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the
+greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing
+the honour of the pursuit.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And did we not make special provision for this, when we said that the
+disciples of philosophy were to be orderly and steadfast, not, as now, any
+chance aspirant or intruder?
+
+Very true.
+
+Suppose, I said, the study of philosophy to take the place of gymnastics
+and to be continued diligently and earnestly and exclusively for twice the
+number of years which were passed in bodily exercise--will that be enough?
+
+Would you say six or four years? he asked.
+
+Say five years, I replied; at the end of the time they must be sent down
+again into the den and compelled to hold any military or other office which
+young men are qualified to hold:  in this way they will get their
+experience of life, and there will be an opportunity of trying whether,
+when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they will stand firm
+or flinch.
+
+And how long is this stage of their lives to last?
+
+Fifteen years, I answered; and when they have reached fifty years of age,
+then let those who still survive and have distinguished themselves in every
+action of their lives and in every branch of knowledge come at last to
+their consummation:  the time has now arrived at which they must raise the
+eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all things, and
+behold the absolute good; for that is the pattern according to which they
+are to order the State and the lives of individuals, and the remainder of
+their own lives also; making philosophy their chief pursuit, but, when
+their turn comes, toiling also at politics and ruling for the public good,
+not as though they were performing some heroic action, but simply as a
+matter of duty; and when they have brought up in each generation others
+like themselves and left them in their place to be governors of the State,
+then they will depart to the Islands of the Blest and dwell there; and the
+city will give them public memorials and sacrifices and honour them, if the
+Pythian oracle consent, as demigods, but if not, as in any case blessed and
+divine.
+
+You are a sculptor, Socrates, and have made statues of our governors
+faultless in beauty.
+
+Yes, I said, Glaucon, and of our governesses too; for you must not suppose
+that what I have been saying applies to men only and not to women as far as
+their natures can go.
+
+There you are right, he said, since we have made them to share in all
+things like the men.
+
+Well, I said, and you would agree (would you not?) that what has been said
+about the State and the government is not a mere dream, and although
+difficult not impossible, but only possible in the way which has been
+supposed; that is to say, when the true philosopher kings are born in a
+State, one or more of them, despising the honours of this present world
+which they deem mean and worthless, esteeming above all things right and
+the honour that springs from right, and regarding justice as the greatest
+and most necessary of all things, whose ministers they are, and whose
+principles will be exalted by them when they set in order their own city?
+
+How will they proceed?
+
+They will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the
+city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of their
+children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they
+will train in their own habits and laws, I mean in the laws which we have
+given them:  and in this way the State and constitution of which we were
+speaking will soonest and most easily attain happiness, and the nation
+which has such a constitution will gain most.
+
+Yes, that will be the best way.  And I think, Socrates, that you have very
+well described how, if ever, such a constitution might come into being.
+
+Enough then of the perfect State, and of the man who bears its image--there
+is no difficulty in seeing how we shall describe him.
+
+There is no difficulty, he replied; and I agree with you in thinking that
+nothing more need be said.
+
+
+BOOK VIII.
+
+And so, Glaucon, we have arrived at the conclusion that in the perfect
+State wives and children are to be in common; and that all education and
+the pursuits of war and peace are also to be common, and the best
+philosophers and the bravest warriors are to be their kings?
+
+That, replied Glaucon, has been acknowledged.
+
+Yes, I said; and we have further acknowledged that the governors, when
+appointed themselves, will take their soldiers and place them in houses
+such as we were describing, which are common to all, and contain nothing
+private, or individual; and about their property, you remember what we
+agreed?
+
+Yes, I remember that no one was to have any of the ordinary possessions of
+mankind; they were to be warrior athletes and guardians, receiving from the
+other citizens, in lieu of annual payment, only their maintenance, and they
+were to take care of themselves and of the whole State.
+
+True, I said; and now that this division of our task is concluded, let us
+find the point at which we digressed, that we may return into the old path.
+
+There is no difficulty in returning; you implied, then as now, that you had
+finished the description of the State:  you said that such a State was
+good, and that the man was good who answered to it, although, as now
+appears, you had more excellent things to relate both of State and man. 
+And you said further, that if this was the true form, then the others were
+false; and of the false forms, you said, as I remember, that there were
+four principal ones, and that their defects, and the defects of the
+individuals corresponding to them, were worth examining.  When we had seen
+all the individuals, and finally agreed as to who was the best and who was
+the worst of them, we were to consider whether the best was not also the
+happiest, and the worst the most miserable.  I asked you what were the four
+forms of government of which you spoke, and then Polemarchus and Adeimantus
+put in their word; and you began again, and have found your way to the
+point at which we have now arrived.
+
+Your recollection, I said, is most exact.
+
+Then, like a wrestler, he replied, you must put yourself again in the same
+position; and let me ask the same questions, and do you give me the same
+answer which you were about to give me then.
+
+Yes, if I can, I will, I said.
+
+I shall particularly wish to hear what were the four constitutions of which
+you were speaking.
+
+That question, I said, is easily answered:  the four governments of which I
+spoke, so far as they have distinct names, are, first, those of Crete and
+Sparta, which are generally applauded; what is termed oligarchy comes next;
+this is not equally approved, and is a form of government which teems with
+evils:  thirdly, democracy, which naturally follows oligarchy, although
+very different:  and lastly comes tyranny, great and famous, which differs
+from them all, and is the fourth and worst disorder of a State.  I do not
+know, do you? of any other constitution which can be said to have a
+distinct character.  There are lordships and principalities which are
+bought and sold, and some other intermediate forms of government.  But
+these are nondescripts and may be found equally among Hellenes and among
+barbarians.
+
+Yes, he replied, we certainly hear of many curious forms of government
+which exist among them.
+
+Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary,
+and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other?  For
+we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock,' and not out of
+the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale
+and draw other things after them?
+
+Yes, he said, the States are as the men are; they grow out of human
+characters.
+
+Then if the constitutions of States are five, the dispositions of
+individual minds will also be five?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Him who answers to aristocracy, and whom we rightly call just and good, we
+have already described.
+
+We have.
+
+Then let us now proceed to describe the inferior sort of natures, being the
+contentious and ambitious, who answer to the Spartan polity; also the
+oligarchical, democratical, and tyrannical.  Let us place the most just by
+the side of the most unjust, and when we see them we shall be able to
+compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of him who leads a life of
+pure justice or pure injustice.  The enquiry will then be completed.  And
+we shall know whether we ought to pursue injustice, as Thrasymachus
+advises, or in accordance with the conclusions of the argument to prefer
+justice.
+
+Certainly, he replied, we must do as you say.
+
+Shall we follow our old plan, which we adopted with a view to clearness, of
+taking the State first and then proceeding to the individual, and begin
+with the government of honour?--I know of no name for such a government
+other than timocracy, or perhaps timarchy.  We will compare with this the
+like character in the individual; and, after that, consider oligarchy and
+the oligarchical man; and then again we will turn our attention to
+democracy and the democratical man; and lastly, we will go and view the
+city of tyranny, and once more take a look into the tyrant's soul, and try
+to arrive at a satisfactory decision.
+
+That way of viewing and judging of the matter will be very suitable.
+
+First, then, I said, let us enquire how timocracy (the government of
+honour) arises out of aristocracy (the government of the best).  Clearly,
+all political changes originate in divisions of the actual governing power;
+a government which is united, however small, cannot be moved.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+In what way, then, will our city be moved, and in what manner will the two
+classes of auxiliaries and rulers disagree among themselves or with one
+another?  Shall we, after the manner of Homer, pray the Muses to tell us
+'how discord first arose'?  Shall we imagine them in solemn mockery, to
+play and jest with us as if we were children, and to address us in a lofty
+tragic vein, making believe to be in earnest?
+
+How would they address us?
+
+After this manner:--A city which is thus constituted can hardly be shaken;
+but, seeing that everything which has a beginning has also an end, even a
+constitution such as yours will not last for ever, but will in time be
+dissolved.  And this is the dissolution:--In plants that grow in the earth,
+as well as in animals that move on the earth's surface, fertility and
+sterility of soul and body occur when the circumferences of the circles of
+each are completed, which in short-lived existences pass over a short
+space, and in long-lived ones over a long space.  But to the knowledge of
+human fecundity and sterility all the wisdom and education of your rulers
+will not attain; the laws which regulate them will not be discovered by an
+intelligence which is alloyed with sense, but will escape them, and they
+will bring children into the world when they ought not.  Now that which is
+of divine birth has a period which is contained in a perfect number (i.e. a
+cyclical number, such as 6, which is equal to the sum of its divisors 1, 2,
+3, so that when the circle or time represented by 6 is completed, the
+lesser times or rotations represented by 1, 2, 3 are also completed.), but
+the period of human birth is comprehended in a number in which first
+increments by involution and evolution (or squared and cubed) obtaining
+three intervals and four terms of like and unlike, waxing and waning
+numbers, make all the terms commensurable and agreeable to one another. 
+(Probably the numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 of which the three first = the sides of
+the Pythagorean triangle.  The terms will then be 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5
+cubed, which together = 6 cubed = 216.)  The base of these (3) with a third
+added (4) when combined with five (20) and raised to the third power
+furnishes two harmonies; the first a square which is a hundred times as
+great (400 = 4 x 100) (Or the first a square which is 100 x 100 = 10,000.
+The whole number will then be 17,500 = a square of 100, and an oblong of
+100 by 75.), and the other a figure having one side equal to the former,
+but oblong, consisting of a hundred numbers squared upon rational diameters
+of a square (i.e. omitting fractions), the side of which is five (7 x 7 =
+49 x 100 = 4900), each of them being less by one (than the perfect square
+which includes the fractions, sc. 50) or less by (Or, 'consisting of two
+numbers squared upon irrational diameters,' etc. = 100.  For other
+explanations of the passage see Introduction.) two perfect squares of
+irrational diameters (of a square the side of which is five = 50 + 50 =
+100); and a hundred cubes of three (27 x 100 = 2700 + 4900 + 400 = 8000). 
+Now this number represents a geometrical figure which has control over the
+good and evil of births.  For when your guardians are ignorant of the law
+of births, and unite bride and bridegroom out of season, the children will
+not be goodly or fortunate.  And though only the best of them will be
+appointed by their predecessors, still they will be unworthy to hold their
+fathers' places, and when they come into power as guardians, they will soon
+be found to fail in taking care of us, the Muses, first by under-valuing
+music; which neglect will soon extend to gymnastic; and hence the young men
+of your State will be less cultivated.  In the succeeding generation rulers
+will be appointed who have lost the guardian power of testing the metal of
+your different races, which, like Hesiod's, are of gold and silver and
+brass and iron.  And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass with
+gold, and hence there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and
+irregularity, which always and in all places are causes of hatred and war. 
+This the Muses affirm to be the stock from which discord has sprung,
+wherever arising; and this is their answer to us.
+
+Yes, and we may assume that they answer truly.
+
+Why, yes, I said, of course they answer truly; how can the Muses speak
+falsely?
+
+And what do the Muses say next?
+
+When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways:  the iron
+and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver;
+but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches
+in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of
+things.  There was a battle between them, and at last they agreed to
+distribute their land and houses among individual owners; and they enslaved
+their friends and maintainers, whom they had formerly protected in the
+condition of freemen, and made of them subjects and servants; and they
+themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch against them.
+
+I believe that you have rightly conceived the origin of the change.
+
+And the new government which thus arises will be of a form intermediate
+between oligarchy and aristocracy?
+
+Very true.
+
+Such will be the change, and after the change has been made, how will they
+proceed?  Clearly, the new State, being in a mean between oligarchy and the
+perfect State, will partly follow one and partly the other, and will also
+have some peculiarities.
+
+True, he said.
+
+In the honour given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior class from
+agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution of
+common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military
+training--in all these respects this State will resemble the former.
+
+True.
+
+But in the fear of admitting philosophers to power, because they are no
+longer to be had simple and earnest, but are made up of mixed elements; and
+in turning from them to passionate and less complex characters, who are by
+nature fitted for war rather than peace; and in the value set by them upon
+military stratagems and contrivances, and in the waging of everlasting
+wars--this State will be for the most part peculiar.
+
+Yes.
+
+Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those
+who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold
+and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and
+treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also
+castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend
+large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And they are miserly because they have no means of openly acquiring the
+money which they prize; they will spend that which is another man's on the
+gratification of their desires, stealing their pleasures and running away
+like children from the law, their father:  they have been schooled not by
+gentle influences but by force, for they have neglected her who is the true
+Muse, the companion of reason and philosophy, and have honoured gymnastic
+more than music.
+
+Undoubtedly, he said, the form of government which you describe is a
+mixture of good and evil.
+
+Why, there is a mixture, I said; but one thing, and one thing only, is
+predominantly seen,--the spirit of contention and ambition; and these are
+due to the prevalence of the passionate or spirited element.
+
+Assuredly, he said.
+
+Such is the origin and such the character of this State, which has been
+described in outline only; the more perfect execution was not required, for
+a sketch is enough to show the type of the most perfectly just and most
+perfectly unjust; and to go through all the States and all the characters
+of men, omitting none of them, would be an interminable labour.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Now what man answers to this form of government-how did he come into being,
+and what is he like?
+
+I think, said Adeimantus, that in the spirit of contention which
+characterises him, he is not unlike our friend Glaucon.
+
+Perhaps, I said, he may be like him in that one point; but there are other
+respects in which he is very different.
+
+In what respects?
+
+He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a
+friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker.  Such
+a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is
+too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and
+remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of
+honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any
+ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of
+arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.
+
+Yes, that is the type of character which answers to timocracy.
+
+Such an one will despise riches only when he is young; but as he gets older
+he will be more and more attracted to them, because he has a piece of the
+avaricious nature in him, and is not single-minded towards virtue, having
+lost his best guardian.
+
+Who was that? said Adeimantus.
+
+Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes up her abode
+in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life.
+
+Good, he said.
+
+Such, I said, is the timocratical youth, and he is like the timocratical
+State.
+
+Exactly.
+
+His origin is as follows:--He is often the young son of a brave father, who
+dwells in an ill-governed city, of which he declines the honours and
+offices, and will not go to law, or exert himself in any way, but is ready
+to waive his rights in order that he may escape trouble.
+
+And how does the son come into being?
+
+The character of the son begins to develope when he hears his mother
+complaining that her husband has no place in the government, of which the
+consequence is that she has no precedence among other women.  Further, when
+she sees her husband not very eager about money, and instead of battling
+and railing in the law courts or assembly, taking whatever happens to him
+quietly; and when she observes that his thoughts always centre in himself,
+while he treats her with very considerable indifference, she is annoyed,
+and says to her son that his father is only half a man and far too
+easy-going:  adding all the other complaints about her own ill-treatment
+which women are so fond of rehearsing.
+
+Yes, said Adeimantus, they give us plenty of them, and their complaints are
+so like themselves.
