The Republic

By Plato

Plato’s most famous work and one of the most important books ever written on the subject of philosophy and political theory, “The Republic” is a fictional dialogue between Socrates and other various Athenians and foreigners which examines the meaning of justice. It is primarily from the writings of Plato that Socrates’s ideas are passed down to us. Written around 380 BC, the work is an important contribution to the age old question of how to best structure a society in a just way. The influence of the analysis contained within it on the development of government and law in Western civilization cannot be overstated. “The Republic” also discusses Plato’s “Theory of Forms”, the nature of the philosopher, the conflict between philosophy and poetry, and the immortality of the soul. An essential read for any student of philosophy or political science, “The Republic” is a monumental work of classical antiquity, which forms the foundation for much of our modern public policy. This edition follows the translation of Benjamin Jowett, includes an introduction by Alexander Kerr, and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420977370

Plato

Plato (aprox. 424-327 BC), a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, is commonly regarded as the centermost figure of Western philosophy. During the Classical period of Ancient Greece he was based in Athens where he founded his Academy and created the Platonist school of thought. His works are among the most influential in Western history, commanding interest and challenging readers of every era and background since they were composed.

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THE REPUBLIC

By PLATO

Translated by BENJAMIN JOWETT

Introduction by ALEXANDER KERR

The Republic

By Plato

Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Introduction by Alexander Kerr

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7570-3

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7737-0

This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: The Acropolis in Athens in Ancient Greece, 1914 (colour litho), Rehlender, G. (b. 1845) (after) / Private Collection / Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I.

BOOK II.

BOOK III.

BOOK IV.

BOOK V.

BOOK VI.

BOOK VII.

BOOK VIII.

BOOK IX.

BOOK X.

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

Introduction

Some of the best thinking of more than three generations has been occupied with the interpretation and exposition of Plato’s Republic. Among the representative men who have made the study of this masterpiece a labor of love one might mention Schleiermacher, Victor Cousin, Professor Jowett, Professor Lewis Campbell and Walter Pater. In common with a few other productions of the Greek genius the Republic possesses a perennial interest not merely for the philosopher and the scholar, but for the general reader who is not satisfied with the ephemeral literature now in vogue, and for the busy man of affairs who wishes to discover for himself the sources of modern thought. It is a pleasure sometimes to turn from the noisy political wrangling of today, to forget for a while the conflicting passions which find their expression in the columns of the partisan press, and to feel, as we study Plato, the awakening power of ideas that belong to every land and to all time.

In the Republic we find the philosopher at his best. After repeated travels extending to the limits of the Hellenic world, and even farther, after prolonged study and meditation, having acquired an intimate knowledge of Greek literature, the oldest and the newest, he comes, in the full maturity of his powers, late in the first quarter of the fourth century B.C., to the composition of his greatest prose drama.

The principal persons of the dialogue are Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus. The first was Plato’s imperturbable master, whose wisdom was more than a match for the rhetoric of Gorgias and for the sophistical arguments of Protagoras, whose enthusiasm for truth made him choose a life of poverty, whose homely wit attracted and delighted the aristocratic youth of Athens, whose unflinching honesty was proof against flattery, bribery and the fear of death. Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers of Plato, after the close of the first book, when the other characters have withdrawn from the discussion, continue, like the second and third actors in a tragedy of Sophocles, to carry important parts to the end of the work. Glaucon, the man of pleasure, is the more aggressive of the two brothers; he finds keen enjoyment in the game of word-fencing, he is quick to detect the fallacies underlying the platitudes of Thrasymachus; he has a ready appreciation of the humorous passages, and sometimes brings Socrates to a halt with a timely jest; and yet he can be alert and earnest in battling for what he believes to be true. Adeimantus, the man of the world, in his speculations is not so light and airy as his younger brother. He is uniformly serious and grave. His strong common sense endeavors to put a check upon what he considers the vagaries of the principal interlocutor. He has an eye to consequences, as when, at the beginning of the fourth bode, he reminds Socrates that the leading citizens of his commonwealth cannot be very happy, although they are the real masters of the State, since they are prohibited from acquiring lands and building for themselves stately mansions, from possessing gold and silver, and, in a word, are debarred from everything which is generally considered essential to human happiness.

