[453]: Odysseus in Od. ix. 8-10. For παραπλεῖαι the Homeric text has παρὰ δὲ πλήθωσι. Plato’s treatment of the quotation is hardly fair to Homer. Aristotle, Politics 1338 a 28, cites it more fairly to illustrate the use of music for entertainment (διαγωγή). The passage, however, was liable to abuse. See the use made of it by Lucian, Parasite 10.
[454]: Hom. Od. 12.342
[455]: Hom. Od. 12.342.
[456]: Hom. Il. 14.294-341.
[457]: Hom. Il. 14.296
[458]: Odyssey viii. 266 ff.
[459]: May include on Platonic principles the temptations of pleasure. Cf. Laws 191 D-E.
[460]: Hom. Od. 20.17-18
[461]: Quoted also in Phaedo 94 D-E.
[462]: unknown
[463]: Suidas s. v. δῶρα says that some attributed the line to Hesiod. Cf. Euripides Medea 964, Ovid, Ars Am. iii. 653, Otto, Sprichw. d. Röm. 233.
[464]: See his speech, Iliad ix. 515 ff.
[465]: Cf. Iliad xix. 278 ff. But Achilles in Homer is indifferent to the gifts.
[466]: Iliad xxiv. 502, 555, 594. But in 560 he does not explicitly mention the ransom.
[467]: Cf. 368 B.
[468]: Hom. Il. 22.15
[469]: Professor Wilamowitz uses ὀλοώτατε to prove that Apollo was a god of destruction. But Menelaus says the same of Zeus in Iliad iii. 365. Cf. Class. Phil. vol. iv. (1909) p. 329.
[470]: Scamander. Il. 21. 130-132.
[471]: Hom. Il. 23.151
[472]: Cf. Proclus, p. 146 Kroll. Plato exaggerates to make his case. The locks were vowed to Spercheius on the condition of Achilles’ return. In their context the words are innocent enough.
[473]: Iliad xxiv. 14 ff.
[474]: Iliad xxiii. 175-176.
[475]: Proverbially. Cf. Pindar Nem. iv. 56, v. 26, Aristophanes Clouds 1063, and my note on Horace iii. 7. 17.
[476]: Zeus, Aeacus, Peleus. For the education of Achilles by Cheiron Cf. Iliad xi. 832, Pindar Nem. iii., Euripides, I. A. 926-927, Plato, Hippias Minor 371 D.
[477]: Theseus was assisted by Perithous in the rape of Helen and joined Perithous in the attempt to abduct Persephone. Theseus was the theme of epics and of lost plays by Sophocles and Euripides.
[478]: Plato was probably thinking of this passage when he wrote the last paragraph of the Critias.
[479]: Aesch. Niobe Fr.
[480]: Cf. my note in Class. Phil. vol. xii. (1910) p. 308.
[481]: Or possibly determine this at present. The prohibition which it would beg the question to place here is made explicit in Laws 660 E. Cf. Laws 899 D, and 364 B.
[482]: λόγων here practically means the matter, and λέξεως, which became a technical term for diction, the manner, as Socrates explains when Adeimantus fails to understand.
[483]: Cf. Aristotle Poetics 1449 b 27.
[484]: All art is essentially imitation for Plato and Aristotle. But imitation means for them not only the portrayal or description of visible and tangible things, but more especially the expression of a mood or feeling, hence the (to a modern) paradox that music is the most imitative of the arts. But Plato here complicates the matter further by sometimes using imitation in the narrower sense of dramatic dialogue as opposed to narration. An attentive reader will easily observe these distinctions. Aristotle’s Poetics makes much use of the ideas and the terminology of the following pages.
[485]: Socratic urbanity professes that the speaker, not the hearer, is at fault. Cf. Protagoras 340 E, Philebus 23 D.