+
+And you know, I said, that the old servants also, who are supposed to be
+attached to the family, from time to time talk privately in the same strain
+to the son; and if they see any one who owes money to his father, or is
+wronging him in any way, and he fails to prosecute them, they tell the
+youth that when he grows up he must retaliate upon people of this sort, and
+be more of a man than his father.  He has only to walk abroad and he hears
+and sees the same sort of thing:  those who do their own business in the
+city are called simpletons, and held in no esteem, while the busy-bodies
+are honoured and applauded.  The result is that the young man, hearing and
+seeing all these things--hearing, too, the words of his father, and having
+a nearer view of his way of life, and making comparisons of him and others
+--is drawn opposite ways:  while his father is watering and nourishing the
+rational principle in his soul, the others are encouraging the passionate
+and appetitive; and he being not originally of a bad nature, but having
+kept bad company, is at last brought by their joint influence to a middle
+point, and gives up the kingdom which is within him to the middle principle
+of contentiousness and passion, and becomes arrogant and ambitious.
+
+You seem to me to have described his origin perfectly.
+
+Then we have now, I said, the second form of government and the second type
+of character?
+
+We have.
+
+Next, let us look at another man who, as Aeschylus says,
+
+'Is set over against another State;'
+
+or rather, as our plan requires, begin with the State.
+
+By all means.
+
+I believe that oligarchy follows next in order.
+
+And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?
+
+A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have
+power and the poor man is deprived of it.
+
+I understand, he replied.
+
+Ought I not to begin by describing how the change from timocracy to
+oligarchy arises?
+
+Yes.
+
+Well, I said, no eyes are required in order to see how the one passes into
+the other.
+
+How?
+
+The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the ruin
+of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or
+their wives care about the law?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the
+great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.
+
+Likely enough.
+
+And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a
+fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
+placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the
+other falls.
+
+True.
+
+And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue
+and the virtuous are dishonoured.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is
+neglected.
+
+That is obvious.
+
+And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers
+of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a
+ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.
+
+They do so.
+
+They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the
+qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in
+another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one
+whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the
+government.  These changes in the constitution they effect by force of
+arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.
+
+Very true.
+
+And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.
+
+Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government,
+and what are the defects of which we were speaking?
+
+First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification.  Just think
+what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property,
+and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a
+better pilot?
+
+You mean that they would shipwreck?
+
+Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?
+
+I should imagine so.
+
+Except a city?--or would you include a city?
+
+Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as the
+rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.
+
+This, then, will be the first great defect of oligarchy?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And here is another defect which is quite as bad.
+
+What defect?
+
+The inevitable division:  such a State is not one, but two States, the one
+of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and
+always conspiring against one another.
+
+That, surely, is at least as bad.
+
+Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are
+incapable of carrying on any war.  Either they arm the multitude, and then
+they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call
+them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as
+they are few to rule.  And at the same time their fondness for money makes
+them unwilling to pay taxes.
+
+How discreditable!
+
+And, as we said before, under such a constitution the same persons have too
+many callings--they are husbandmen, tradesmen, warriors, all in one.  Does
+that look well?
+
+Anything but well.
+
+There is another evil which is, perhaps, the greatest of all, and to which
+this State first begins to be liable.
+
+What evil?
+
+A man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire his property; yet
+after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a part,
+being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman, nor hoplite, but only a
+poor, helpless creature.
+
+Yes, that is an evil which also first begins in this State.
+
+The evil is certainly not prevented there; for oligarchies have both the
+extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.
+
+True.
+
+But think again:  In his wealthy days, while he was spending his money, was
+a man of this sort a whit more good to the State for the purposes of
+citizenship?  Or did he only seem to be a member of the ruling body,
+although in truth he was neither ruler nor subject, but just a spendthrift?
+
+As you say, he seemed to be a ruler, but was only a spendthrift.
+
+May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone in
+the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as the other is
+of the hive?
+
+Just so, Socrates.
+
+And God has made the flying drones, Adeimantus, all without stings, whereas
+of the walking drones he has made some without stings but others have
+dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end
+as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they are
+termed.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Clearly then, whenever you see paupers in a State, somewhere in that
+neighborhood there are hidden away thieves, and cut-purses and robbers of
+temples, and all sorts of malefactors.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers?
+
+Yes, he said; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler.
+
+And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals to be
+found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities are careful
+to restrain by force?
+
+Certainly, we may be so bold.
+
+The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education,
+ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State?
+
+True.
+
+Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy; and there may
+be many other evils.
+
+Very likely.
+
+Then oligarchy, or the form of government in which the rulers are elected
+for their wealth, may now be dismissed.  Let us next proceed to consider
+the nature and origin of the individual who answers to this State.
+
+By all means.
+
+Does not the timocratical man change into the oligarchical on this wise?
+
+How?
+
+A time arrives when the representative of timocracy has a son:  at first he
+begins by emulating his father and walking in his footsteps, but presently
+he sees him of a sudden foundering against the State as upon a sunken reef,
+and he and all that he has is lost; he may have been a general or some
+other high officer who is brought to trial under a prejudice raised by
+informers, and either put to death, or exiled, or deprived of the
+privileges of a citizen, and all his property taken from him.
+
+Nothing more likely.
+
+And the son has seen and known all this--he is a ruined man, and his fear
+has taught him to knock ambition and passion headforemost from his bosom's
+throne; humbled by poverty he takes to money-making and by mean and miserly
+savings and hard work gets a fortune together.  Is not such an one likely
+to seat the concupiscent and covetous element on the vacant throne and to
+suffer it to play the great king within him, girt with tiara and chain and
+scimitar?
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+And when he has made reason and spirit sit down on the ground obediently on
+either side of their sovereign, and taught them to know their place, he
+compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be turned into larger
+ones, and will not allow the other to worship and admire anything but
+riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything so much as the
+acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it.
+
+Of all changes, he said, there is none so speedy or so sure as the
+conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one.
+
+And the avaricious, I said, is the oligarchical youth?
+
+Yes, he said; at any rate the individual out of whom he came is like the
+State out of which oligarchy came.
+
+Let us then consider whether there is any likeness between them.
+
+Very good.
+
+First, then, they resemble one another in the value which they set upon
+wealth?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Also in their penurious, laborious character; the individual only satisfies
+his necessary appetites, and confines his expenditure to them; his other
+desires he subdues, under the idea that they are unprofitable.
+
+True.
+
+He is a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes a
+purse for himself; and this is the sort of man whom the vulgar applaud.  Is
+he not a true image of the State which he represents?
+
+He appears to me to be so; at any rate money is highly valued by him as
+well as by the State.
+
+You see that he is not a man of cultivation, I said.
+
+I imagine not, he said; had he been educated he would never have made a
+blind god director of his chorus, or given him chief honour.
+
+Excellent! I said.  Yet consider:  Must we not further admit that owing to
+this want of cultivation there will be found in him dronelike desires as of
+pauper and rogue, which are forcibly kept down by his general habit of
+life?
+
+True.
+
+Do you know where you will have to look if you want to discover his
+rogueries?
+
+Where must I look?
+
+You should see him where he has some great opportunity of acting
+dishonestly, as in the guardianship of an orphan.
+
+Aye.
+
+It will be clear enough then that in his ordinary dealings which give him a
+reputation for honesty he coerces his bad passions by an enforced virtue;
+not making them see that they are wrong, or taming them by reason, but by
+necessity and fear constraining them, and because he trembles for his
+possessions.
+
+To be sure.
+
+Yes, indeed, my dear friend, but you will find that the natural desires of
+the drone commonly exist in him all the same whenever he has to spend what
+is not his own.
+
+Yes, and they will be strong in him too.
+
+The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not
+one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his
+inferior ones.
+
+True.
+
+For these reasons such an one will be more respectable than most people;
+yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will flee far away
+and never come near him.
+
+I should expect so.
+
+And surely, the miser individually will be an ignoble competitor in a State
+for any prize of victory, or other object of honourable ambition; he will
+not spend his money in the contest for glory; so afraid is he of awakening
+his expensive appetites and inviting them to help and join in the struggle;
+in true oligarchical fashion he fights with a small part only of his
+resources, and the result commonly is that he loses the prize and saves his
+money.
+
+Very true.
+
+Can we any longer doubt, then, that the miser and money-maker answers to
+the oligarchical State?
+
+There can be no doubt.
+
+Next comes democracy; of this the origin and nature have still to be
+considered by us; and then we will enquire into the ways of the democratic
+man, and bring him up for judgment.
+
+That, he said, is our method.
+
+Well, I said, and how does the change from oligarchy into democracy arise? 
+Is it not on this wise?--The good at which such a State aims is to become
+as rich as possible, a desire which is insatiable?
+
+What then?
+
+The rulers, being aware that their power rests upon their wealth, refuse to
+curtail by law the extravagance of the spendthrift youth because they gain
+by their ruin; they take interest from them and buy up their estates and
+thus increase their own wealth and importance?
+
+To be sure.
+
+There can be no doubt that the love of wealth and the spirit of moderation
+cannot exist together in citizens of the same state to any considerable
+extent; one or the other will be disregarded.
+
+That is tolerably clear.
+
+And in oligarchical States, from the general spread of carelessness and
+extravagance, men of good family have often been reduced to beggary?
+
+Yes, often.
+
+And still they remain in the city; there they are, ready to sting and fully
+armed, and some of them owe money, some have forfeited their citizenship; a
+third class are in both predicaments; and they hate and conspire against
+those who have got their property, and against everybody else, and are
+eager for revolution.
+
+That is true.
+
+On the other hand, the men of business, stooping as they walk, and
+pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert
+their sting--that is, their money--into some one else who is not on his
+guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times over multiplied
+into a family of children:  and so they make drone and pauper to abound in
+the State.
+
+Yes, he said, there are plenty of them--that is certain.
+
+The evil blazes up like a fire; and they will not extinguish it, either by
+restricting a man's use of his own property, or by another remedy:
+
+What other?
+
+One which is the next best, and has the advantage of compelling the
+citizens to look to their characters:--Let there be a general rule that
+every one shall enter into voluntary contracts at his own risk, and there
+will be less of this scandalous money-making, and the evils of which we
+were speaking will be greatly lessened in the State.
+
+Yes, they will be greatly lessened.
+
+At present the governors, induced by the motives which I have named, treat
+their subjects badly; while they and their adherents, especially the young
+men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and
+idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of
+resisting either pleasure or pain.
+
+Very true.
+
+They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as the
+pauper to the cultivation of virtue.
+
+Yes, quite as indifferent.
+
+Such is the state of affairs which prevails among them.  And often rulers
+and their subjects may come in one another's way, whether on a journey or
+on some other occasion of meeting, on a pilgrimage or a march, as
+fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye and they may observe the behaviour
+of each other in the very moment of danger--for where danger is, there is
+no fear that the poor will be despised by the rich--and very likely the
+wiry sunburnt poor man may be placed in battle at the side of a wealthy one
+who has never spoilt his complexion and has plenty of superfluous flesh--
+when he sees such an one puffing and at his wits'-end, how can he avoid
+drawing the conclusion that men like him are only rich because no one has
+the courage to despoil them?  And when they meet in private will not people
+be saying to one another 'Our warriors are not good for much'?
+
+Yes, he said, I am quite aware that this is their way of talking.
+
+And, as in a body which is diseased the addition of a touch from without
+may bring on illness, and sometimes even when there is no external
+provocation a commotion may arise within--in the same way wherever there is
+weakness in the State there is also likely to be illness, of which the
+occasion may be very slight, the one party introducing from without their
+oligarchical, the other their democratical allies, and then the State falls
+sick, and is at war with herself; and may be at times distracted, even when
+there is no external cause.
+
+Yes, surely.
+
+And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their
+opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder
+they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of
+government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution has
+been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite party to
+withdraw.
+
+And now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government have
+they? for as the government is, such will be the man.
+
+Clearly, he said.
+
+In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom
+and frankness--a man may say and do what he likes?
+
+'Tis said so, he replied.
+
+And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself
+his own life as he pleases?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human
+natures?
+
+There will.
+
+This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being like an
+embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower.  And just as
+women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most
+charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with
+the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of
+States.
+
+Yes.
+
+Yes, my good Sir, and there will be no better in which to look for a
+government.
+
+Why?
+
+Because of the liberty which reigns there--they have a complete assortment
+of constitutions; and he who has a mind to establish a State, as we have
+been doing, must go to a democracy as he would to a bazaar at which they
+sell them, and pick out the one that suits him; then, when he has made his
+choice, he may found his State.
+
+He will be sure to have patterns enough.
+
+And there being no necessity, I said, for you to govern in this State, even
+if you have the capacity, or to be governed, unless you like, or go to war
+when the rest go to war, or to be at peace when others are at peace, unless
+you are so disposed--there being no necessity also, because some law
+forbids you to hold office or be a dicast, that you should not hold office
+or be a dicast, if you have a fancy--is not this a way of life which for
+the moment is supremely delightful?
+
+For the moment, yes.
+
+And is not their humanity to the condemned in some cases quite charming? 
+Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although they have
+been sentenced to death or exile, just stay where they are and walk about
+the world--the gentleman parades like a hero, and nobody sees or cares?
+
+Yes, he replied, many and many a one.
+
+See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the 'don't care'
+about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine principles
+which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the city--as when we said
+that, except in the case of some rarely gifted nature, there never will be
+a good man who has not from his childhood been used to play amid things of
+beauty and make of them a joy and a study--how grandly does she trample all
+these fine notions of ours under her feet, never giving a thought to the
+pursuits which make a statesman, and promoting to honour any one who
+professes to be the people's friend.
+
+Yes, she is of a noble spirit.
+
+These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a
+charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a
+sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
+
+We know her well.
+
+Consider now, I said, what manner of man the individual is, or rather
+consider, as in the case of the State, how he comes into being.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Is not this the way--he is the son of the miserly and oligarchical father
+who has trained him in his own habits?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And, like his father, he keeps under by force the pleasures which are of
+the spending and not of the getting sort, being those which are called
+unnecessary?
+
+Obviously.
+
+Would you like, for the sake of clearness, to distinguish which are the
+necessary and which are the unnecessary pleasures?
+
+I should.
+
+Are not necessary pleasures those of which we cannot get rid, and of which
+the satisfaction is a benefit to us?  And they are rightly called so,
+because we are framed by nature to desire both what is beneficial and what
+is necessary, and cannot help it.
+
+True.
+
+We are not wrong therefore in calling them necessary?
+
+We are not.
+
+And the desires of which a man may get rid, if he takes pains from his
+youth upwards--of which the presence, moreover, does no good, and in some
+cases the reverse of good--shall we not be right in saying that all these
+are unnecessary?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+Suppose we select an example of either kind, in order that we may have a
+general notion of them?
+
+Very good.
+
+Will not the desire of eating, that is, of simple food and condiments, in
+so far as they are required for health and strength, be of the necessary
+class?
+
+That is what I should suppose.
+
+The pleasure of eating is necessary in two ways; it does us good and it is
+essential to the continuance of life?
+
+Yes.
+
+But the condiments are only necessary in so far as they are good for
+health?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the desire which goes beyond this, of more delicate food, or other
+luxuries, which might generally be got rid of, if controlled and trained in
+youth, and is hurtful to the body, and hurtful to the soul in the pursuit
+of wisdom and virtue, may be rightly called unnecessary?
+
+Very true.
+
+May we not say that these desires spend, and that the others make money
+because they conduce to production?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And of the pleasures of love, and all other pleasures, the same holds good?
+
+True.
+
+And the drone of whom we spoke was he who was surfeited in pleasures and
+desires of this sort, and was the slave of the unnecessary desires, whereas
+he who was subject to the necessary only was miserly and oligarchical?
+
+Very true.