The scene is at the Peiraeus, first in a street of the seaport, but soon changes to the house of Cephalus, a wealthy Syracusan. Socrates and Glaucon had come down from the city to be present at a festival in honor of Bendis, the Thracian Artemis, whose worship was to be established with great pomp and ceremony, with processions of natives and Thracians by day and a torch-race in the evening. The philosopher and his young friend showing their approval of the new worship have offered their prayer to the goddess and are ready to return home. Just as the two are in the act of starting, a lover of high discourse, Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, catching sight of them at a distance, orders his slave to run forward and bid them wait for him. Polemarchus, supported by the arguments of Adeimantus, who with some others is present, by the use of a little good-natured banter, and by the mention of a night-festival and the prospect of a conversation with many young men, easily prevails on Socrates to change his plans and spend the evening at the Peiraeus. Under less favorable conditions, as at the close of the Protagoras, where the famous sophist of Abdera is embarrassed and baffled, Socrates can plead a prior engagement and take his departure; but the present invitation attracts him, and is too urgent to be refused. At the home of the venerable merchant Socrates receives a right royal welcome from the master of the house who with great dignity and in perfect peace is enjoying the closing days of a well-spent life. In the company there assembled are found Polemarchus, Lysias and Euthydemus, the three sons of Cephalus, and a few visitors including Thrasymachus, the Chalcedonian giant.

In the opening chapters of the Republic we have one of the memorable passages of Greek literature. The veteran father surrounded by his sons and his friends who do him reverence, as he is sketched in Plato’s inimitable style, awaiting, as in the land of Beulah, his summons to receive the rewards of virtue in the other world, makes a picture not to be forgotten. He is sitting garlanded upon a sort of cushioned chair, for he had just been sacrificing in the court, and, with the wisdom of age, he is discoursing, in answer to the queries of Socrates, upon the pleasures which are a solace to such men as Sophocles at that period of life when they have attained self-mastery and are freed from the tyranny of passion. While he is free to admit that age brings discomfort and misery to many who have wasted their youthful prime in debasing pleasures and riotous living, he finds the chief cause of their trouble not in age but in the character of the men themselves. Upon this topic Plato, unlike his imitator, Cicero, does not expand his thought into an elaborate essay on Old Age. He contents himself with a few graphic strokes which, satisfying our sense of proportion, are entirely adequate to his purpose. He makes the reverend patriarch conclude his delightful part in the dialogue with a few fitting words upon the uses of wealth to the good man when the time of his departure is at hand. Like the national poet of Scotland Cephalus thinks Age and Want are an ill-matched pair. But he has never been in bondage to avarice; the object of his endeavor has not been the accumulation of property for its own sake; he is not unduly fond of money; riches, he thinks, when we have the closing scene in sight, are chiefly to be prized by us because they enable us to perform our vows to the gods, and to discharge our obligations to men. Thus, in the opening pages, we are afforded a partial view of justice, the subject of the whole dialogue. Cephalus, who is no philosopher, without attempting a definition, considers it to be Paying our debts to gods and men. This is the conclusion which he has reached, not by the reasoning process, but by experience. After giving in his closing words a glimpse of the happiness that may be confidently expected by the just man in the future life, he resigns the argument to his son, and, taking leave of the company, he goes off to the sacrifices. The glimpse of the future life here allowed us Plato, in the tenth book, expands into a glorious vision. Perhaps in the vision of judgment there revealed to Er, the son of Armenius, Plato intends us to infer that his Utopian commonwealth, where Justice dwells, cannot be fully realized in this world.

When Cephalus has withdrawn, Polemarchus, jocosely called by Socrates heir to the argument, begins the search for justice by what he considers an apt quotation from Simonides: Justice, that poet tells us, consists in restoring to every man what is his due. Socrates is not long in showing by telling illustrations taken from the arts, how inadequate and even perverse as a definition of justice is the maxim of Simonides, Yet the words of the poet, if rightly understood, are in complete accord with the ethics of the average Greek, whose ambition was to be

"Grim to his foes, and kindly to his friends,

For of such is the life most glorious;"{1}

but the Platonic Socrates shows us a more excellent way: We ought not to do wrong at all, nor should we, as the mass of men think, retaliate when unjustly treated, seeing that we ought never to commit any injustice at all.{2}