[486]: Plato and Aristotle often contrast the universal and the particular as whole and part. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 52. Though a good style is concrete, it is a mark of linguistic helplessness not to be able to state an idea in general terms. Cf. Locke, Human Understanding, ii. 10. 27: This man is hindered in his discourse for want of words to communicate his complex ideas, which he is therefore forced to make known by an enumeration of the simple ones that compose them.
[487]: Iliad
[488]: Hom. Il. 1.15
[489]: In the narrower sense.
[490]: Cf. Hazlitt, Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare does not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once becomes them and speaks and acts for them.
[491]: From here to 394 B, Plato gives a prose paraphrase of Iliad i. 12-42. Roger Ascham in his Schoolmaster quotes it as a perfect example of the best form of exercise for learning a language.
[492]: The dithyramb was technically a poem in honor of Bacchus. For its more or less conjectural history cf. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy. Here, however, it is used broadly to designate the type of elaborate Greek lyric which like the odes of Pindar and Bacchylides narrates a myth or legend with little if any dialogue.
[493]: Again in the special limited sense.
[494]: This seems to imply that Plato already had in mind the extension of the discussion in the tenth book to the whole question of the moral effect of poetry and art.
[495]: Cf. Theaetetus 172 D. But it is very naive to suppose that the sequence of Plato’s argument is not carefully planned in his own mind. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 5.
[496]: At the close of the Symposium Socrates constrains Agathon and Aristophanes to admit that one who has the science (τέχνη) of writing tragedy will also be able to write comedy. There is for Plato no contradiction, since poetry is for him not a science or art, but an inspiration.
[497]: The rhapsode Ion is a Homeric specialist who cannot interpret other poets. Cf. Ion 533 C.
[498]: Cf. Classical Review, vol. xiv. (1900), pp. 201 ff.
[499]: Cf. Laws 846 E, Montaigne, Nostre suffisance est detaillée à menues pièces, Pope, Essay on Criticism, 60: One science only will one genius fit, So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
[500]: Cf. the fine passage in Laws 817 B ἡμεῖς ἐσμεν τραγωδίας αὐτοὶ ποιηταί, [Pindar] apud Plut. 807 C δημιουργὸς εὐνομίας καὶ δίκης.
[501]: Cf. 386 A.
[502]: i.e., δημιουργοῖς ἐλευθερίας
[503]: Cf. 606 B, Laws 656 B, 669 B-C, and Burke, Sublime and Beautiful iv. 4, anticipating James, Psychology ii. pp. 449, 451, and anticipated by Shakespeare’s (Cor. III. ii. 123) By my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness.
[504]: Cf. my paper on Φύσις, Μελέτη, Ἐπιστήμη, T.A.P.A. vol. xl. (1910) pp. 185 ff.
[505]: Cf. Laws 816 D-E.
[506]: For this rejection of violent realism Cf. Laws 669 C-D. Plato describes exactly what Verhaeren’s admirers approve: often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers, the hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels, the whirring of looms, the hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of the streets, the humming and rumbling of dense masses of people. (Stefan Zweig). So another modern critic celebrates the cry of a baby in a Strauss symphony, the sneers and snarls of his critics in his Helden Leben, the contortions of the Dragon in Wagner’s Siegfried.
[507]: Chaucer drew from a misapplication of Timaeus 29 B or Boethius the opposite moral: Who shall telle a tale after a man, He most reherse, as neighe as ever he can, Everich word, if it be in his charge, All speke he never so rudely and so large; Eke Plato sayeth, who so can him rede, The words most ben cosin to the dede.
[508]: Plato, like Howells and some other modern novelists, would have thought somewhat gross comedy less harmful than the tragedy or romance that insidiously instils false ideals.
[509]: The respondent plays on the double meaning of οὐδὲν λέγεις and replies, Yes indeed you do say something, namely the type and pattern, etc.
[510]: Cf. Gorgias 487 B, Euthydemus 305 B, Protagoras 323 B.
[511]: Besides its suggestion of change and reaction the word is technical in music for the transition from one harmony to another.