+
+Again, let us see how the democratical man grows out of the oligarchical: 
+the following, as I suspect, is commonly the process.
+
+What is the process?
+
+When a young man who has been brought up as we were just now describing, in
+a vulgar and miserly way, has tasted drones' honey and has come to
+associate with fierce and crafty natures who are able to provide for him
+all sorts of refinements and varieties of pleasure--then, as you may
+imagine, the change will begin of the oligarchical principle within him
+into the democratical?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+And as in the city like was helping like, and the change was effected by an
+alliance from without assisting one division of the citizens, so too the
+young man is changed by a class of desires coming from without to assist
+the desires within him, that which is akin and alike again helping that
+which is akin and alike?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if there be any ally which aids the oligarchical principle within him,
+whether the influence of a father or of kindred, advising or rebuking him,
+then there arises in his soul a faction and an opposite faction, and he
+goes to war with himself.
+
+It must be so.
+
+And there are times when the democratical principle gives way to the
+oligarchical, and some of his desires die, and others are banished; a
+spirit of reverence enters into the young man's soul and order is restored.
+
+Yes, he said, that sometimes happens.
+
+And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones
+spring up, which are akin to them, and because he their father does not
+know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.
+
+Yes, he said, that is apt to be the way.
+
+They draw him to his old associates, and holding secret intercourse with
+them, breed and multiply in him.
+
+Very true.
+
+At length they seize upon the citadel of the young man's soul, which they
+perceive to be void of all accomplishments and fair pursuits and true
+words, which make their abode in the minds of men who are dear to the gods,
+and are their best guardians and sentinels.
+
+None better.
+
+False and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their place.
+
+They are certain to do so.
+
+And so the young man returns into the country of the lotus-eaters, and
+takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men; and if any help be sent
+by his friends to the oligarchical part of him, the aforesaid vain conceits
+shut the gate of the king's fastness; and they will neither allow the
+embassy itself to enter, nor if private advisers offer the fatherly counsel
+of the aged will they listen to them or receive them.  There is a battle
+and they gain the day, and then modesty, which they call silliness, is
+ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they
+nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and cast forth; they persuade
+men that moderation and orderly expenditure are vulgarity and meanness, and
+so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them beyond the
+border.
+
+Yes, with a will.
+
+And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in
+their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next
+thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and
+impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads, and a great
+company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names;
+insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence,
+and impudence courage.  And so the young man passes out of his original
+nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and
+libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.
+
+Yes, he said, the change in him is visible enough.
+
+After this he lives on, spending his money and labour and time on
+unnecessary pleasures quite as much as on necessary ones; but if he be
+fortunate, and is not too much disordered in his wits, when years have
+elapsed, and the heyday of passion is over--supposing that he then
+re-admits into the city some part of the exiled virtues, and does not
+wholly give himself up to their successors--in that case he balances his
+pleasures and lives in a sort of equilibrium, putting the government of
+himself into the hands of the one which comes first and wins the turn; and
+when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another; he despises
+none of them but encourages them all equally.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress any true word of
+advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of
+good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to
+use and honour some and chastise and master the others--whenever this is
+repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and
+that one is as good as another.
+
+Yes, he said; that is the way with him.
+
+Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour;
+and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he
+becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at
+gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more
+living the life of a philosopher; often he is busy with politics, and
+starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if
+he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or
+of men of business, once more in that.  His life has neither law nor order;
+and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he
+goes on.
+
+Yes, he replied, he is all liberty and equality.
+
+Yes, I said; his life is motley and manifold and an epitome of the lives of
+many;--he answers to the State which we described as fair and spangled. 
+And many a man and many a woman will take him for their pattern, and many a
+constitution and many an example of manners is contained in him.
+
+Just so.
+
+Let him then be set over against democracy; he may truly be called the
+democratic man.
+
+Let that be his place, he said.
+
+Last of all comes the most beautiful of all, man and State alike, tyranny
+and the tyrant; these we have now to consider.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Say then, my friend, In what manner does tyranny arise?--that it has a
+democratic origin is evident.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy
+from oligarchy--I mean, after a sort?
+
+How?
+
+The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it was
+maintained was excess of wealth--am I not right?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for
+the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy?
+
+True.
+
+And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her
+to dissolution?
+
+What good?
+
+Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of
+the State--and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of
+nature deign to dwell.
+
+Yes; the saying is in every body's mouth.
+
+I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect
+of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a
+demand for tyranny.
+
+How so?
+
+When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cup-bearers
+presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of
+freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful
+draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they
+are cursed oligarchs.
+
+Yes, he replied, a very common occurrence.
+
+Yes, I said; and loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who
+hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like
+rulers, and rulers who are like subjects:  these are men after her own
+heart, whom she praises and honours both in private and public.  Now, in
+such a State, can liberty have any limit?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting
+among the animals and infecting them.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons
+and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no
+respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom,
+and the metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and
+the stranger is quite as good as either.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the way.
+
+And these are not the only evils, I said--there are several lesser ones: 
+In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his scholars, and
+the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike;
+and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with
+him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of
+pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought morose and
+authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money,
+whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser; nor must I
+forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to
+each other.
+
+Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?
+
+That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who does not
+know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the animals who
+are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in any other State: 
+for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as good as their
+she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of marching along with
+all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at any body who
+comes in their way if he does not leave the road clear for them:  and all
+things are just ready to burst with liberty.
+
+When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you describe. 
+You and I have dreamed the same thing.
+
+And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the
+citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority,
+and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written
+or unwritten; they will have no one over them.
+
+Yes, he said, I know it too well.
+
+Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which
+springs tyranny.
+
+Glorious indeed, he said.  But what is the next step?
+
+The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified
+and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy--the truth being that the
+excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite
+direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable
+and animal life, but above all in forms of government.
+
+True.
+
+The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass
+into excess of slavery.
+
+Yes, the natural order.
+
+And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated
+form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?
+
+As we might expect.
+
+That, however, was not, as I believe, your question--you rather desired to
+know what is that disorder which is generated alike in oligarchy and
+democracy, and is the ruin of both?
+
+Just so, he replied.
+
+Well, I said, I meant to refer to the class of idle spendthrifts, of whom
+the more courageous are the leaders and the more timid the followers, the
+same whom we were comparing to drones, some stingless, and others having
+stings.
+
+A very just comparison.
+
+These two classes are the plagues of every city in which they are
+generated, being what phlegm and bile are to the body.  And the good
+physician and lawgiver of the State ought, like the wise bee-master, to
+keep them at a distance and prevent, if possible, their ever coming in; and
+if they have anyhow found a way in, then he should have them and their
+cells cut out as speedily as possible.
+
+Yes, by all means, he said.
+
+Then, in order that we may see clearly what we are doing, let us imagine
+democracy to be divided, as indeed it is, into three classes; for in the
+first place freedom creates rather more drones in the democratic than there
+were in the oligarchical State.
+
+That is true.
+
+And in the democracy they are certainly more intensified.
+
+How so?
+
+Because in the oligarchical State they are disqualified and driven from
+office, and therefore they cannot train or gather strength; whereas in a
+democracy they are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener
+sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema and do not suffer
+a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies almost everything
+is managed by the drones.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass.
+
+What is that?
+
+They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders is sure to be the
+richest.
+
+Naturally so.
+
+They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey
+to the drones.
+
+Why, he said, there is little to be squeezed out of people who have little.
+
+And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them.
+
+That is pretty much the case, he said.
+
+The people are a third class, consisting of those who work with their own
+hands; they are not politicians, and have not much to live upon.  This,
+when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a democracy.
+
+True, he said; but then the multitude is seldom willing to congregate
+unless they get a little honey.
+
+And do they not share? I said.  Do not their leaders deprive the rich of
+their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time taking
+care to reserve the larger part for themselves?
+
+Why, yes, he said, to that extent the people do share.
+
+And the persons whose property is taken from them are compelled to defend
+themselves before the people as they best can?
+
+What else can they do?
+
+And then, although they may have no desire of change, the others charge
+them with plotting against the people and being friends of oligarchy?
+
+True.
+
+And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord, but
+through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers, seeking to
+do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become oligarchs in reality;
+they do not wish to be, but the sting of the drones torments them and
+breeds revolution in them.
+
+That is exactly the truth.
+
+Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.
+
+True.
+
+The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into
+greatness.
+
+Yes, that is their way.
+
+This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first
+appears above ground he is a protector.
+
+Yes, that is quite clear.
+
+How then does a protector begin to change into a tyrant?  Clearly when he
+does what the man is said to do in the tale of the Arcadian temple of
+Lycaean Zeus.
+
+What tale?
+
+The tale is that he who has tasted the entrails of a single human victim
+minced up with the entrails of other victims is destined to become a wolf. 
+Did you never hear it?
+
+Oh, yes.
+
+And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at his
+disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen; by the
+favourite method of false accusation he brings them into court and murders
+them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy tongue and lips
+tasting the blood of his fellow citizens; some he kills and others he
+banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of debts and partition
+of lands:  and after this, what will be his destiny?  Must he not either
+perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a man become a wolf--that
+is, a tyrant?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+This, I said, is he who begins to make a party against the rich?
+
+The same.
+
+After a while he is driven out, but comes back, in spite of his enemies, a
+tyrant full grown.
+
+That is clear.
+
+And if they are unable to expel him, or to get him condemned to death by a
+public accusation, they conspire to assassinate him.
+
+Yes, he said, that is their usual way.
+
+Then comes the famous request for a body-guard, which is the device of all
+those who have got thus far in their tyrannical career--'Let not the
+people's friend,' as they say, 'be lost to them.'
+
+Exactly.
+
+The people readily assent; all their fears are for him--they have none for
+themselves.
+
+Very true.
+
+And when a man who is wealthy and is also accused of being an enemy of the
+people sees this, then, my friend, as the oracle said to Croesus,
+
+'By pebbly Hermus' shore he flees and rests not, and is not ashamed to be a
+coward.'
+
+And quite right too, said he, for if he were, he would never be ashamed
+again.
+
+But if he is caught he dies.
+
+Of course.
+
+And he, the protector of whom we spoke, is to be seen, not 'larding the
+plain' with his bulk, but himself the overthrower of many, standing up in
+the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer protector, but
+tyrant absolute.
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+And now let us consider the happiness of the man, and also of the State in
+which a creature like him is generated.
+
+Yes, he said, let us consider that.
+
+At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he
+salutes every one whom he meets;--he to be called a tyrant, who is making
+promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and
+distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so
+kind and good to every one!
+
+Of course, he said.
+
+But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and
+there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war
+or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
+
+To be sure.
+
+Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by
+payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily
+wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom, and
+of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for destroying
+them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all these reasons
+the tyrant must be always getting up a war.
+
+He must.
+
+Now he begins to grow unpopular.
+
+A necessary result.
+
+Then some of those who joined in setting him up, and who are in power,
+speak their minds to him and to one another, and the more courageous of
+them cast in his teeth what is being done.
+
+Yes, that may be expected.
+
+And the tyrant, if he means to rule, must get rid of them; he cannot stop
+while he has a friend or an enemy who is good for anything.
+
+He cannot.
+
+And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is
+high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy of
+them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no, until
+he has made a purgation of the State.
+
+Yes, he said, and a rare purgation.
+
+Yes, I said, not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the
+body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he does
+the reverse.
+
+If he is to rule, I suppose that he cannot help himself.
+
+What a blessed alternative, I said:--to be compelled to dwell only with the
+many bad, and to be by them hated, or not to live at all!
+
+Yes, that is the alternative.
+
+And the more detestable his actions are to the citizens the more satellites
+and the greater devotion in them will he require?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them?
+
+They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if he pays them.
+
+By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every
+land.
+
+Yes, he said, there are.
+
+But will he not desire to get them on the spot?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+He will rob the citizens of their slaves; he will then set them free and
+enrol them in his body-guard.
+
+To be sure, he said; and he will be able to trust them best of all.
+
+What a blessed creature, I said, must this tyrant be; he has put to death
+the others and has these for his trusted friends.
+
+Yes, he said; they are quite of his sort.
+
+Yes, I said, and these are the new citizens whom he has called into
+existence, who admire him and are his companions, while the good hate and
+avoid him.
+
+Of course.
+
+Verily, then, tragedy is a wise thing and Euripides a great tragedian.
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, because he is the author of the pregnant saying,
+
+'Tyrants are wise by living with the wise;'
+
+and he clearly meant to say that they are the wise whom the tyrant makes
+his companions.
+
+Yes, he said, and he also praises tyranny as godlike; and many other things
+of the same kind are said by him and by the other poets.
+
+And therefore, I said, the tragic poets being wise men will forgive us and
+any others who live after our manner if we do not receive them into our
+State, because they are the eulogists of tyranny.
+
+Yes, he said, those who have the wit will doubtless forgive us.
+
+But they will continue to go to other cities and attract mobs, and hire
+voices fair and loud and persuasive, and draw the cities over to tyrannies
+and democracies.
+
+Very true.
+
+Moreover, they are paid for this and receive honour--the greatest honour,
+as might be expected, from tyrants, and the next greatest from democracies;
+but the higher they ascend our constitution hill, the more their reputation
+fails, and seems unable from shortness of breath to proceed further.
+
+True.
+
+But we are wandering from the subject:  Let us therefore return and enquire
+how the tyrant will maintain that fair and numerous and various and
+ever-changing army of his.
+
+If, he said, there are sacred treasures in the city, he will confiscate and
+spend them; and in so far as the fortunes of attainted persons may suffice,
+he will be able to diminish the taxes which he would otherwise have to
+impose upon the people.
+
+And when these fail?
+
+Why, clearly, he said, then he and his boon companions, whether male or
+female, will be maintained out of his father's estate.
+
+You mean to say that the people, from whom he has derived his being, will
+maintain him and his companions?
+
+Yes, he said; they cannot help themselves.
+
+But what if the people fly into a passion, and aver that a grown-up son
+ought not to be supported by his father, but that the father should be
+supported by the son?  The father did not bring him into being, or settle
+him in life, in order that when his son became a man he should himself be
+the servant of his own servants and should support him and his rabble of
+slaves and companions; but that his son should protect him, and that by his
+help he might be emancipated from the government of the rich and
+aristocratic, as they are termed.  And so he bids him and his companions
+depart, just as any other father might drive out of the house a riotous son
+and his undesirable associates.
+
+By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has
+been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he will
+find that he is weak and his son strong.
+
+Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence?  What! beat
+his father if he opposes him?
+
+Yes, he will, having first disarmed him.
+
+Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and this is
+real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake:  as the saying
+is, the people who would escape the smoke which is the slavery of freemen,
+has fallen into the fire which is the tyranny of slaves.  Thus liberty,
+getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest
+form of slavery.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Very well; and may we not rightly say that we have sufficiently discussed
+the nature of tyranny, and the manner of the transition from democracy to
+tyranny?
+
+Yes, quite enough, he said.
+
+
+BOOK IX.
+
+Last of all comes the tyrannical man; about whom we have once more to ask,
+how is he formed out of the democratical? and how does he live, in
+happiness or in misery?
+
+Yes, he said, he is the only one remaining.
+
+There is, however, I said, a previous question which remains unanswered.
+
+What question?
+
+I do not think that we have adequately determined the nature and number of
+the appetites, and until this is accomplished the enquiry will always be
+confused.