As Socrates in Book I, the ethical prologue of the Republic, elaborates and supports by the dialectic process his version of the golden rule so alien to Greek thought, Polemarchus at first bewildered by the strangeness of the doctrine is finally convinced of its truth; but Thrasymachus, the arch sophist, cannot abide such nonsense; he watches his opportunity, and, at the first pause in the argument, he rushes into the fray and begins his tirade with the fury of a wild beast. Confident that Wisdom dwells with him he heaps terms of derision upon the philosophy of Socrates. Might, he maintains, is right, and justice is the interest of the stronger. In despite of the temptation to retort in kind, the wise man, throughout this stormy episode, keeps himself mild and serene. The skirmishing with his brutal antagonist continues uninterrupted through fifteen chapters, to the end of Book I. Before the scene closes the sophist, involved in hopeless contradictions, for a wonder is seen to blush, and, like Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias, is, by the unerring logic of the master, completely foiled. The prologue ends with the pacification of Thrasymachus, and his withdrawal from the argument. Like other sophists he requires to be paid for his part in the discussion; his lively contribution contains merely some representative opinions about justice, but no worthy definition; the definition which at last is allowed to stand is led up to by degrees, and is finally reached in the fourth book. The Platonic Socrates is never in haste; he is quite content to continue indefinitely the dialogue of search, if haply he may feel after and find the truth. And when we moderns follow him through the second and third books, in his patient and deliberate quest of justice in the individual and the State, we are never so eager for results as to wish him to quicken his pace. At every step of his progress he opens up new vistas of thought and speculation, and lets in the light of intelligence upon subjects which the older philosophers had left vague and obscure.

In the nine opening chapters of Book II we have a continuation and conclusion of the ethical prologue. At this stage of the conversation the two brothers, thinking Thrasymachus had been too easily silenced, proceed, after the manner of the Devil’s advocate, but against their real convictions, to set forth the advantages of injustice and to make a plea for the unjust man. With all the ardor of youth and with the skill of trained gymnasts they conduct their sham battle of the orators so successfully that Socrates is delighted above measure with their words; and, because they are able to speak so eloquently in defense of injustice, while they believe in the superiority of justice, he expresses his admiration by citing in their honor a recent line of elegiac poetry, Sons of Ariston, divine progeny of an illustrious father. Glaucon has with great vigor supported the popular view that there is no essential difference between the just man and the unjust, that if each of them could procure a magic ring like that of Gyges, which possessed the power of making the wearer invisible, the two would go the same way, choosing injustice for its consequences, because every man thinks that it is far more profitable to himself individually than justice.

Furthermore, Glaucon continues, suppose the perfectly unjust man to be stripped of all things that have the appearance of evil, and, while guilty of the most consummate injustice, to have gained for himself the greatest reputation for justice; and, in case he makes a false step, thus revealing his real character, he must be able by his eloquence to convince men of his innocence, and he must be able to carry by force whatever requires force, as well by his courage and power as by his command of friends and money. And by his side let us place, by way of contrast, the perfectly just man who desires not to seem, but to be good; and let us suppose him to go on with a firm step till the day of his death, unswerving in his justice, but believed to be unjust all his life. Can we doubt which of the two will be the happier? The just man will endure hardness, will be destitute, afflicted, tormented, and finally, after suffering all evils, he will die an ignominious death. How different is the lot of the unjust man! Adroitly covering up his wickedness by wearing the livery of virtue, he becomes a ruler in the state, he takes a wife wherever he inclines, he gives his children in marriage to whatever family he pleases, and, acquiring wealth by the practice of villainy, he makes his less fortunate friends the objects of his benevolence, and gains the favor of the gods by dedicating to them magnificent votive offerings. At this point Adeimantus, offering considerations which he thinks important, enforces and supplements his brother’s arguments. The poets, he declares, do not commend the just and holy life, in and for itself. They deal rather with the rewards of virtue, and predict for the upright man prosperity and happiness here, and a heaven of sensuous pleasures hereafter, and for the wicked the direst penalties in Hades. But on questions of morality he concedes that the poets are hopelessly inconsistent; self-control and justice, they tell us, are hard and irksome, but intemperance and injustice are pleasant and easy to attain, and are rendered disgraceful only by public opinion and law. And further, according to Homer, Even the gods themselves may be turned by prayers, and men propitiate them with sacrifices, reverent vows, libations, burnt-offerings and entreaties as often as any one has committed transgression and sin. What wonder then if the young man, when he hears these doctrines plausibly set forth by professors of rhetoric, should choose the pleasant path of vice, and should rely upon sacrifices and rites of initiation to make his peace with heaven? In view of all this Adeimantus ends as his brother began by expressing an earnest desire to listen to a plea for the superiority of justice considered with reference to its intrinsic nature, and stripped of its accessories and consequences. Socrates fears that the difficulties of the question may be beyond him, but cannot very well refuse to come, as best he may, to the defense of justice. Justice, he says, with the approval of Adeimantus, is found in the individual, and it is found in a whole state as well. If then we can discover it writ large in the greater organism, which is the State, we may perhaps better ascertain its nature in the soul of man.