[512]: The reverse of the Periclean ideal. Cf. Thucydides ii. 41.
[513]: The famous banishment of Homer, regarded as the prototype of the tragedian. Cf. 568 A-C, 595 B, 605 C, 607 D, Laws 656 C, 817 B
[514]: Greek idiom achieves an effect impossible to English here, by the shift from the co-ordination of ποιήματα with αὐτός to the treatmnt of it as the object of ἐπιδείξασθαι and the possible double use of the latter as middle with αὐτός and transitive with ποιήματα. Cf. for a less striking example 427 D, Phaedrus 250 B-C.
[515]: Cf. from a different point of view Arnold’s The Austerity of Poetry.
[516]: Cf. 379 A ff.
[517]: He laughs at his own mild joke, which Professor Wilamowitz (Platon ii. p. 192) does not understand. Cf. Laws 859 E, Hippias Major 293 A ἢ οὐχ εἷς τῶν ἁπάντων καὶ Ἡρακλῆς ἦν; and in a recent novel, I am afraid everybody does not include me, she smiled.
[518]: The complete song includes words, rhythms, and harmony, that is, a pitch system of high and low notes. Harmony is also used technically of the peculiar Greek system of scales or modes. Cf. Monro, Modes of Ancient Greek Music.
[519]: The poets at first composed their own music to fit the words. When, with the further development of music, there arose the practice of distorting the words, as in a mere libretto, it provoked a storm of protest from conservatives in aesthetics and morals.
[520]: The modes of Greek music are known to the English reader only from Milton’s allusions, his Lap me in soft Lydian airs and, P. L. i. 549 f., his Anon they movein perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders; such as rasied To highth of noblest temper heroes old. The adaptation of particualr modes, harmonies, or scales to the expression of particular feelings is something that we are obliged to accept on faith. Plato’s statements here were challenged by some later critics, but the majority believed that there was a connection between modes of music and modes of feeling, as Ruskin and many others have in our day. The hard-headed Epicureans and sceptics denied it, as well as the moral significance of music generally.
[521]: Cf. 387 E.
[522]: Plato, like a lawyer or popular essayist, affects ignorance of the technical details; or perhaps rather he wishes to disengage his main principle from the specialists’ controversy about particular modes of music and their names.
[523]: ἐκείνην may mean, but does not say, Dorian, which the Laches (188 D) pronounces the only true Greek harmony. This long anacoluthic sentence sums up the whole matter with impressive repetition and explicit enumeration of all types of conduct in peace and war, and implied reference to Plato’s doctrine of the two fundamental temperaments, the swift and the slow, the energetic and the mild. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, nn. 59, 70, 481.
[524]: Cf. Laws 814 E.
[525]: Metaphorically. The many-toned instrumentation of the flutes, as Pindar calls it, Ol. vii. 12, can vie with the most complex and many-stringed lyre of musical innovation.
[526]: Cf. 404 D, the only other occurrence of the word in Plato.
[527]: Cf. my note on Timaeus 47 C, in A.J.P. vol. x. p. 61.
[528]: Ancient critics noted this sentence as an adaptation of sound to sense. Cf. Demetr. Περὶ ἑρμ. 185. The sigmas and iotas may be fancied to suggest the whistling notes of the syrinx. So Lucretius v. 1385 tibia quas fundit digitis pulsata canentum. Cf. on Catullus 61. 13 voce carmina tinnula.
[529]: The so-called Rhadamanthine oath to avoid taking the names of the gods in vain. Cf. 592 A, Apology 21 E, Blaydes on Aristophanes Wasps 83.
[530]: Cf. 372 E. Dummler, Proleg. p. 62, strangely affirms that this is an express retraction of the ἀληθινὴ πόλις. This is to misapprehend Plato’s method. He starts with the indispensable minimum of a simple society, develops it by Herbert Spencer’s multiplication of effects into an ordinary Greek city, then reforms it by a reform of education and finally transforms it into his ideal state by the rule of the philosopher kings. Cf. Introduction p. xiv.