+
+Well, he said, it is not too late to supply the omission.
+
+Very true, I said; and observe the point which I want to understand: 
+Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be
+unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are
+controlled by the laws and by reason, and the better desires prevail over
+them--either they are wholly banished or they become few and weak; while in
+the case of others they are stronger, and there are more of them.
+
+Which appetites do you mean?
+
+I mean those which are awake when the reasoning and human and ruling power
+is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or drink, starts
+up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his desires; and
+there is no conceivable folly or crime--not excepting incest or any other
+unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food--which at
+such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may
+not be ready to commit.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+But when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and when before going to
+sleep he has awakened his rational powers, and fed them on noble thoughts
+and enquiries, collecting himself in meditation; after having first
+indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to
+lay them to sleep, and prevent them and their enjoyments and pains from
+interfering with the higher principle--which he leaves in the solitude of
+pure abstraction, free to contemplate and aspire to the knowledge of the
+unknown, whether in past, present, or future:  when again he has allayed
+the passionate element, if he has a quarrel against any one--I say, when,
+after pacifying the two irrational principles, he rouses up the third,
+which is reason, before he takes his rest, then, as you know, he attains
+truth most nearly, and is least likely to be the sport of fantastic and
+lawless visions.
+
+I quite agree.
+
+In saying this I have been running into a digression; but the point which I
+desire to note is that in all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless
+wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.  Pray, consider whether I am
+right, and you agree with me.
+
+Yes, I agree.
+
+And now remember the character which we attributed to the democratic man. 
+He was supposed from his youth upwards to have been trained under a miserly
+parent, who encouraged the saving appetites in him, but discountenanced the
+unnecessary, which aim only at amusement and ornament?
+
+True.
+
+And then he got into the company of a more refined, licentious sort of
+people, and taking to all their wanton ways rushed into the opposite
+extreme from an abhorrence of his father's meanness.  At last, being a
+better man than his corruptors, he was drawn in both directions until he
+halted midway and led a life, not of vulgar and slavish passion, but of
+what he deemed moderate indulgence in various pleasures.  After this manner
+the democrat was generated out of the oligarch?
+
+Yes, he said; that was our view of him, and is so still.
+
+And now, I said, years will have passed away, and you must conceive this
+man, such as he is, to have a son, who is brought up in his father's
+principles.
+
+I can imagine him.
+
+Then you must further imagine the same thing to happen to the son which has
+already happened to the father:--he is drawn into a perfectly lawless life,
+which by his seducers is termed perfect liberty; and his father and friends
+take part with his moderate desires, and the opposite party assist the
+opposite ones.  As soon as these dire magicians and tyrant-makers find that
+they are losing their hold on him, they contrive to implant in him a master
+passion, to be lord over his idle and spendthrift lusts--a sort of
+monstrous winged drone--that is the only image which will adequately
+describe him.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the only adequate image of him.
+
+And when his other lusts, amid clouds of incense and perfumes and garlands
+and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life, now let loose, come
+buzzing around him, nourishing to the utmost the sting of desire which they
+implant in his drone-like nature, then at last this lord of the soul,
+having Madness for the captain of his guard, breaks out into a frenzy:  and
+if he finds in himself any good opinions or appetites in process of
+formation, and there is in him any sense of shame remaining, to these
+better principles he puts an end, and casts them forth until he has purged
+away temperance and brought in madness to the full.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the way in which the tyrannical man is generated.
+
+And is not this the reason why of old love has been called a tyrant?
+
+I should not wonder.
+
+Further, I said, has not a drunken man also the spirit of a tyrant?
+
+He has.
+
+And you know that a man who is deranged and not right in his mind, will
+fancy that he is able to rule, not only over men, but also over the gods?
+
+That he will.
+
+And the tyrannical man in the true sense of the word comes into being when,
+either under the influence of nature, or habit, or both, he becomes
+drunken, lustful, passionate?  O my friend, is not that so?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Such is the man and such is his origin.  And next, how does he live?
+
+Suppose, as people facetiously say, you were to tell me.
+
+I imagine, I said, at the next step in his progress, that there will be
+feasts and carousals and revellings and courtezans, and all that sort of
+thing; Love is the lord of the house within him, and orders all the
+concerns of his soul.
+
+That is certain.
+
+Yes; and every day and every night desires grow up many and formidable, and
+their demands are many.
+
+They are indeed, he said.
+
+His revenues, if he has any, are soon spent.
+
+True.
+
+Then comes debt and the cutting down of his property.
+
+Of course.
+
+When he has nothing left, must not his desires, crowding in the nest like
+young ravens, be crying aloud for food; and he, goaded on by them, and
+especially by love himself, who is in a manner the captain of them, is in a
+frenzy, and would fain discover whom he can defraud or despoil of his
+property, in order that he may gratify them?
+
+Yes, that is sure to be the case.
+
+He must have money, no matter how, if he is to escape horrid pains and
+pangs.
+
+He must.
+
+And as in himself there was a succession of pleasures, and the new got the
+better of the old and took away their rights, so he being younger will
+claim to have more than his father and his mother, and if he has spent his
+own share of the property, he will take a slice of theirs.
+
+No doubt he will.
+
+And if his parents will not give way, then he will try first of all to
+cheat and deceive them.
+
+Very true.
+
+And if he fails, then he will use force and plunder them.
+
+Yes, probably.
+
+And if the old man and woman fight for their own, what then, my friend? 
+Will the creature feel any compunction at tyrannizing over them?
+
+Nay, he said, I should not feel at all comfortable about his parents.
+
+But, O heavens! Adeimantus, on account of some new-fangled love of a
+harlot, who is anything but a necessary connection, can you believe that he
+would strike the mother who is his ancient friend and necessary to his very
+existence, and would place her under the authority of the other, when she
+is brought under the same roof with her; or that, under like circumstances,
+he would do the same to his withered old father, first and most
+indispensable of friends, for the sake of some newly-found blooming youth
+who is the reverse of indispensable?
+
+Yes, indeed, he said; I believe that he would.
+
+Truly, then, I said, a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and
+mother.
+
+He is indeed, he replied.
+
+He first takes their property, and when that fails, and pleasures are
+beginning to swarm in the hive of his soul, then he breaks into a house, or
+steals the garments of some nightly wayfarer; next he proceeds to clear a
+temple.  Meanwhile the old opinions which he had when a child, and which
+gave judgment about good and evil, are overthrown by those others which
+have just been emancipated, and are now the body-guard of love and share
+his empire.  These in his democratic days, when he was still subject to the
+laws and to his father, were only let loose in the dreams of sleep.  But
+now that he is under the dominion of love, he becomes always and in waking
+reality what he was then very rarely and in a dream only; he will commit
+the foulest murder, or eat forbidden food, or be guilty of any other horrid
+act.  Love is his tyrant, and lives lordly in him and lawlessly, and being
+himself a king, leads him on, as a tyrant leads a State, to the performance
+of any reckless deed by which he can maintain himself and the rabble of his
+associates, whether those whom evil communications have brought in from
+without, or those whom he himself has allowed to break loose within him by
+reason of a similar evil nature in himself.  Have we not here a picture of
+his way of life?
+
+Yes, indeed, he said.
+
+And if there are only a few of them in the State, and the rest of the
+people are well disposed, they go away and become the body-guard or
+mercenary soldiers of some other tyrant who may probably want them for a
+war; and if there is no war, they stay at home and do many little pieces of
+mischief in the city.
+
+What sort of mischief?
+
+For example, they are the thieves, burglars, cut-purses, foot-pads, robbers
+of temples, man-stealers of the community; or if they are able to speak
+they turn informers, and bear false witness, and take bribes.
+
+A small catalogue of evils, even if the perpetrators of them are few in
+number.
+
+Yes, I said; but small and great are comparative terms, and all these
+things, in the misery and evil which they inflict upon a State, do not come
+within a thousand miles of the tyrant; when this noxious class and their
+followers grow numerous and become conscious of their strength, assisted by
+the infatuation of the people, they choose from among themselves the one
+who has most of the tyrant in his own soul, and him they create their
+tyrant.
+
+Yes, he said, and he will be the most fit to be a tyrant.
+
+If the people yield, well and good; but if they resist him, as he began by
+beating his own father and mother, so now, if he has the power, he beats
+them, and will keep his dear old fatherland or motherland, as the Cretans
+say, in subjection to his young retainers whom he has introduced to be
+their rulers and masters.  This is the end of his passions and desires.
+
+Exactly.
+
+When such men are only private individuals and before they get power, this
+is their character; they associate entirely with their own flatterers or
+ready tools; or if they want anything from anybody, they in their turn are
+equally ready to bow down before them:  they profess every sort of
+affection for them; but when they have gained their point they know them no
+more.
+
+Yes, truly.
+
+They are always either the masters or servants and never the friends of
+anybody; the tyrant never tastes of true freedom or friendship.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And may we not rightly call such men treacherous?
+
+No question.
+
+Also they are utterly unjust, if we were right in our notion of justice?
+
+Yes, he said, and we were perfectly right.
+
+Let us then sum up in a word, I said, the character of the worst man:  he
+is the waking reality of what we dreamed.
+
+Most true.
+
+And this is he who being by nature most of a tyrant bears rule, and the
+longer he lives the more of a tyrant he becomes.
+
+That is certain, said Glaucon, taking his turn to answer.
+
+And will not he who has been shown to be the wickedest, be also the most
+miserable? and he who has tyrannized longest and most, most continually and
+truly miserable; although this may not be the opinion of men in general?
+
+Yes, he said, inevitably.
+
+And must not the tyrannical man be like the tyrannical State, and the
+democratical man like the democratical State; and the same of the others?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And as State is to State in virtue and happiness, so is man in relation to
+man?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then comparing our original city, which was under a king, and the city
+which is under a tyrant, how do they stand as to virtue?
+
+They are the opposite extremes, he said, for one is the very best and the
+other is the very worst.
+
+There can be no mistake, I said, as to which is which, and therefore I will
+at once enquire whether you would arrive at a similar decision about their
+relative happiness and misery.  And here we must not allow ourselves to be
+panic-stricken at the apparition of the tyrant, who is only a unit and may
+perhaps have a few retainers about him; but let us go as we ought into
+every corner of the city and look all about, and then we will give our
+opinion.
+
+A fair invitation, he replied; and I see, as every one must, that a tyranny
+is the wretchedest form of government, and the rule of a king the happiest.
+
+And in estimating the men too, may I not fairly make a like request, that I
+should have a judge whose mind can enter into and see through human nature?
+he must not be like a child who looks at the outside and is dazzled at the
+pompous aspect which the tyrannical nature assumes to the beholder, but let
+him be one who has a clear insight.  May I suppose that the judgment is
+given in the hearing of us all by one who is able to judge, and has dwelt
+in the same place with him, and been present at his dally life and known
+him in his family relations, where he may be seen stripped of his tragedy
+attire, and again in the hour of public danger--he shall tell us about the
+happiness and misery of the tyrant when compared with other men?
+
+That again, he said, is a very fair proposal.
+
+Shall I assume that we ourselves are able and experienced judges and have
+before now met with such a person?  We shall then have some one who will
+answer our enquiries.
+
+By all means.
+
+Let me ask you not to forget the parallel of the individual and the State;
+bearing this in mind, and glancing in turn from one to the other of them,
+will you tell me their respective conditions?
+
+What do you mean? he asked.
+
+Beginning with the State, I replied, would you say that a city which is
+governed by a tyrant is free or enslaved?
+
+No city, he said, can be more completely enslaved.
+
+And yet, as you see, there are freemen as well as masters in such a State?
+
+Yes, he said, I see that there are--a few; but the people, speaking
+generally, and the best of them are miserably degraded and enslaved.
+
+Then if the man is like the State, I said, must not the same rule prevail?
+his soul is full of meanness and vulgarity--the best elements in him are
+enslaved; and there is a small ruling part, which is also the worst and
+maddest.
+
+Inevitably.
+
+And would you say that the soul of such an one is the soul of a freeman, or
+of a slave?
+
+He has the soul of a slave, in my opinion.
+
+And the State which is enslaved under a tyrant is utterly incapable of
+acting voluntarily?
+
+Utterly incapable.
+
+And also the soul which is under a tyrant (I am speaking of the soul taken
+as a whole) is least capable of doing what she desires; there is a gadfly
+which goads her, and she is full of trouble and remorse?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is the city which is under a tyrant rich or poor?
+
+Poor.
+
+And the tyrannical soul must be always poor and insatiable?
+
+True.
+
+And must not such a State and such a man be always full of fear?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+Is there any State in which you will find more of lamentation and sorrow
+and groaning and pain?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And is there any man in whom you will find more of this sort of misery than
+in the tyrannical man, who is in a fury of passions and desires?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Reflecting upon these and similar evils, you held the tyrannical State to
+be the most miserable of States?
+
+And I was right, he said.
+
+Certainly, I said.  And when you see the same evils in the tyrannical man,
+what do you say of him?
+
+I say that he is by far the most miserable of all men.
+
+There, I said, I think that you are beginning to go wrong.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I do not think that he has as yet reached the utmost extreme of misery.
+
+Then who is more miserable?
+
+One of whom I am about to speak.
+
+Who is that?
+
+He who is of a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life has
+been cursed with the further misfortune of being a public tyrant.
+
+From what has been said, I gather that you are right.
+
+Yes, I replied, but in this high argument you should be a little more
+certain, and should not conjecture only; for of all questions, this
+respecting good and evil is the greatest.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Let me then offer you an illustration, which may, I think, throw a light
+upon this subject.
+
+What is your illustration?
+
+The case of rich individuals in cities who possess many slaves:  from them
+you may form an idea of the tyrant's condition, for they both have slaves;
+the only difference is that he has more slaves.
+
+Yes, that is the difference.
+
+You know that they live securely and have nothing to apprehend from their
+servants?
+
+What should they fear?
+
+Nothing.  But do you observe the reason of this?
+
+Yes; the reason is, that the whole city is leagued together for the
+protection of each individual.
+
+Very true, I said.  But imagine one of these owners, the master say of some
+fifty slaves, together with his family and property and slaves, carried off
+by a god into the wilderness, where there are no freemen to help him--will
+he not be in an agony of fear lest he and his wife and children should be
+put to death by his slaves?
+
+Yes, he said, he will be in the utmost fear.
+
+The time has arrived when he will be compelled to flatter divers of his
+slaves, and make many promises to them of freedom and other things, much
+against his will--he will have to cajole his own servants.
+
+Yes, he said, that will be the only way of saving himself.
+
+And suppose the same god, who carried him away, to surround him with
+neighbours who will not suffer one man to be the master of another, and
+who, if they could catch the offender, would take his life?
+
+His case will be still worse, if you suppose him to be everywhere
+surrounded and watched by enemies.
+
+And is not this the sort of prison in which the tyrant will be bound--he
+who being by nature such as we have described, is full of all sorts of
+fears and lusts?  His soul is dainty and greedy, and yet alone, of all men
+in the city, he is never allowed to go on a journey, or to see the things
+which other freemen desire to see, but he lives in his hole like a woman
+hidden in the house, and is jealous of any other citizen who goes into
+foreign parts and sees anything of interest.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And amid evils such as these will not he who is ill-governed in his own
+person--the tyrannical man, I mean--whom you just now decided to be the
+most miserable of all--will not he be yet more miserable when, instead of
+leading a private life, he is constrained by fortune to be a public tyrant? 