Hence he proceeds to treat of the origin of society. A State arises, he thinks, because each one is not self-sufficing, but requires the help of others to supply even his most elementary wants. Society is based upon an exchange of services. Our primitive needs are food, shelter and clothing. Now in order that our State shall be able to provide all this, one of its members must be a farmer, another a builder, and another a weaver, and perhaps we should add a shoemaker, or another of those who minister to the body. Hence our barest possible State would consist of four or five men. But here we should observe that, since natural endowments are by no means equal, one man has an aptitude for one task, another for another. Consequently our little State soon finds division of labor a necessity. In addition to the four classes already mentioned, there must be smiths and carpenters and other workmen to engage in the manufacture of agricultural implements, and of the tools required by the builder, the weaver and the shoemaker; for we conclude that the several commodities are produced in greater abundance, of better quality and with more ease when every man turns from other pursuits and, following his natural bent, does one thing at the proper season. Hence there will soon be a demand for herdsmen and shepherds to supply draft-animals, hides and wool; and as production increases our State will require day-laborers, retail dealers, a currency to serve as a token for the sake of exchange, sailors who understand the business of the sea, and a mercantile marine to carry on the foreign trade. Thus far Socrates has considered only the material wants of a simple and unsophisticated community. At this stage in the development of the State justice and injustice will begin to show themselves in the intercourse and dealings of these classes with one another.

In a tentative way, as if anticipating objections, Socrates proceeds, with scarcely disguised humor, to give us an idyllic description of a life of innocence. It reads like a page from the records of the Golden Age. The inhabitants of the new city are a simple folk; they have not tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge; they will be fed on barley-meal and wheaten flour, and reclining on pallets strewn with myrtle and yew they and their children will feast, sipping their wine, honoring the gods, dwelling together in unity, guarding against over population through fear of poverty or war. Since their hygienic menu does not appeal to Glaucon, Socrates adds a dessert of figs, of peas and beans, of roasted myrtle-berries and beech nuts. Glaucon protests, declaring such food to be appropriate only for a city of pigs, and demands for the new State the proprieties and comforts of civilization. Socrates readily yields to this demand, and thus makes it probable that the patriarchal society which he commends marks merely the beginning and not the complete development of his ideal State. To be sure, the primitive man wants but little here below, but perhaps in the luxurious State, with its artificial and complex needs we may best discover the growth of justice and injustice. Manifestly the way of living found quite sufficient to promote the welfare and happiness of the healthy State will fail to satisfy persons like Glaucon; they will require for their easement and gratification an amount and variety of the good things of this world hardly surpassed by the blessings of civilization which John Quincy Adams once recounted in his graceful verses upon the Wants of Man. As a result of the demand for the luxuries instead of the bare necessities of life, the arts and industries will be multiplied, the State must expand, for our primitive healthy city is no longer of sufficient size. To make room for the increased population we must cut off a slice of the adjacent territory, and, as our neighbors for like reasons will encroach upon us, wars will be inevitable. But as war requires soldiers, the principle of the division of labor will necessitate the maintenance of a warrior class. The men of this class, constituting a standing army whose duty it shall be to defend the State, will require a careful preparation for their profession; for war certainly calls for as much skill as shoe-making or carpentry. Furthermore, from the warrior-class must be chosen our guardians who are to be philosophical, high-spirited, but gentle, swift, and brave and strong.