[531]: Practically the feet.
[532]: According to the ancient musicians these are the equal as e.g. in dactyls (–⏑⏑), spondees (––) and anapests (⏑⏑–), where the foot divides into two equal quantities; the 3/2 ratio, as in the so-called cretic (⏑–⏑); the 2/1 as in the iamb (⏑–) and trochee (–⏑). Cf. Aristid. Quint. i. pp. 34-35.
[533]: Possibly the four notes of the tetrachord, but there is no agreement among experts. Cf. Monro, Modes of Ancient Greek Music.
[534]: Modern psychologists are still debating the question.
[535]: The Platonic Socrates frequently refers to Damon as his musical expert. Cf. Laches 200 B, 424 C, Alc. I. 118 C.
[536]: There is a hint of satire in this disclaimer of expert knowledge. Cf. 399 A. There is no agreement among modern experts with regard to the precise form of the so-called enoplios. Cf. my review of Herkenrath’s Der Enoplios, Class. Phil. vol. iii. p. 360, Goodell, Chapters on Greek Metric, pp. 185 and 189, Blaydes on Aristophanes Nubes 651.
[537]: Possibly foot, possibly rhythm. δάκτυλον seems to mean the foot, while ἡρῷος is the measure based on dactyls but admitting spondees.
[538]: ἄνω καὶ κάτω is an untranslatable gibe meaning literally and technically the upper and lower half of the foot, the arsis and thesis, but idiomatically meaning topsy-turvy. There is a similar play on the idiom in Philebus 43 A and 43 B.
[539]: Literally becoming or issuing in long and short, long, that is, when a spondee is used, short when a dactyl.
[540]: Plato, as often, employs the forms of an argument proceeding by minute links to accumulate synonyms in illustration of a moral or aesthetic analogy. He is working up to the Wordsworthian thought that order, harmony, and beauty in nature and art are akin to these qualities in the soul.
[541]: Plato recurs to the etymological meaning of εὐήθεια. Cf. on 343 C.
[542]: The Ruskinian and Wordsworthian generalization is extended from music to all the fine arts, including, by the way, architecture (οἰκοδομία), which Butcher (Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry, p. 138) says is ignored by Plato and Aristotle.
[543]: Their special task is to cultivate true εὐήθεια in their souls. For τὸ αὑτῶν πράττειν here Cf. 443 C-D.
[544]: The following page is Plato’s most eloquent statement of Wordsworth’s, Ruskin’s, and Tennyson’s gospel of beauty for the education of the young. He repeats it in Laws 668 B. Cf. my paper on Some Ideals of Education in Plato’s Republic, Educational Bi-monthly, vol. ii. (1907-1908) pp. 215 ff.
[545]: Schopenhauer, following Plato, adds the further metaphysical reason that while the other arts imitate the external manifestations of the universal Will, music represents the Will itself.
[546]: Cf. 362 B, 366 C, 388 A, 391 E, and Ruskin’s paradox that taste is the only morality.
[547]: Cf. Laws 653 B-C, where Plato defines education by this principle. Aristotle virtually accepts it (Ethics ii. 3. 2). The Stoics somewhat pedantically laid it down that reason entered into the youth at the age of fourteen.
[548]: Plato often employs letters or elements (στοιχεῖα) to illustrate the acquisition of knowledge (Theaetetus 206 A), the relation of elements to compounds, the principles of classification (Philebus 18 C, Cratylus 393 D), and the theory of ideas (Politicus 278 A. Cf. Isocrates xiii. 13, Xenophon Memorabilia iv. 4. 7, Blass, Attische Beredsamkeit, ii. pp. 23 f., 348 f., Cicero De or. ii. 130).