+He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself:  he is like
+a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his life, not in
+retirement, but fighting and combating with other men.
+
+Yes, he said, the similitude is most exact.
+
+Is not his case utterly miserable? and does not the actual tyrant lead a
+worse life than he whose life you determined to be the worst?
+
+Certainly.
+
+He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and
+is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the
+flatterer of the vilest of mankind.  He has desires which he is utterly
+unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if
+you know how to inspect the whole soul of him:  all his life long he is
+beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions, even as the
+State which he resembles:  and surely the resemblance holds?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power:  he
+becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more
+friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor and
+cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is
+supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as
+himself.
+
+No man of any sense will dispute your words.
+
+Come then, I said, and as the general umpire in theatrical contests
+proclaims the result, do you also decide who in your opinion is first in
+the scale of happiness, and who second, and in what order the others
+follow:  there are five of them in all--they are the royal, timocratical,
+oligarchical, democratical, tyrannical.
+
+The decision will be easily given, he replied; they shall be choruses
+coming on the stage, and I must judge them in the order in which they
+enter, by the criterion of virtue and vice, happiness and misery.
+
+Need we hire a herald, or shall I announce, that the son of Ariston (the
+best) has decided that the best and justest is also the happiest, and that
+this is he who is the most royal man and king over himself; and that the
+worst and most unjust man is also the most miserable, and that this is he
+who being the greatest tyrant of himself is also the greatest tyrant of his
+State?
+
+Make the proclamation yourself, he said.
+
+And shall I add, 'whether seen or unseen by gods and men'?
+
+Let the words be added.
+
+Then this, I said, will be our first proof; and there is another, which may
+also have some weight.
+
+What is that?
+
+The second proof is derived from the nature of the soul:  seeing that the
+individual soul, like the State, has been divided by us into three
+principles, the division may, I think, furnish a new demonstration.
+
+Of what nature?
+
+It seems to me that to these three principles three pleasures correspond;
+also three desires and governing powers.
+
+How do you mean? he said.
+
+There is one principle with which, as we were saying, a man learns, another
+with which he is angry; the third, having many forms, has no special name,
+but is denoted by the general term appetitive, from the extraordinary
+strength and vehemence of the desires of eating and drinking and the other
+sensual appetites which are the main elements of it; also money-loving,
+because such desires are generally satisfied by the help of money.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+If we were to say that the loves and pleasures of this third part were
+concerned with gain, we should then be able to fall back on a single
+notion; and might truly and intelligibly describe this part of the soul as
+loving gain or money.
+
+I agree with you.
+
+Again, is not the passionate element wholly set on ruling and conquering
+and getting fame?
+
+True.
+
+Suppose we call it the contentious or ambitious--would the term be
+suitable?
+
+Extremely suitable.
+
+On the other hand, every one sees that the principle of knowledge is wholly
+directed to the truth, and cares less than either of the others for gain or
+fame.
+
+Far less.
+
+'Lover of wisdom,' 'lover of knowledge,' are titles which we may fitly
+apply to that part of the soul?
+
+Certainly.
+
+One principle prevails in the souls of one class of men, another in others,
+as may happen?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men--lovers
+of wisdom, lovers of honour, lovers of gain?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And there are three kinds of pleasure, which are their several objects?
+
+Very true.
+
+Now, if you examine the three classes of men, and ask of them in turn which
+of their lives is pleasantest, each will be found praising his own and
+depreciating that of others:  the money-maker will contrast the vanity of
+honour or of learning if they bring no money with the solid advantages of
+gold and silver?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And the lover of honour--what will be his opinion?  Will he not think that
+the pleasure of riches is vulgar, while the pleasure of learning, if it
+brings no distinction, is all smoke and nonsense to him?
+
+Very true.
+
+And are we to suppose, I said, that the philosopher sets any value on other
+pleasures in comparison with the pleasure of knowing the truth, and in that
+pursuit abiding, ever learning, not so far indeed from the heaven of
+pleasure?  Does he not call the other pleasures necessary, under the idea
+that if there were no necessity for them, he would rather not have them?
+
+There can be no doubt of that, he replied.
+
+Since, then, the pleasures of each class and the life of each are in
+dispute, and the question is not which life is more or less honourable, or
+better or worse, but which is the more pleasant or painless--how shall we
+know who speaks truly?
+
+I cannot myself tell, he said.
+
+Well, but what ought to be the criterion?  Is any better than experience
+and wisdom and reason?
+
+There cannot be a better, he said.
+
+Then, I said, reflect.  Of the three individuals, which has the greatest
+experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated?  Has the lover of
+gain, in learning the nature of essential truth, greater experience of the
+pleasure of knowledge than the philosopher has of the pleasure of gain?
+
+The philosopher, he replied, has greatly the advantage; for he has of
+necessity always known the taste of the other pleasures from his childhood
+upwards:  but the lover of gain in all his experience has not of necessity
+tasted--or, I should rather say, even had he desired, could hardly have
+tasted--the sweetness of learning and knowing truth.
+
+Then the lover of wisdom has a great advantage over the lover of gain, for
+he has a double experience?
+
+Yes, very great.
+
+Again, has he greater experience of the pleasures of honour, or the lover
+of honour of the pleasures of wisdom?
+
+Nay, he said, all three are honoured in proportion as they attain their
+object; for the rich man and the brave man and the wise man alike have
+their crowd of admirers, and as they all receive honour they all have
+experience of the pleasures of honour; but the delight which is to be found
+in the knowledge of true being is known to the philosopher only.
+
+His experience, then, will enable him to judge better than any one?
+
+Far better.
+
+And he is the only one who has wisdom as well as experience?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Further, the very faculty which is the instrument of judgment is not
+possessed by the covetous or ambitious man, but only by the philosopher?
+
+What faculty?
+
+Reason, with whom, as we were saying, the decision ought to rest.
+
+Yes.
+
+And reasoning is peculiarly his instrument?
+
+Certainly.
+
+If wealth and gain were the criterion, then the praise or blame of the
+lover of gain would surely be the most trustworthy?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Or if honour or victory or courage, in that case the judgment of the
+ambitious or pugnacious would be the truest?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But since experience and wisdom and reason are the judges--
+
+The only inference possible, he replied, is that pleasures which are
+approved by the lover of wisdom and reason are the truest.
+
+And so we arrive at the result, that the pleasure of the intelligent part
+of the soul is the pleasantest of the three, and that he of us in whom this
+is the ruling principle has the pleasantest life.
+
+Unquestionably, he said, the wise man speaks with authority when he
+approves of his own life.
+
+And what does the judge affirm to be the life which is next, and the
+pleasure which is next?
+
+Clearly that of the soldier and lover of honour; who is nearer to himself
+than the money-maker.
+
+Last comes the lover of gain?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Twice in succession, then, has the just man overthrown the unjust in this
+conflict; and now comes the third trial, which is dedicated to Olympian
+Zeus the saviour:  a sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure except that
+of the wise is quite true and pure--all others are a shadow only; and
+surely this will prove the greatest and most decisive of falls?
+
+Yes, the greatest; but will you explain yourself?
+
+I will work out the subject and you shall answer my questions.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Say, then, is not pleasure opposed to pain?
+
+True.
+
+And there is a neutral state which is neither pleasure nor pain?
+
+There is.
+
+A state which is intermediate, and a sort of repose of the soul about
+either--that is what you mean?
+
+Yes.
+
+You remember what people say when they are sick?
+
+What do they say?
+
+That after all nothing is pleasanter than health.  But then they never knew
+this to be the greatest of pleasures until they were ill.
+
+Yes, I know, he said.
+
+And when persons are suffering from acute pain, you must have heard them
+say that there is nothing pleasanter than to get rid of their pain?
+
+I have.
+
+And there are many other cases of suffering in which the mere rest and
+cessation of pain, and not any positive enjoyment, is extolled by them as
+the greatest pleasure?
+
+Yes, he said; at the time they are pleased and well content to be at rest.
+
+Again, when pleasure ceases, that sort of rest or cessation will be
+painful?
+
+Doubtless, he said.
+
+Then the intermediate state of rest will be pleasure and will also be pain?
+
+So it would seem.
+
+But can that which is neither become both?
+
+I should say not.
+
+And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul, are they not?
+
+Yes.
+
+But that which is neither was just now shown to be rest and not motion, and
+in a mean between them?
+
+Yes.
+
+How, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is
+pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?
+
+Impossible.
+
+This then is an appearance only and not a reality; that is to say, the rest
+is pleasure at the moment and in comparison of what is painful, and painful
+in comparison of what is pleasant; but all these representations, when
+tried by the test of true pleasure, are not real but a sort of imposition?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+Look at the other class of pleasures which have no antecedent pains and you
+will no longer suppose, as you perhaps may at present, that pleasure is
+only the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
+
+What are they, he said, and where shall I find them?
+
+There are many of them:  take as an example the pleasures of smell, which
+are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a moment, and
+when they depart leave no pain behind them.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the cessation
+of pain, or pain of pleasure.
+
+No.
+
+Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul through
+the body are generally of this sort--they are reliefs of pain.
+
+That is true.
+
+And the anticipations of future pleasures and pains are of a like nature?
+
+Yes.
+
+Shall I give you an illustration of them?
+
+Let me hear.
+
+You would allow, I said, that there is in nature an upper and lower and
+middle region?
+
+I should.
+
+And if a person were to go from the lower to the middle region, would he
+not imagine that he is going up; and he who is standing in the middle and
+sees whence he has come, would imagine that he is already in the upper
+region, if he has never seen the true upper world?
+
+To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?
+
+But if he were taken back again he would imagine, and truly imagine, that
+he was descending?
+
+No doubt.
+
+All that would arise out of his ignorance of the true upper and middle and
+lower regions?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as
+they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong ideas
+about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when they are
+only being drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think the pain
+which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when drawn away from
+pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly believe that they
+have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they, not knowing pleasure,
+err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain, which is like contrasting
+black with grey instead of white--can you wonder, I say, at this?
+
+No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.
+
+Look at the matter thus:--Hunger, thirst, and the like, are inanitions of
+the bodily state?
+
+Yes.
+
+And ignorance and folly are inanitions of the soul?
+
+True.
+
+And food and wisdom are the corresponding satisfactions of either?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is the satisfaction derived from that which has less or from that which
+has more existence the truer?
+
+Clearly, from that which has more.
+
+What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence in your
+judgment--those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of
+sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion and
+knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue?  Put the question
+in this way:--Which has a more pure being--that which is concerned with the
+invariable, the immortal, and the true, and is of such a nature, and is
+found in such natures; or that which is concerned with and found in the
+variable and mortal, and is itself variable and mortal?
+
+Far purer, he replied, is the being of that which is concerned with the
+invariable.
+
+And does the essence of the invariable partake of knowledge in the same
+degree as of essence?
+
+Yes, of knowledge in the same degree.
+
+And of truth in the same degree?
+
+Yes.
+
+And, conversely, that which has less of truth will also have less of
+essence?
+
+Necessarily.
+
+Then, in general, those kinds of things which are in the service of the
+body have less of truth and essence than those which are in the service of
+the soul?
+
+Far less.
+
+And has not the body itself less of truth and essence than the soul?
+
+Yes.
+
+What is filled with more real existence, and actually has a more real
+existence, is more really filled than that which is filled with less real
+existence and is less real?
+
+Of course.
+
+And if there be a pleasure in being filled with that which is according to
+nature, that which is more really filled with more real being will more
+really and truly enjoy true pleasure; whereas that which participates in
+less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied, and will
+participate in an illusory and less real pleasure?
+
+Unquestionably.
+
+Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with
+gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in
+this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into
+the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find
+their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste
+of pure and abiding pleasure.  Like cattle, with their eyes always looking
+down and their heads stooping to the earth, that is, to the dining-table,
+they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these
+delights, they kick and butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are
+made of iron; and they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust. 
+For they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part
+of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent.
+
+Verily, Socrates, said Glaucon, you describe the life of the many like an
+oracle.
+
+Their pleasures are mixed with pains--how can they be otherwise?  For they
+are mere shadows and pictures of the true, and are coloured by contrast,
+which exaggerates both light and shade, and so they implant in the minds of
+fools insane desires of themselves; and they are fought about as
+Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen at Troy
+in ignorance of the truth.
+
+Something of that sort must inevitably happen.
+
+And must not the like happen with the spirited or passionate element of the
+soul?  Will not the passionate man who carries his passion into action, be
+in the like case, whether he is envious and ambitious, or violent and
+contentious, or angry and discontented, if he be seeking to attain honour
+and victory and the satisfaction of his anger without reason or sense?
+
+Yes, he said, the same will happen with the spirited element also.
+
+Then may we not confidently assert that the lovers of money and honour,
+when they seek their pleasures under the guidance and in the company of
+reason and knowledge, and pursue after and win the pleasures which wisdom
+shows them, will also have the truest pleasures in the highest degree which
+is attainable to them, inasmuch as they follow truth; and they will have
+the pleasures which are natural to them, if that which is best for each one
+is also most natural to him?
+
+Yes, certainly; the best is the most natural.
+
+And when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there is
+no division, the several parts are just, and do each of them their own
+business, and enjoy severally the best and truest pleasures of which they
+are capable?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But when either of the two other principles prevails, it fails in attaining
+its own pleasure, and compels the rest to pursue after a pleasure which is
+a shadow only and which is not their own?
+
+True.
+
+And the greater the interval which separates them from philosophy and
+reason, the more strange and illusive will be the pleasure?
+
+Yes.
+
+And is not that farthest from reason which is at the greatest distance from
+law and order?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the lustful and tyrannical desires are, as we saw, at the greatest
+distance?  Yes.
+
+And the royal and orderly desires are nearest?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the tyrant will live at the greatest distance from true or natural
+pleasure, and the king at the least?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But if so, the tyrant will live most unpleasantly, and the king most
+pleasantly?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+Would you know the measure of the interval which separates them?
+
+Will you tell me?
+
+There appear to be three pleasures, one genuine and two spurious:  now the
+transgression of the tyrant reaches a point beyond the spurious; he has run
+away from the region of law and reason, and taken up his abode with certain
+slave pleasures which are his satellites, and the measure of his
+inferiority can only be expressed in a figure.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I assume, I said, that the tyrant is in the third place from the oligarch;
+the democrat was in the middle?
+
+Yes.
+
+And if there is truth in what has preceded, he will be wedded to an image
+of pleasure which is thrice removed as to truth from the pleasure of the
+oligarch?
+
+He will.
+
+And the oligarch is third from the royal; since we count as one royal and
+aristocratical?
+
+Yes, he is third.
+
+Then the tyrant is removed from true pleasure by the space of a number
+which is three times three?
+
+Manifestly.
+
+The shadow then of tyrannical pleasure determined by the number of length
+will be a plane figure.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if you raise the power and make the plane a solid, there is no
+difficulty in seeing how vast is the interval by which the tyrant is parted
+from the king.
+
+Yes; the arithmetician will easily do the sum.
+
+Or if some person begins at the other end and measures the interval by
+which the king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will find
+him, when the multiplication is completed, living 729 times more
+pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval.
+
+What a wonderful calculation!  And how enormous is the distance which
+separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!
+
+Yet a true calculation, I said, and a number which nearly concerns human
+life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and
+years.  (729 NEARLY equals the number of days and nights in the year.)