At this point in the dialogue comes the question, How are the heroes, the future rulers of the people, to be educated? By way of answer we have what Rousseau has called the finest educational treatise the world has seen.

Education, Plato tells us, consists of gymnastic, or physical training, and of music, which includes literature and the liberal arts. The Platonic meaning of the word music, it has been well observed, is not unlike the academic sense of the word arts, which in the term, Bachelor of Arts, has been used for centuries with special reference to literature. The object of gymnastic is to secure the normal development and vigor of the body which are essential to the highest order of manhood; while the office of music is to promote the harmony and spiritual excellence of the soul. The work of education is to begin with the period of infancy and to continue through life. But in the training of the child music is to precede gymnastic. Now there are two kinds of literature—truth and fiction; and, while both are to be employed in the process of education, we must begin with fiction. The one educates through the imagination, the other through the reason. Perhaps the most striking modern instance of the disaster wrought by reversing the natural order is seen in Dickens’ tale of Hard Times, where Thomas Gradgrind is determined to mould the mind of his little daughter with fact instead of fiction. Plato’s first steps in education are lessons in religion. He would have the nurses and mothers tell to their children such myths of the gods and heroes as are suited to convey impressions of righteousness and purity. In this connection we come upon his famous criticism of the Homeric poems. The philosopher protests against the educational influence of many of the legends which survived in the two Greek bibles, the Iliad and the Odyssey. He cannot tolerate the poet whose stories of ignoble and lying gods fill the imagination of youth with false ideals of the divine nature. Yet he confesses that he himself is under the spell of Homer; but many passages of the poems he is compelled to exclude from the City of the Perfect. Plato’s proposed censorship and expurgation of the body of poetic literature existing in his day form a marked feature of the second and third books of the Republic. His criticism deals for the most part with Homer, but does not spare Hesiod and the dramatists. It cannot be said, however, that the finest educational treatise the world has seen materially affected the place of Homer in the schools of antiquity. In one of the early dialogues Socrates, without raising objections, listens while Protagoras gives an account of the method of study pursued in the schools. The teacher sets before the boys as they sit upon the benches the works of good poets to be read and committed to memory. The principal purpose of the lessons was to promote civic virtue, to form the boy’s character, to teach him to admire and emulate the great men of old. Among the good poets we may infer from Xenophon’s Symposium that Homer, as an educational force, was thought to be supreme. Centuries later, it can be shown on the authority of Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom, the two great epics still retained such a hold upon the mind of antiquity that the study of them formed an important part of Greek education.

It is true that Plato’s Higher Criticism of the poets, which he deemed essential to the welfare of his Utopian commonwealth, was denounced and rejected by many men of his own time, and by their followers in later generations. The martyrdom of Socrates, brought about in part, it was believed, by his dislike and rejection of the coarser myths with their immoral gods and goddesses, was still fresh in the writer’s memory. Yet none the less boldly on that account he lays down the rules of theology which are to be obeyed in conducting the new education. In the first place, since God is good, he cannot be the author of all things, as the many declare, but he is the cause of a few things, and not of the greater number that befall men, for the good things of our life are fewer by far than the evil. Here we have a strain of pessimism not frequent in Plato, but common enough in Greek literature. Professor Butcher in his fine essay upon the Melancholy of the Greeks has collected examples in abundance to show that Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and the dramatists often rehearsed in their poems the miseries of man. But while Plato recognizes the existence of evil in the world, he never attempts to account for its origin; he nowhere refers it to the influence of some malignant Power, but he insists that God is not its author. But if God, who is good, has sent distress and anguish upon the wicked, their punishment is not evil, but beneficent and remedial, and it is good for them that they have been afflicted. In the definition of God, a famous deliverance of the Westminster Assembly, the last but not the least of the divine attributes is truth. But here Plato is twenty centuries in advance of the learned theologians, for he says in the Republic that God is true and unchangeable. Now the student of history hardly needs to be told that veracity is not a distinguishing trait of the Ancient or the Modern Greek. Hence, as the children of Plato’s generation, no less than those of the psalmist, were prone to go astray speaking lies, the future rulers of the State, he tells us, must, in the early stages of their training, be taught to love the truth, and to hate falsehood. To this end many parts of Homer must be banished from the ideal State, for, according to Plato, the child whose mind is corrupted by the legends of treacherous and lying divinities will never become a lover of wisdom, an ingenuous and a just magistrate. Human nature cannot be expected to surpass or equal the divine in excellence; consequently in the days of his youth, while the mind is plastic, the future guardian must have none but the noblest ideals of God.