[549]: It is of course possible to contrast images with the things themselves, and to speak of forms or species without explicit allusion to the metaphysical doctrine of ideas. But on the other hand there is not the slightest reason to assume that the doctrine and its terminology were not familiar to Plato at the time when this part of the Republic was written. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 31 ff., 35. Statistics of the use of εἶδος and ἰδέα (Peiper’s Ontologica Platonica, Taylor, Varia Socratica, Wilamowitz, Platon, ii. pp. 249-253), whatever their philological interest, contribute nothing to the interpretation of Plato’s thought. Cf. my De Platonis Idearum Doctrina, pp. 1, 30, and Class Phil. vol. vi. pp. 363-364. There is for common sense no contradiction or problem in the fact that Plato here says that we cannot be true musicians till we recognize both the forms and all copies of, or approximations to, them in art or nature, while in Book X (601) he argues that the poet and artist copy not the idea but its copy in the material world.
[550]: Plato, like all intellectuals, habitually assumes that knowledge of principles helps practice. Cf. Phaedrus 259 E, 262 B, and 484 D, 520 C, 540 A.
[551]: Liberality and high-mindedness, or rather, perhaps, magnificence, are among the virtues defined in Aristotle’s list (Eth. Nic. 1107 b 17), but are not among the four cardinal virtues which the Republic will use in Book IV. in the comparison of the indivdual with the state.
[552]: Symposium 209 B τὸ συναμφότερον, 210 C, Wilamowitz, vol. ii. p. 192.
[553]: Music and beauty lead to the philosophy of love, more fully set forth in the Phaedrus and Symposium, and here dismissed in a page. Plato’s practical conclusion here may be summed up in the Virgilian line (Aeneid v. 344): Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.
[554]: Extravagant pleasure is akin to madness. Cf. Philebus 47 A-C, Phaedo 83 C-D.
[555]: Cf. 468 B-C.
[556]: The dependence of body on soul, whether in a mystical, a moral, or a medical sense, is a favorite doctrine of Plato and the Platonists. Cf. Charmides 156-157, Spenser, An Hymn in Honour of Beauty: For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make, and Shelley, The Sensitive Plant: A lady, the wonder of her kind, Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind, Which dilating had moulded her mien and her motion Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean. Cf. also Democr. fr. B. 187 Diels.
[557]: Cf. 398 E. There is no contradiction between this and the half-serious proposal of the Laws to use supervised drinking-bouts as a safe test of character (Laws 641).
[558]: γε emphasizes what follows from the very meaning of the word. Cf. 379 B, 389 B, 435 A.
[559]: Cf. 543 B, 621 D, Laches 182 A, Laws 830 A, Demosthenes xxv. 97 ἀθληταὶ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων.
[560]: Cf. Ἐράσται 132 C καθεύδων πάντα τὸν βίον. Xenophanes, Euripides, Aristotle, and the medical writers, like Plato, protest against the exaggerated honor paid to athletes and the heavy sluggishness induced by overfeeeding and overtraining.
[561]: Laws 797 D. Cf. 380 E. Aristotle’s comment on μεταβολή, Eth. Nic. 1154 b 28 ff., is curiously reminiscent of Plato, including the phrase ἁπλῆ οὐδ’ ἐπιεικής.
[562]: Perhaps in the context cold.
[563]: Literally equitable, if we translate ἐπιεικής by its later meaning, that is, not over-precise or rigid in conformity to rule. Adam is mistaken in saying that ἐπιεικής is practically synonymous with ἀγαθή. It sometimes is, but not here. Cf. Plutarch, De san. 13 ἀκριβὴς . . . καὶ δι’ ὄνυχος.
[564]: So Laws 706 D. The καί is perhaps merely idiomatic in quotation.
[565]: Homer’s ignoring of fish diet, except in stress of starvation, has been much and idly discussed both in antiquity and by modern scholars. Modern pseudo-science has even inferred from this passage that Plato placed a taboo on fish, though they are at the sea-side on the Hellespont, which Homer calls fish-teeming, Iliad ix. 360.