+
+Yes, he said, human life is certainly concerned with them.
+
+Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil and
+unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of life and
+in beauty and virtue?
+
+Immeasurably greater.
+
+Well, I said, and now having arrived at this stage of the argument, we may
+revert to the words which brought us hither:  Was not some one saying that
+injustice was a gain to the perfectly unjust who was reputed to be just?
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Now then, having determined the power and quality of justice and injustice,
+let us have a little conversation with him.
+
+What shall we say to him?
+
+Let us make an image of the soul, that he may have his own words presented
+before his eyes.
+
+Of what sort?
+
+An ideal image of the soul, like the composite creations of ancient
+mythology, such as the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus, and there are many
+others in which two or more different natures are said to grow into one.
+
+There are said of have been such unions.
+
+Then do you now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster,
+having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he is
+able to generate and metamorphose at will.
+
+You suppose marvellous powers in the artist; but, as language is more
+pliable than wax or any similar substance, let there be such a model as you
+propose.
+
+Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man,
+the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second.
+
+That, he said, is an easier task; and I have made them as you say.
+
+And now join them, and let the three grow into one.
+
+That has been accomplished.
+
+Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so that
+he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull, may
+believe the beast to be a single human creature.
+
+I have done so, he said.
+
+And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human creature
+to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply that, if he be
+right, it is profitable for this creature to feast the multitudinous
+monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like qualities, but to starve
+and weaken the man, who is consequently liable to be dragged about at the
+mercy of either of the other two; and he is not to attempt to familiarize
+or harmonize them with one another--he ought rather to suffer them to fight
+and bite and devour one another.
+
+Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.
+
+To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so speak
+and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the most
+complete mastery over the entire human creature.  He should watch over the
+many-headed monster like a good husbandman, fostering and cultivating the
+gentle qualities, and preventing the wild ones from growing; he should be
+making the lion-heart his ally, and in common care of them all should be
+uniting the several parts with one another and with himself.
+
+Yes, he said, that is quite what the maintainer of justice say.
+
+And so from every point of view, whether of pleasure, honour, or advantage,
+the approver of justice is right and speaks the truth, and the disapprover
+is wrong and false and ignorant?
+
+Yes, from every point of view.
+
+Come, now, and let us gently reason with the unjust, who is not
+intentionally in error.  'Sweet Sir,' we will say to him, 'what think you
+of things esteemed noble and ignoble?  Is not the noble that which subjects
+the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man; and the ignoble that
+which subjects the man to the beast?'  He can hardly avoid saying Yes--can
+he now?
+
+Not if he has any regard for my opinion.
+
+But, if he agree so far, we may ask him to answer another question:  'Then
+how would a man profit if he received gold and silver on the condition that
+he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst?  Who can imagine
+that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for money, especially
+if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men, would be the gainer,
+however large might be the sum which he received?  And will any one say
+that he is not a miserable caitiff who remorselessly sells his own divine
+being to that which is most godless and detestable?  Eriphyle took the
+necklace as the price of her husband's life, but he is taking a bribe in
+order to compass a worse ruin.'
+
+Yes, said Glaucon, far worse--I will answer for him.
+
+Has not the intemperate been censured of old, because in him the huge
+multiform monster is allowed to be too much at large?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And men are blamed for pride and bad temper when the lion and serpent
+element in them disproportionately grows and gains strength?
+
+Yes.
+
+And luxury and softness are blamed, because they relax and weaken this same
+creature, and make a coward of him?
+
+Very true.
+
+And is not a man reproached for flattery and meanness who subordinates the
+spirited animal to the unruly monster, and, for the sake of money, of which
+he can never have enough, habituates him in the days of his youth to be
+trampled in the mire, and from being a lion to become a monkey?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And why are mean employments and manual arts a reproach?  Only because they
+imply a natural weakness of the higher principle; the individual is unable
+to control the creatures within him, but has to court them, and his great
+study is how to flatter them.
+
+Such appears to be the reason.
+
+And therefore, being desirous of placing him under a rule like that of the
+best, we say that he ought to be the servant of the best, in whom the
+Divine rules; not, as Thrasymachus supposed, to the injury of the servant,
+but because every one had better be ruled by divine wisdom dwelling within
+him; or, if this be impossible, then by an external authority, in order
+that we may be all, as far as possible, under the same government, friends
+and equals.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And this is clearly seen to be the intention of the law, which is the ally
+of the whole city; and is seen also in the authority which we exercise over
+children, and the refusal to let them be free until we have established in
+them a principle analogous to the constitution of a state, and by
+cultivation of this higher element have set up in their hearts a guardian
+and ruler like our own, and when this is done they may go their ways.
+
+Yes, he said, the purpose of the law is manifest.
+
+From what point of view, then, and on what ground can we say that a man is
+profited by injustice or intemperance or other baseness, which will make
+him a worse man, even though he acquire money or power by his wickedness?
+
+From no point of view at all.
+
+What shall he profit, if his injustice be undetected and unpunished?  He
+who is undetected only gets worse, whereas he who is detected and punished
+has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanized; the gentler
+element in him is liberated, and his whole soul is perfected and ennobled
+by the acquirement of justice and temperance and wisdom, more than the body
+ever is by receiving gifts of beauty, strength and health, in proportion as
+the soul is more honourable than the body.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+To this nobler purpose the man of understanding will devote the energies of
+his life.  And in the first place, he will honour studies which impress
+these qualities on his soul and will disregard others?
+
+Clearly, he said.
+
+In the next place, he will regulate his bodily habit and training, and so
+far will he be from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, that he
+will regard even health as quite a secondary matter; his first object will
+be not that he may be fair or strong or well, unless he is likely thereby
+to gain temperance, but he will always desire so to attemper the body as to
+preserve the harmony of the soul?
+
+Certainly he will, if he has true music in him.
+
+And in the acquisition of wealth there is a principle of order and harmony
+which he will also observe; he will not allow himself to be dazzled by the
+foolish applause of the world, and heap up riches to his own infinite harm?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+He will look at the city which is within him, and take heed that no
+disorder occur in it, such as might arise either from superfluity or from
+want; and upon this principle he will regulate his property and gain or
+spend according to his means.
+
+Very true.
+
+And, for the same reason, he will gladly accept and enjoy such honours as
+he deems likely to make him a better man; but those, whether private or
+public, which are likely to disorder his life, he will avoid?
+
+Then, if that is his motive, he will not be a statesman.
+
+By the dog of Egypt, he will! in the city which is his own he certainly
+will, though in the land of his birth perhaps not, unless he have a divine
+call.
+
+I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we are
+the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that
+there is such an one anywhere on earth?
+
+In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he
+who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order.  But
+whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for
+he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any
+other.
+
+I think so, he said.
+
+
+BOOK X.
+
+Of the many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there
+is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule about poetry.
+
+To what do you refer?
+
+To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be
+received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have
+been distinguished.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to
+the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe--but I do not mind
+saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the
+understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature
+is the only antidote to them.
+
+Explain the purport of your remark.
+
+Well, I will tell you, although I have always from my earliest youth had an
+awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on my lips,
+for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that charming
+tragic company; but a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and
+therefore I will speak out.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Listen to me then, or rather, answer me.
+
+Put your question.
+
+Can you tell me what imitation is? for I really do not know.
+
+A likely thing, then, that I should know.
+
+Why not? for the duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the keener.
+
+Very true, he said; but in your presence, even if I had any faint notion, I
+could not muster courage to utter it.  Will you enquire yourself?
+
+Well then, shall we begin the enquiry in our usual manner:  Whenever a
+number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a
+corresponding idea or form:--do you understand me?
+
+I do.
+
+Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world--
+plenty of them, are there not?
+
+Yes.
+
+But there are only two ideas or forms of them--one the idea of a bed, the
+other of a table.
+
+True.
+
+And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our
+use, in accordance with the idea--that is our way of speaking in this and
+similar instances--but no artificer makes the ideas themselves:  how could
+he?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And there is another artist,--I should like to know what you would say of
+him.
+
+Who is he?
+
+One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen.
+
+What an extraordinary man!
+
+Wait a little, and there will be more reason for your saying so.  For this
+is he who is able to make not only vessels of every kind, but plants and
+animals, himself and all other things--the earth and heaven, and the things
+which are in heaven or under the earth; he makes the gods also.
+
+He must be a wizard and no mistake.
+
+Oh! you are incredulous, are you?  Do you mean that there is no such maker
+or creator, or that in one sense there might be a maker of all these things
+but in another not?  Do you see that there is a way in which you could make
+them all yourself?
+
+What way?
+
+An easy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in which the feat might
+be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a
+mirror round and round--you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens,
+and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and all the other
+things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror.
+
+Yes, he said; but they would be appearances only.
+
+Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now.  And the painter too
+is, as I conceive, just such another--a creator of appearances, is he not?
+
+Of course.
+
+But then I suppose you will say that what he creates is untrue.  And yet
+there is a sense in which the painter also creates a bed?
+
+Yes, he said, but not a real bed.
+
+And what of the maker of the bed? were you not saying that he too makes,
+not the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the bed, but
+only a particular bed?
+
+Yes, I did.
+
+Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true existence,
+but only some semblance of existence; and if any one were to say that the
+work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence,
+he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.
+
+At any rate, he replied, philosophers would say that he was not speaking
+the truth.
+
+No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth.
+
+No wonder.
+
+Suppose now that by the light of the examples just offered we enquire who
+this imitator is?
+
+If you please.
+
+Well then, here are three beds:  one existing in nature, which is made by
+God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can be the maker?
+
+No.
+
+There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the work of the painter is a third?
+
+Yes.
+
+Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend
+them:  God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?
+
+Yes, there are three of them.
+
+God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one
+only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be
+made by God.
+
+Why is that?
+
+Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them
+which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal
+bed and not the two others.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a
+particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which
+is essentially and by nature one only.
+
+So we believe.
+
+Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?
+
+Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is the
+author of this and of all other things.
+
+And what shall we say of the carpenter--is not he also the maker of the
+bed?
+
+Yes.
+
+But would you call the painter a creator and maker?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?
+
+I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that
+which the others make.
+
+Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an
+imitator?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other
+imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?
+
+That appears to be so.
+
+Then about the imitator we are agreed.  And what about the painter?--I
+would like to know whether he may be thought to imitate that which
+originally exists in nature, or only the creations of artists?
+
+The latter.
+
+As they are or as they appear? you have still to determine this.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely
+or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear
+different, but there is no difference in reality.  And the same of all
+things.
+
+Yes, he said, the difference is only apparent.
+
+Now let me ask you another question:  Which is the art of painting designed
+to be--an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear--of appearance
+or of reality?
+
+Of appearance.
+
+Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all
+things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an
+image.  For example:  A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any
+other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good
+artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his
+picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are
+looking at a real carpenter.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the
+arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a
+higher degree of accuracy than any other man--whoever tells us this, I
+think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to
+have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought
+all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of
+knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
+
+Most true.
+
+And so, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who is
+at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well as
+vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot compose well
+unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this knowledge can
+never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also there may not be a
+similar illusion.  Perhaps they may have come across imitators and been
+deceived by them; they may not have remembered when they saw their works
+that these were but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could
+easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are
+appearances only and not realities?  Or, after all, they may be in the
+right, and poets do really know the things about which they seem to the
+many to speak so well?
+
+The question, he said, should by all means be considered.
+
+Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well
+as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? 
+Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he
+had nothing higher in him?
+
+I should say not.
+
+The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in
+realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of
+himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums,
+he would prefer to be the theme of them.
+
+Yes, he said, that would be to him a source of much greater honour and
+profit.
+
+Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or any
+of the arts to which his poems only incidentally refer:  we are not going
+to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured patients like
+Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the Asclepiads
+were, or whether he only talks about medicine and other arts at second-
+hand; but we have a right to know respecting military tactics, politics,
+education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we
+may fairly ask him about them.  'Friend Homer,' then we say to him, 'if you
+are only in the second remove from truth in what you say of virtue, and not
+in the third--not an image maker or imitator--and if you are able to
+discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life,
+tell us what State was ever better governed by your help?  The good order
+of Lacedaemon is due to Lycurgus, and many other cities great and small
+have been similarly benefited by others; but who says that you have been a
+good legislator to them and have done them any good?  Italy and Sicily
+boast of Charondas, and there is Solon who is renowned among us; but what
+city has anything to say about you?'  Is there any city which he might
+name?
+
+I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that he
+was a legislator.
+
+Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully by
+him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?
+
+There is not.
+
+Or is there any invention of his, applicable to the arts or to human life,
+such as Thales the Milesian or Anacharsis the Scythian, and other ingenious
+men have conceived, which is attributed to him?
+
+There is absolutely nothing of the kind.
+
+But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or
+teacher of any?  Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate with
+him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such as was
+established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his wisdom, and
+whose followers are to this day quite celebrated for the order which was
+named after him?
+
+Nothing of the kind is recorded of him.  For surely, Socrates, Creophylus,
+the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name always makes us
+laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his stupidity, if, as is said,
+Homer was greatly neglected by him and others in his own day when he was
+alive?
+
+Yes, I replied, that is the tradition.  But can you imagine, Glaucon, that
+if Homer had really been able to educate and improve mankind--if he had
+possessed knowledge and not been a mere imitator--can you imagine, I say,
+that he would not have had many followers, and been honoured and loved by
+them?  Protagoras of Abdera, and Prodicus of Ceos, and a host of others,
+have only to whisper to their contemporaries:  'You will never be able to
+manage either your own house or your own State until you appoint us to be
+your ministers of education'--and this ingenious device of theirs has such
+an effect in making men love them that their companions all but carry them
+about on their shoulders.  And is it conceivable that the contemporaries of
+Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go about as
+rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind virtuous?  Would
+they not have been as unwilling to part with them as with gold, and have
+compelled them to stay at home with them?  Or, if the master would not
+stay, then the disciples would have followed him about everywhere, until
+they had got education enough?
+
+Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
+
+Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with
+Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the
+truth they never reach?  The poet is like a painter who, as we have already
+observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing
+of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than
+he does, and judge only by colours and figures.
+
+Quite so.
+
+In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on
+the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only
+enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and
+judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of
+military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he
+speaks very well--such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by
+nature have.  And I think that you must have observed again and again what
+a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours
+which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only blooming;
+and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Here is another point:  The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of
+true existence; he knows appearances only.  Am I not right?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then let us have a clear understanding, and not be satisfied with half an
+explanation.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Of the painter we say that he will paint reins, and he will paint a bit?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the worker in leather and brass will make them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But does the painter know the right form of the bit and reins?  Nay, hardly
+even the workers in brass and leather who make them; only the horseman who
+knows how to use them--he knows their right form.
+
+Most true.
+
+And may we not say the same of all things?
+
+What?
+
+That there are three arts which are concerned with all things:  one which
+uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or
+inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which
+nature or the artist has intended them.
+
+True.
+
+Then the user of them must have the greatest experience of them, and he
+must indicate to the maker the good or bad qualities which develop
+themselves in use; for example, the flute-player will tell the flute-maker
+which of his flutes is satisfactory to the performer; he will tell him how
+he ought to make them, and the other will attend to his instructions?
+
+Of course.
+
+The one knows and therefore speaks with authority about the goodness and
+badness of flutes, while the other, confiding in him, will do what he is
+told by him?
+
+True.