In Book III other considerations are urged for the reform of mythology. And here we should remember that we moderns, unlike the people of Plato’s day, do not take seriously the tales of Ancient Greece, but we read them for their literary excellence and not as lessons in morality. But their ethical import seems never to be lost sight of in the Republic; therefore Homer’s gloomy and false pictures of the life in Hades must be rejected, lest they weaken the courage of the future warriors, who are to be more afraid of slavery than of death.

Furthermore, those passages of the great epics which represent the gods and heroes giving way to excessive lamentations, or indulging in uproarious laughter, have a baneful influence upon the mind, and must be excluded from the State; for from everything that enervates and enfeebles the character the young men must be delivered. And, as we have observed, they must set a high value upon truth, seeing that the lie is a dangerous thing, to be used perhaps by physicians in dealing with the insane, or in treating diseases, or by magistrates in deceiving the enemy for the advantage of the commonwealth, but not to be meddled with by private individuals. Again, they must be taught the distinctive virtue of youth, self-control or temperance, which includes obedience to rulers, control of the desires that find their gratification in drinking, feasting and love, and restraint of sordid avarice, and of insolence, or proud contempt for both gods and men. The inculcation of this cardinal virtue will imply the exclusion of many a Homeric text and episode from Plato’s secondary school.

After dealing with the subject-matter of literature Plato proceeds to inquire into the form of discourse. Simplicity and directness must, in his ideal State, be leading characteristics of both prose and verse. Here we should remember that, when his remarks on style were written, nearly all the great Athenian poets were dead, and there had arisen in their place a succession of poeticules whose works had a tendency to corrupt the morals and vitiate the taste of the people. He fears that under the influence of these degenerates his countrymen are becoming a nation of imitators who, despising the words of truth and soberness, demand for their entertainment the spectacular and sensational drama. But by reason of his zeal for sincerity and simplicity of thought and action Plato, in the third and tenth books of the Republic, seems too severe upon the poets as a class; he apparently forgets that he himself is a poet. A tradition, which cannot be verified, makes him the author of about thirty extant epigrams written in elegiac verse. These have been collected in Bergk’s edition of the Greek Lyric Poets. Among them is the famous tribute to the master of Attic Comedy:

"The Graces sought some holy ground,

Whose site should ever please;

And in their search the soul they found

Of Aristophanes."

But as we have in the dialogues ample proof of his being by nature a poet, we need not insist upon the authenticity of the metrical fragments, or heed the story that, when in his twentieth year he met with Socrates and began the study of philosophy, he renounced the muse and burned his verses. The genius, who could create the allegory of the cave or den at the opening of Book VII, the vision of the disembodied spirit in Book X, or the myths at the close of the Gorgias and the Phaedo, appears inconsistent in banishing the poets from his Utopia. These productions, both in substance and form, seem quite as fanciful and remote from reality as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Plato does not rest satisfied with demanding the utmost simplicity in that part of music which relates to narratives or myths, but proceeds to impose equally severe restrictions on the character of melody and songs. In the education of the future warriors and guardians the pathetic and enervating strains are to be discarded, the Dorian Mood is to be retained, soft Lydian airs are to be excluded; no musical instruments are to be used except the lyre, the cithara and the Pandean pipe. Writing on Plato’s antipathy to instrumental music Professor Lewis Campbell shrewdly remarks: He would have sympathized with the Presbyterian who could not bear to hear the organ praising God by itself. Plato, we may believe, would have approved the compliment said to have been paid by Carlyle to a German composer; upon hearing the musician’s most difficult and complicated piece played after the manner of Rubenstein, the sage of Chelsea observed: Would to God it had been impossible! Literature, music proper, and art in all its forms are to be prized for their effect upon character. Simplicity and unity of design in all these things are essential to the best results. The youth who are to be the future rulers of the commonwealth must be protected, to the end that our guardians may not be brought up among images of vice, as in some vile pasture, each day, little by little, culling and feeding upon many baneful herbs in many places, until they unwittingly accumulate a great mass of evil in their own soul . . . . . . We must seek for those artists who by their native wit are able to trace out the nature of the beautiful and the graceful, so that our young men, like the inhabitants of a salubrious climate, may derive good from every quarter, whence any impression of fair works may strike upon their sense of sight or hearing, like a breeze wafting health from wholesome places, and may, from their earliest years, insensibly bring them into likeness, love and unison with the beauty of reason.{3}