[566]: Cf. Green, History of English People, Book II. chap. ii., an old description of the Scotch army: They have therefore no occasion for pots and pans, for they dress the flesh of the cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, etc. But cf. Athenaeus, i. 8-9 (vol. i. p. 36 L.C.L.), Diogenes Laertius viii. 13 ὥστε εὐπορίστους αὐτοῖς εἶναι τὰς τροφάς.
[567]: Proverbial, like the Corinthian maid and the Attic pastry. Cf. Otto, Sprichw. d. Rom. p. 321, Newman, Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, p. 302. Cf. also Phaedrus 240 B.
[568]: δικανική: more contemptuous than δικαστική.
[569]: I have given the sense. The contruction is debated accordingly as we read ἀπορία or ἀπορίᾳ. Cf. Phaedrus 239 D, of the use of cosmetics, χήτει οἰκείων. The καί with ἀπορίᾳ is awkward or expresses the carelessness of conversation.
[570]: Plato likes to emphasize by pointing to a lower depth or a higher height beyond the superlative.
[571]: There is no exact English equivalent for ἀπειροκαλία, the insensitiveness to the καλόν of the banausic, the nouveau riche and the Philistine.
[572]: The phrasing of this passage recalls passages of Aristophanes’ Clouds, and the description of the pettifogging lawyer and politician in the Theaetetus 172 E. Cf. 519, also Euthydemus 302 B, and Porphyry, De abstinentia, i. 34. The metaphors are partly from wrestling.
[573]: Cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Knights 263.
[574]: Cf. Gorgias 507 D, Thucydides iii. 82, Isocrates Antidosis 238, Antiphanes, fr. 288 Kock ὁ μηδὲν ἀδικῶν οὐδενὸς δεῖται νόμου.
[575]: Plato ridicules the unsavory metaphors required to describe the effects of auto-intoxication. There is a similar bit of somewhat heavier satire in Spencer’s Social Statics, 1868, p. 32: Carbuncled noses, cadaverous faces, foetid breaths, and plethoric bodies meet us at every turn; and our condolences are prepetually asked for headaches, flatulences, nightmare, heartburn, and endless other dyspeptic symptoms.
[576]: Plato is probably quoting from memory. In our text, Iliad xi. 624, Hecamede gives the draught to Machaon and Nestor as the Ion (538 B) correctly states.
[577]: This coddling treatment of disease, which Plato affects to reprobate here, he recommends from the point of view of science in the Timaeus (89 C): διὸ παιδαγωγεῖν δεῖ διαίταις, etc. Cf. Euripides Orestes 883; and even in the Republic 459 C.
[578]: Cf. Protagoras 316 E, Phaedrus 227 D. To be distinguished from his namesake, the brother of Gorgias in Gorgias 448 B. Cf. Cope on Aristotle Rhet. i. 5, Wilamowitz-Kiessling, Phil. Unt. xv. p. 220, Juthner, Philostratus uber Gymnastik, p. 10.
[579]: Cf. Macaulay on Mitford’s History of Greece: It (oligarchical government) has a sort of valetudinarian longevity; it lives in the balance of Sanctorius; it takes no exercise; it exposes itself to no accident; it is seized with a hypochondriac alarm at every new sensation; it trembles at every breath; it lets blood for every inflammation; and this, without ever enjoying a day of health or pleasure, drags out its existence to a doting and debilitated old age. That Macaulay here is consciously paraphrasing Plato is apparent from his unfair use of the Platonic passage in his essay on Bacon. Cf. further Euripides Supp. 1109-1113; Seneca on early medicine, Epistles xv. 3 (95) 14 ff., overdoes both Spencer and Macaulay. Cf. Rousseau, Emile, Book I.: Je ne sais point apprendre à vivre à qui ne songe qu’à s’empêcher de mourir; La Rochefoucauld (Max. 282): C’est une ennuyeuse maladie que de conserver sa santé par un trop grand régime.