+
+The instrument is the same, but about the excellence or badness of it the
+maker will only attain to a correct belief; and this he will gain from him
+who knows, by talking to him and being compelled to hear what he has to
+say, whereas the user will have knowledge?
+
+True.
+
+But will the imitator have either?  Will he know from use whether or no his
+drawing is correct or beautiful? or will he have right opinion from being
+compelled to associate with another who knows and gives him instructions
+about what he should draw?
+
+Neither.
+
+Then he will no more have true opinion than he will have knowledge about
+the goodness or badness of his imitations?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+The imitative artist will be in a brilliant state of intelligence about his
+own creations?
+
+Nay, very much the reverse.
+
+And still he will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing good
+or bad, and may be expected therefore to imitate only that which appears to
+be good to the ignorant multitude?
+
+Just so.
+
+Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no knowledge
+worth mentioning of what he imitates.  Imitation is only a kind of play or
+sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in Iambic or in Heroic
+verse, are imitators in the highest degree?
+
+Very true.
+
+And now tell me, I conjure you, has not imitation been shown by us to be
+concerned with that which is thrice removed from the truth?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I will explain:  The body which is large when seen near, appears small when
+seen at a distance?
+
+True.
+
+And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and
+crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the
+illusion about colours to which the sight is liable.  Thus every sort of
+confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human
+mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and
+other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.
+
+True.
+
+And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of
+the human understanding--there is the beauty of them--and the apparent
+greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery over us,
+but give way before calculation and measure and weight?
+
+Most true.
+
+And this, surely, must be the work of the calculating and rational
+principle in the soul?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And when this principle measures and certifies that some things are equal,
+or that some are greater or less than others, there occurs an apparent
+contradiction?
+
+True.
+
+But were we not saying that such a contradiction is impossible--the same
+faculty cannot have contrary opinions at the same time about the same
+thing?
+
+Very true.
+
+Then that part of the soul which has an opinion contrary to measure is not
+the same with that which has an opinion in accordance with measure?
+
+True.
+
+And the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to
+measure and calculation?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that which is opposed to them is one of the inferior principles of the
+soul?
+
+No doubt.
+
+This was the conclusion at which I was seeking to arrive when I said that
+painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own proper
+work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and
+associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason,
+and that they have no true or healthy aim.
+
+Exactly.
+
+The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior
+offspring.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is this confined to the sight only, or does it extend to the hearing
+also, relating in fact to what we term poetry?
+
+Probably the same would be true of poetry.
+
+Do not rely, I said, on a probability derived from the analogy of painting;
+but let us examine further and see whether the faculty with which poetical
+imitation is concerned is good or bad.
+
+By all means.
+
+We may state the question thus:--Imitation imitates the actions of men,
+whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or bad
+result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly.  Is there
+anything more?
+
+No, there is nothing else.
+
+But in all this variety of circumstances is the man at unity with himself--
+or rather, as in the instance of sight there was confusion and opposition
+in his opinions about the same things, so here also is there not strife and
+inconsistency in his life?  Though I need hardly raise the question again,
+for I remember that all this has been already admitted; and the soul has
+been acknowledged by us to be full of these and ten thousand similar
+oppositions occurring at the same moment?
+
+And we were right, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, thus far we were right; but there was an omission which must
+now be supplied.
+
+What was the omission?
+
+Were we not saying that a good man, who has the misfortune to lose his son
+or anything else which is most dear to him, will bear the loss with more
+equanimity than another?
+
+Yes.
+
+But will he have no sorrow, or shall we say that although he cannot help
+sorrowing, he will moderate his sorrow?
+
+The latter, he said, is the truer statement.
+
+Tell me:  will he be more likely to struggle and hold out against his
+sorrow when he is seen by his equals, or when he is alone?
+
+It will make a great difference whether he is seen or not.
+
+When he is by himself he will not mind saying or doing many things which he
+would be ashamed of any one hearing or seeing him do?
+
+True.
+
+There is a principle of law and reason in him which bids him resist, as
+well as a feeling of his misfortune which is forcing him to indulge his
+sorrow?
+
+True.
+
+But when a man is drawn in two opposite directions, to and from the same
+object, this, as we affirm, necessarily implies two distinct principles in
+him?
+
+Certainly.
+
+One of them is ready to follow the guidance of the law?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+The law would say that to be patient under suffering is best, and that we
+should not give way to impatience, as there is no knowing whether such
+things are good or evil; and nothing is gained by impatience; also, because
+no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands in the way of
+that which at the moment is most required.
+
+What is most required? he asked.
+
+That we should take counsel about what has happened, and when the dice have
+been thrown order our affairs in the way which reason deems best; not, like
+children who have had a fall, keeping hold of the part struck and wasting
+time in setting up a howl, but always accustoming the soul forthwith to
+apply a remedy, raising up that which is sickly and fallen, banishing the
+cry of sorrow by the healing art.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the true way of meeting the attacks of fortune.
+
+Yes, I said; and the higher principle is ready to follow this suggestion of
+reason?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the other principle, which inclines us to recollection of our troubles
+and to lamentation, and can never have enough of them, we may call
+irrational, useless, and cowardly?
+
+Indeed, we may.
+
+And does not the latter--I mean the rebellious principle--furnish a great
+variety of materials for imitation?  Whereas the wise and calm temperament,
+being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when
+imitated, especially at a public festival when a promiscuous crowd is
+assembled in a theatre.  For the feeling represented is one to which they
+are strangers.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made,
+nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle in
+the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is
+easily imitated?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of the painter,
+for he is like him in two ways:  first, inasmuch as his creations have an
+inferior degree of truth--in this, I say, he is like him; and he is also
+like him in being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and
+therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered
+State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and
+impairs the reason.  As in a city when the evil are permitted to have
+authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we
+maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges
+the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but
+thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small--he is a
+manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth.
+
+Exactly.
+
+But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our accusation:--
+the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few
+who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?
+
+Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.
+
+Hear and judge:  The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage
+of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful
+hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and
+smiting his breast--the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to
+sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our
+feelings most.
+
+Yes, of course I know.
+
+But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we
+pride ourselves on the opposite quality--we would fain be quiet and
+patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the
+recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that
+which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?
+
+No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.
+
+Nay, I said, quite reasonable from one point of view.
+
+What point of view?
+
+If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural hunger
+and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and that this
+feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is satisfied and
+delighted by the poets;--the better nature in each of us, not having been
+sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to
+break loose because the sorrow is another's; and the spectator fancies that
+there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying any one who
+comes telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his
+troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should he be
+supercilious and lose this and the poem too?  Few persons ever reflect, as
+I should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is
+communicated to themselves.  And so the feeling of sorrow which has
+gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others is with
+difficulty repressed in our own.
+
+How very true!
+
+And does not the same hold also of the ridiculous?  There are jests which
+you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or
+indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused by them, and
+are not at all disgusted at their unseemliness;--the case of pity is
+repeated;--there is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise
+a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were
+afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again; and having
+stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are betrayed
+unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet at home.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of
+desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every
+action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of
+drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled,
+if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.
+
+I cannot deny it.
+
+Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of
+Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is
+profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you
+should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your
+whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these
+things--they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we
+are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of
+tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to
+the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be
+admitted into our State.  For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed
+muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of
+mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure
+and pain will be the rulers in our State.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our
+defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending
+away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described;
+for reason constrained us.  But that she may not impute to us any harshness
+or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel
+between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the
+saying of 'the yelping hound howling at her lord,' or of one 'mighty in the
+vain talk of fools,' and 'the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,' and the
+'subtle thinkers who are beggars after all'; and there are innumerable
+other signs of ancient enmity between them.  Notwithstanding this, let us
+assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation, that if she will
+only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted
+to receive her--we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that
+account betray the truth.  I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much
+charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer?
+
+Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.
+
+Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon
+this condition only--that she make a defence of herself in lyrical or some
+other metre?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry
+and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf:  let them
+show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human
+life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we
+shall surely be the gainers--I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as
+a delight?
+
+Certainly, he said, we shall be the gainers.
+
+If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are
+enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think
+their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after the
+manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle.  We too are
+inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble States has
+implanted in us, and therefore we would have her appear at her best and
+truest; but so long as she is unable to make good her defence, this
+argument of ours shall be a charm to us, which we will repeat to ourselves
+while we listen to her strains; that we may not fall away into the childish
+love of her which captivates the many.  At all events we are well aware
+that poetry being such as we have described is not to be regarded seriously
+as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her, fearing for the
+safety of the city which is within him, should be on his guard against her
+seductions and make our words his law.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite agree with you.
+
+Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater than
+appears, whether a man is to be good or bad.  And what will any one be
+profited if under the influence of honour or money or power, aye, or under
+the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?
+
+Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the argument, as I believe that any
+one else would have been.
+
+And yet no mention has been made of the greatest prizes and rewards which
+await virtue.
+
+What, are there any greater still?  If there are, they must be of an
+inconceivable greatness.
+
+Why, I said, what was ever great in a short time?  The whole period of
+three score years and ten is surely but a little thing in comparison with
+eternity?
+
+Say rather 'nothing,' he replied.
+
+And should an immortal being seriously think of this little space rather
+than of the whole?
+
+Of the whole, certainly.  But why do you ask?
+
+Are you not aware, I said, that the soul of man is immortal and
+imperishable?
+
+He looked at me in astonishment, and said:  No, by heaven:  And are you
+really prepared to maintain this?
+
+Yes, I said, I ought to be, and you too--there is no difficulty in proving
+it.
+
+I see a great difficulty; but I should like to hear you state this argument
+of which you make so light.
+
+Listen then.
+
+I am attending.
+
+There is a thing which you call good and another which you call evil?
+
+Yes, he replied.
+
+Would you agree with me in thinking that the corrupting and destroying
+element is the evil, and the saving and improving element the good?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you admit that every thing has a good and also an evil; as ophthalmia
+is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as mildew is of
+corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron:  in everything, or in
+almost everything, there is an inherent evil and disease?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And anything which is infected by any of these evils is made evil, and at
+last wholly dissolves and dies?
+
+True.
+
+The vice and evil which is inherent in each is the destruction of each; and
+if this does not destroy them there is nothing else that will; for good
+certainly will not destroy them, nor again, that which is neither good nor
+evil.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+If, then, we find any nature which having this inherent corruption cannot
+be dissolved or destroyed, we may be certain that of such a nature there is
+no destruction?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+Well, I said, and is there no evil which corrupts the soul?
+
+Yes, he said, there are all the evils which we were just now passing in
+review:  unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance.
+
+But does any of these dissolve or destroy her?--and here do not let us fall
+into the error of supposing that the unjust and foolish man, when he is
+detected, perishes through his own injustice, which is an evil of the soul. 
+Take the analogy of the body:  The evil of the body is a disease which
+wastes and reduces and annihilates the body; and all the things of which we
+were just now speaking come to annihilation through their own corruption
+attaching to them and inhering in them and so destroying them.  Is not this
+true?
+
+Yes.
+
+Consider the soul in like manner.  Does the injustice or other evil which
+exists in the soul waste and consume her?  Do they by attaching to the soul
+and inhering in her at last bring her to death, and so separate her from
+the body?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And yet, I said, it is unreasonable to suppose that anything can perish
+from without through affection of external evil which could not be
+destroyed from within by a corruption of its own?
+
+It is, he replied.
+
+Consider, I said, Glaucon, that even the badness of food, whether
+staleness, decomposition, or any other bad quality, when confined to the
+actual food, is not supposed to destroy the body; although, if the badness
+of food communicates corruption to the body, then we should say that the
+body has been destroyed by a corruption of itself, which is disease,
+brought on by this; but that the body, being one thing, can be destroyed by
+the badness of food, which is another, and which does not engender any
+natural infection--this we shall absolutely deny?
+
+Very true.
+
+And, on the same principle, unless some bodily evil can produce an evil of
+the soul, we must not suppose that the soul, which is one thing, can be
+dissolved by any merely external evil which belongs to another?
+
+Yes, he said, there is reason in that.
+
+Either, then, let us refute this conclusion, or, while it remains
+unrefuted, let us never say that fever, or any other disease, or the knife
+put to the throat, or even the cutting up of the whole body into the
+minutest pieces, can destroy the soul, until she herself is proved to
+become more unholy or unrighteous in consequence of these things being done
+to the body; but that the soul, or anything else if not destroyed by an
+internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is not to be affirmed
+by any man.
+
+And surely, he replied, no one will ever prove that the souls of men become
+more unjust in consequence of death.
+
+But if some one who would rather not admit the immortality of the soul
+boldly denies this, and says that the dying do really become more evil and
+unrighteous, then, if the speaker is right, I suppose that injustice, like
+disease, must be assumed to be fatal to the unjust, and that those who take
+this disorder die by the natural inherent power of destruction which evil
+has, and which kills them sooner or later, but in quite another way from
+that in which, at present, the wicked receive death at the hands of others
+as the penalty of their deeds?
+
+Nay, he said, in that case injustice, if fatal to the unjust, will not be
+so very terrible to him, for he will be delivered from evil.  But I rather
+suspect the opposite to be the truth, and that injustice which, if it have
+the power, will murder others, keeps the murderer alive--aye, and well
+awake too; so far removed is her dwelling-place from being a house of
+death.
+
+True, I said; if the inherent natural vice or evil of the soul is unable to
+kill or destroy her, hardly will that which is appointed to be the
+destruction of some other body, destroy a soul or anything else except that
+of which it was appointed to be the destruction.
+
+Yes, that can hardly be.
+
+But the soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil, whether inherent or
+external, must exist for ever, and if existing for ever, must be immortal?
+
+Certainly.
+
+That is the conclusion, I said; and, if a true conclusion, then the souls
+must always be the same, for if none be destroyed they will not diminish in
+number.  Neither will they increase, for the increase of the immortal
+natures must come from something mortal, and all things would thus end in
+immortality.
+
+Very true.
+
+But this we cannot believe--reason will not allow us--any more than we can
+believe the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and
+difference and dissimilarity.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+The soul, I said, being, as is now proven, immortal, must be the fairest of
+compositions and cannot be compounded of many elements?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are
+many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now behold
+her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must
+contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity; and then
+her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all the things
+which we have described will be manifested more clearly.  Thus far, we have
+spoken the truth concerning her as she appears at present, but we must
+remember also that we have seen her only in a condition which may be
+compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be
+discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and
+damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown
+over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some
+monster than he is to his own natural form.  And the soul which we behold
+is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills.  But not there,
+Glaucon, not there must we look.
+
+Where then?
+
+At her love of wisdom.  Let us see whom she affects, and what society and
+converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and
+eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following
+this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of the ocean in
+which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of
+earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds
+upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are
+termed:  then you would see her as she is, and know whether she have one
+shape only or many, or what her nature is.  Of her affections and of the
+forms which she takes in this present life I think that we have now said
+enough.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And thus, I said, we have fulfilled the conditions of the argument; we have
+not introduced the rewards and glories of justice, which, as you were
+saying, are to be found in Homer and Hesiod; but justice in her own nature
+has been shown to be best for the soul in her own nature.  Let a man do
+what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not, and even if in
+addition to the ring of Gyges he put on the helmet of Hades.
+
+Very true.