To produce men capable of governing the State gymnastic, as a part of education, is no less essential than music. Their physical training, unlike that of the ordinary Greek athlete which often made him sluggish and stupid, must make them alert, sensitive to moral distinctions, must promote the growth of courage and self-control, must not develop brawn without brain, but must join forces with culture to strengthen their character. Moderate gymnastic exercise and plain living will constitute their art of medicine. For them physic and surgery, if resorted to at all, are to be heroic; when they suffer from diseases incident to the season, from wounds or accidents, they will require their physicians to follow the practice of Asclepias and his sons, and employ a kill or cure treatment. It is better for the patient, when his malady is incurable and his bodily and mental powers have failed, that he should die and be quit of his troubles, for by living he could be of no advantage either to himself or the State. Plato, in thus subordinating the individual to the community, shows a Spartan severity and cruelty, anticipates in a way the coldblooded communism of Book V, and disregards the principle which in our modern society takes the name of altruism, and is the consummate flower of Christianity.

As in the works of the dramatists, who treat for the most part of legendary Greece, there are frequent references to contemporary politics, so in the Republic there are occasional digressions in which Plato is not thinking of his ideal State, but has in mind the Athens of his own day. An example in point is the passage where he discriminates between the qualifications of the physician and the judge: "Physicians would become most skilful, if from their youth upward, after learning the principles of their art, they should have to deal with the greatest number of the worst cases, and should have personal experience of all manner of diseases, and if they were not naturally very healthy.

* * * *

On the other hand the judge governs mind with mind; and his mind should not have been nurtured among vicious minds or have had early intercourse with them, nor does it need to have gone through a personal experience in a long criminal career, to the end that his own injustice may render him quick to discover the guilt of others, as the maladies of the physician enable him to discern bodily diseases; on the contrary the mind from its youth must have been innocent, and free from taint of vice, if it is to be noble and good, and is to judge righteous judgment{4}

But he soon returns to his Perfect City and to the influence of gymnastic, when combined with culture, upon the character of those who are to be its defenders and rulers. Gymnastic, if rightly employed, develops the spirited part of our nature, and gives vigor to mind and body; but pursued to excess, to the neglect of music and philosophy, it has a tendency to make a man harsh and brutal; while exclusive attention to music results in softness and effeminacy.

It is from the men who have shared in due proportion the discipline of these two forces in education, and have become in consequence both spirited and gentle that the magistrates of the ideal State are to be chosen. They must also have been subjected to severe tests and temptations to determine whether, by patient continuance in well-doing, they have become worthy of their high calling.

To enforce the lesson that the three classes in his commonwealth, are actually made of different stuff, Plato at the end of Book III introduces a myth:

"I will endeavor to persuade first the rulers themselves and the soldiers, and then the rest of the citizens that, according to our tale, the education and training we gave them are mere illusions; they only fancied, as in dreams, that they experienced all these things, and that they happened to them, while in reality at that time they were being fashioned and nourished in the bosom of the earth, where they themselves, their weapons and the rest of their implements were manufactured; but when they were entirely completed, even then the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so they must take thought for the country in which they live as for their mother and nurse, and they must defend her against assault, and must look upon the rest of the citizens as children of the earth and their own brothers.

"No doubt all of you who dwell in the State are brothers, we shall say to them, keeping up the fiction; but the god, when he was forming you, mingled gold in the composition of those among you who had the power to govern others, and therefore they have the greatest honor, and silver in the composition of those who were fit to be auxiliaries, and iron and brass in the composition of the husbandmen and the other workmen. As you are all originally of the same