+
+And now, Glaucon, there will be no harm in further enumerating how many and
+how great are the rewards which justice and the other virtues procure to
+the soul from gods and men, both in life and after death.
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+Will you repay me, then, what you borrowed in the argument?
+
+What did I borrow?
+
+The assumption that the just man should appear unjust and the unjust just: 
+for you were of opinion that even if the true state of the case could not
+possibly escape the eyes of gods and men, still this admission ought to be
+made for the sake of the argument, in order that pure justice might be
+weighed against pure injustice.  Do you remember?
+
+I should be much to blame if I had forgotten.
+
+Then, as the cause is decided, I demand on behalf of justice that the
+estimation in which she is held by gods and men and which we acknowledge to
+be her due should now be restored to her by us; since she has been shown to
+confer reality, and not to deceive those who truly possess her, let what
+has been taken from her be given back, that so she may win that palm of
+appearance which is hers also, and which she gives to her own.
+
+The demand, he said, is just.
+
+In the first place, I said--and this is the first thing which you will have
+to give back--the nature both of the just and unjust is truly known to the
+gods.
+
+Granted.
+
+And if they are both known to them, one must be the friend and the other
+the enemy of the gods, as we admitted from the beginning?
+
+True.
+
+And the friend of the gods may be supposed to receive from them all things
+at their best, excepting only such evil as is the necessary consequence of
+former sins?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in
+poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in
+the end work together for good to him in life and death:  for the gods have
+a care of any one whose desire is to become just and to be like God, as far
+as man can attain the divine likeness, by the pursuit of virtue?
+
+Yes, he said; if he is like God he will surely not be neglected by him.
+
+And of the unjust may not the opposite be supposed?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Such, then, are the palms of victory which the gods give the just?
+
+That is my conviction.
+
+And what do they receive of men?  Look at things as they really are, and
+you will see that the clever unjust are in the case of runners, who run
+well from the starting-place to the goal but not back again from the goal: 
+they go off at a great pace, but in the end only look foolish, slinking
+away with their ears draggling on their shoulders, and without a crown; but
+the true runner comes to the finish and receives the prize and is crowned. 
+And this is the way with the just; he who endures to the end of every
+action and occasion of his entire life has a good report and carries off
+the prize which men have to bestow.
+
+True.
+
+And now you must allow me to repeat of the just the blessings which you
+were attributing to the fortunate unjust.  I shall say of them, what you
+were saying of the others, that as they grow older, they become rulers in
+their own city if they care to be; they marry whom they like and give in
+marriage to whom they will; all that you said of the others I now say of
+these.  And, on the other hand, of the unjust I say that the greater
+number, even though they escape in their youth, are found out at last and
+look foolish at the end of their course, and when they come to be old and
+miserable are flouted alike by stranger and citizen; they are beaten and
+then come those things unfit for ears polite, as you truly term them; they
+will be racked and have their eyes burned out, as you were saying.  And you
+may suppose that I have repeated the remainder of your tale of horrors. 
+But will you let me assume, without reciting them, that these things are
+true?
+
+Certainly, he said, what you say is true.
+
+These, then, are the prizes and rewards and gifts which are bestowed upon
+the just by gods and men in this present life, in addition to the other
+good things which justice of herself provides.
+
+Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting.
+
+And yet, I said, all these are as nothing either in number or greatness in
+comparison with those other recompenses which await both just and unjust
+after death.  And you ought to hear them, and then both just and unjust
+will have received from us a full payment of the debt which the argument
+owes to them.
+
+Speak, he said; there are few things which I would more gladly hear.
+
+Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which Odysseus
+tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero, Er the son of
+Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth.  He was slain in battle, and ten days
+afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of
+corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried away home
+to be buried.  And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile,
+he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world.  He
+said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great
+company, and that they came to a mysterious place at which there were two
+openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were
+two other openings in the heaven above.  In the intermediate space there
+were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment
+on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the
+heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden
+by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the
+symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs.  He drew near, and
+they told him that he was to be the messenger who would carry the report of
+the other world to men, and they bade him hear and see all that was to be
+heard and seen in that place.  Then he beheld and saw on one side the souls
+departing at either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been
+given on them; and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending
+out of the earth dusty and worn with travel, some descending out of heaven
+clean and bright.  And arriving ever and anon they seemed to have come from
+a long journey, and they went forth with gladness into the meadow, where
+they encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one another embraced and
+conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about the
+things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things
+beneath.  And they told one another of what had happened by the way, those
+from below weeping and sorrowing at the remembrance of the things which
+they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth (now the
+journey lasted a thousand years), while those from above were describing
+heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty.  The story, Glaucon,
+would take too long to tell; but the sum was this:--He said that for every
+wrong which they had done to any one they suffered tenfold; or once in a
+hundred years--such being reckoned to be the length of man's life, and the
+penalty being thus paid ten times in a thousand years.  If, for example,
+there were any who had been the cause of many deaths, or had betrayed or
+enslaved cities or armies, or been guilty of any other evil behaviour, for
+each and all of their offences they received punishment ten times over, and
+the rewards of beneficence and justice and holiness were in the same
+proportion.  I need hardly repeat what he said concerning young children
+dying almost as soon as they were born.  Of piety and impiety to gods and
+parents, and of murderers, there were retributions other and greater far
+which he described.  He mentioned that he was present when one of the
+spirits asked another, 'Where is Ardiaeus the Great?'  (Now this Ardiaeus
+lived a thousand years before the time of Er:  he had been the tyrant of
+some city of Pamphylia, and had murdered his aged father and his elder
+brother, and was said to have committed many other abominable crimes.)  The
+answer of the other spirit was:  'He comes not hither and will never come. 
+And this,' said he, 'was one of the dreadful sights which we ourselves
+witnessed.  We were at the mouth of the cavern, and, having completed all
+our experiences, were about to reascend, when of a sudden Ardiaeus appeared
+and several others, most of whom were tyrants; and there were also besides
+the tyrants private individuals who had been great criminals:  they were
+just, as they fancied, about to return into the upper world, but the mouth,
+instead of admitting them, gave a roar, whenever any of these incurable
+sinners or some one who had not been sufficiently punished tried to ascend;
+and then wild men of fiery aspect, who were standing by and heard the
+sound, seized and carried them off; and Ardiaeus and others they bound head
+and foot and hand, and threw them down and flayed them with scourges, and
+dragged them along the road at the side, carding them on thorns like wool,
+and declaring to the passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were
+being taken away to be cast into hell.'  And of all the many terrors which
+they had endured, he said that there was none like the terror which each of
+them felt at that moment, lest they should hear the voice; and when there
+was silence, one by one they ascended with exceeding joy.  These, said Er,
+were the penalties and retributions, and there were blessings as great.
+  
+Now when the spirits which were in the meadow had tarried seven days, on
+the eighth they were obliged to proceed on their journey, and, on the
+fourth day after, he said that they came to a place where they could see
+from above a line of light, straight as a column, extending right through
+the whole heaven and through the earth, in colour resembling the rainbow,
+only brighter and purer; another day's journey brought them to the place,
+and there, in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of the chains of
+heaven let down from above:  for this light is the belt of heaven, and
+holds together the circle of the universe, like the under-girders of a
+trireme.  From these ends is extended the spindle of Necessity, on which
+all the revolutions turn.  The shaft and hook of this spindle are made of
+steel, and the whorl is made partly of steel and also partly of other
+materials.  Now the whorl is in form like the whorl used on earth; and the
+description of it implied that there is one large hollow whorl which is
+quite scooped out, and into this is fitted another lesser one, and another,
+and another, and four others, making eight in all, like vessels which fit
+into one another; the whorls show their edges on the upper side, and on
+their lower side all together form one continuous whorl.  This is pierced
+by the spindle, which is driven home through the centre of the eighth.  The
+first and outermost whorl has the rim broadest, and the seven inner whorls
+are narrower, in the following proportions--the sixth is next to the first
+in size, the fourth next to the sixth; then comes the eighth; the seventh
+is fifth, the fifth is sixth, the third is seventh, last and eighth comes
+the second.  The largest (or fixed stars) is spangled, and the seventh (or
+sun) is brightest; the eighth (or moon) coloured by the reflected light of
+the seventh; the second and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) are in colour like
+one another, and yellower than the preceding; the third (Venus) has the
+whitest light; the fourth (Mars) is reddish; the sixth (Jupiter) is in
+whiteness second.  Now the whole spindle has the same motion; but, as the
+whole revolves in one direction, the seven inner circles move slowly in the
+other, and of these the swiftest is the eighth; next in swiftness are the
+seventh, sixth, and fifth, which move together; third in swiftness appeared
+to move according to the law of this reversed motion the fourth; the third
+appeared fourth and the second fifth.  The spindle turns on the knees of
+Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes
+round with them, hymning a single tone or note.  The eight together form
+one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals, there is another band,
+three in number, each sitting upon her throne:  these are the Fates,
+daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets
+upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their
+voices the harmony of the sirens--Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of
+the present, Atropos of the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with
+a touch of her right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl
+or spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner
+ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and
+then with the other.
+
+When Er and the spirits arrived, their duty was to go at once to Lachesis;
+but first of all there came a prophet who arranged them in order; then he
+took from the knees of Lachesis lots and samples of lives, and having
+mounted a high pulpit, spoke as follows:  'Hear the word of Lachesis, the
+daughter of Necessity.  Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and
+mortality.  Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose
+your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and
+the life which he chooses shall be his destiny.  Virtue is free, and as a
+man honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her; the
+responsibility is with the chooser--God is justified.'  When the
+Interpreter had thus spoken he scattered lots indifferently among them all,
+and each of them took up the lot which fell near him, all but Er himself
+(he was not allowed), and each as he took his lot perceived the number
+which he had obtained.  Then the Interpreter placed on the ground before
+them the samples of lives; and there were many more lives than the souls
+present, and they were of all sorts.  There were lives of every animal and
+of man in every condition.  And there were tyrannies among them, some
+lasting out the tyrant's life, others which broke off in the middle and
+came to an end in poverty and exile and beggary; and there were lives of
+famous men, some who were famous for their form and beauty as well as for
+their strength and success in games, or, again, for their birth and the
+qualities of their ancestors; and some who were the reverse of famous for
+the opposite qualities.  And of women likewise; there was not, however, any
+definite character in them, because the soul, when choosing a new life,
+must of necessity become different.  But there was every other quality, and
+the all mingled with one another, and also with elements of wealth and
+poverty, and disease and health; and there were mean states also.  And
+here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and
+therefore the utmost care should be taken.  Let each one of us leave every
+other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure
+he may be able to learn and may find some one who will make him able to
+learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and
+everywhere the better life as he has opportunity.  He should consider the
+bearing of all these things which have been mentioned severally and
+collectively upon virtue; he should know what the effect of beauty is when
+combined with poverty or wealth in a particular soul, and what are the good
+and evil consequences of noble and humble birth, of private and public
+station, of strength and weakness, of cleverness and dullness, and of all
+the natural and acquired gifts of the soul, and the operation of them when
+conjoined; he will then look at the nature of the soul, and from the
+consideration of all these qualities he will be able to determine which is
+the better and which is the worse; and so he will choose, giving the name
+of evil to the life which will make his soul more unjust, and good to the
+life which will make his soul more just; all else he will disregard.  For
+we have seen and know that this is the best choice both in life and after
+death.  A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith
+in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of
+wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and
+similar villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet
+worse himself; but let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the
+extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in
+all that which is to come.  For this is the way of happiness.
+
+And according to the report of the messenger from the other world this was
+what the prophet said at the time:  'Even for the last comer, if he chooses
+wisely and will live diligently, there is appointed a happy and not
+undesirable existence.  Let not him who chooses first be careless, and let
+not the last despair.'  And when he had spoken, he who had the first choice
+came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny; his mind having
+been darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not thought out the whole
+matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he was
+fated, among other evils, to devour his own children.  But when he had time
+to reflect, and saw what was in the lot, he began to beat his breast and
+lament over his choice, forgetting the proclamation of the prophet; for,
+instead of throwing the blame of his misfortune on himself, he accused
+chance and the gods, and everything rather than himself.  Now he was one of
+those who came from heaven, and in a former life had dwelt in a
+well-ordered State, but his virtue was a matter of habit only, and he had
+no philosophy.  And it was true of others who were similarly overtaken,
+that the greater number of them came from heaven and therefore they had
+never been schooled by trial, whereas the pilgrims who came from earth
+having themselves suffered and seen others suffer, were not in a hurry to
+choose.  And owing to this inexperience of theirs, and also because the lot
+was a chance, many of the souls exchanged a good destiny for an evil or an
+evil for a good.  For if a man had always on his arrival in this world
+dedicated himself from the first to sound philosophy, and had been
+moderately fortunate in the number of the lot, he might, as the messenger
+reported, be happy here, and also his journey to another life and return to
+this, instead of being rough and underground, would be smooth and heavenly. 
+Most curious, he said, was the spectacle--sad and laughable and strange;
+for the choice of the souls was in most cases based on their experience of
+a previous life.  There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus
+choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to
+be born of a woman because they had been his murderers; he beheld also the
+soul of Thamyras choosing the life of a nightingale; birds, on the other
+hand, like the swan and other musicians, wanting to be men.  The soul which
+obtained the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion, and this was the soul
+of Ajax the son of Telamon, who would not be a man, remembering the
+injustice which was done him in the judgment about the arms.  The next was
+Agamemnon, who took the life of an eagle, because, like Ajax, he hated
+human nature by reason of his sufferings.  About the middle came the lot of
+Atalanta; she, seeing the great fame of an athlete, was unable to resist
+the temptation:  and after her there followed the soul of Epeus the son of
+Panopeus passing into the nature of a woman cunning in the arts; and far
+away among the last who chose, the soul of the jester Thersites was putting
+on the form of a monkey.  There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet
+to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all.  Now the
+recollection of former toils had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went
+about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who
+had no cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about
+and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that
+he would have done the same had his lot been first instead of last, and
+that he was delighted to have it.  And not only did men pass into animals,
+but I must also mention that there were animals tame and wild who changed
+into one another and into corresponding human natures--the good into the
+gentle and the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.
+
+All the souls had now chosen their lives, and they went in the order of
+their choice to Lachesis, who sent with them the genius whom they had
+severally chosen, to be the guardian of their lives and the fulfiller of
+the choice:  this genius led the souls first to Clotho, and drew them
+within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand, thus ratifying
+the destiny of each; and then, when they were fastened to this, carried
+them to Atropos, who spun the threads and made them irreversible, whence
+without turning round they passed beneath the throne of Necessity; and when
+they had all passed, they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of
+Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and
+then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose
+water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain
+quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was
+necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things.  Now after they had
+gone to rest, about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and
+earthquake, and then in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner
+of ways to their birth, like stars shooting.  He himself was hindered from
+drinking the water.  But in what manner or by what means he returned to the
+body he could not say; only, in the morning, awaking suddenly, he found
+himself lying on the pyre.
+
+And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will
+save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely
+over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled. 
+Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and
+follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is
+immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. 
+Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while
+remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to
+gather gifts, we receive our reward.  And it shall be well with us both in
+this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been
+describing.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Republic by Plato
+
+Also see The Republic by Plato, Jowett, Wiretap[repub10x.xxx]150
+We are giving this one a new number so as not to take any credit
+away from the wonderful efforts of the Internet Wiretap Etexts.
+
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