[580]: The pun γήρας and γέρας is hardly translatable. Cf. Pherecydes apud Diogenes Laertius i. 119 χθονίῃ δὲ ὄνομα ἐγένετο Γῆ, ἐπειδὴ αὐτῇ Ζὰς γῆν γέρας διδοῖ (vol. i. p. 124 L.C.L.). For the ironical use of καλόν cf. Euripides Cyclops 551, Sappho, fr. 53 (58).
[581]: Cf. Plutarch, De sanitate tuenda 23, Sophocles, fr. 88. 11 (?), Lucian, Nigrinus 22, differently; Hotspur’s, Zounds! how has he the leisure to be sick?
[582]: For ἢ κάτω cf. Chaucer, Ne upward purgative ne downward laxative.
[583]: Cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Acharnians 439.
[584]: This alone marks the humor of the whole passage, which Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon seems to miss. Cf. Aristophanes Acharnians 757;Apology 41 D.
[585]: The line of Phocylides is toyed with merely to vary the expression of the thought. Bergk restores it δίζησθαι βιοτήν, ἀρετὴν δ’ ὅταν ᾖ βίος ἤδη, which is Horace’s (Epistles i. 1. 53 f.): Quaerenda pecunia primum est;Virtus post nummos!
[586]: In the Gorgias (464 B) ἰατρική is recognized as co-ordinate in the care of the body with γυμναστική. Here, whatever goes beyond the training and care that will preserve the health of a normal body is austerely rejected. Cf. 410 B.
[587]: As Macaulay, Essay on Bacon, puts it: That a valetudinarian . . . who enjoyed a hearty laugh over the Queen of Navarre’s tales should be treated as a caput lupinum because he could not read the Timaeus without a headache, was a notion which the humane spirit of the English schools of wisdom altogether rejected. For the thought cf. Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 12. 6-7.
[588]: Literally virtue is practiced in this way. Cf. 503 D for a similar contrast between mental and other labors. And for the meaning of virtue cf. the Elizabethan: Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds.
[589]: There is a suggestion of Stoic terminology in Plato’s use of ἐμπόδιος and similar words. Cf. Xenophon Memorabilia i. 2. 4. On the whole passage cf. again Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon, Maximus of Tyre (Duebn.) 10, and the diatribe on modern medicine and valetudinarianism in Edward Carpenter’s Civilization, Its Cause and Cure.
[590]: Cf. Thucydides i. 130.
[591]: There is a touch of comedy in the Greek. Cf. Eupolis, fr. 94 Kock ταχὺν λέγεις μέν.
[592]: Cf. the Homeric ἦ οὐ μέμνῃ;
[593]: Hom. Il. 4.218
[594]: Plato is quoting loosely or adapting Hom. Il. 4.218. αἷμ’ ἐκμυζήσας ἐπ’ ἄρ’ ἤπια φάρμακα εἰδὼς πάσσε is said of Machaon, not of Menelaus.
[595]: Proverbial and suggests Tyrtaeus. Cf. Laws 660 E.
[596]: Cf. Aeschylus Agamemnon 1022 ff., Euripides Alcestis 3-4, Pindar, Pyth. iii. 53.
[597]: Cf. 379 ff., also 365 E.
[598]: Slight colloquial jest. Cf. Aristophanes Eq. 1158, Pax 1061.
[599]: Cf. Gorgias 465 C-D.
[600]: ὀψιμαθῆ: here in a favorable sense, but usually an untranslatable Greek word for a type portrayed in a charater of Theophrastus.
[601]: For this type of character cf. Thucydides iii. 83, and my comments in T.A.P.A. vol. xxiv. p. 79. Cf. Burke, Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol: They who raise suspicions on the good on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter; Stobaeus ii. p. 46 Βίας ἔφη, οἱ ἀγαθοὶ εὐαπάτητοι, Menander, fr. 845 Kock χρηστοῦ παρ’ ἀνδρὸς μηδὲν ὑπονόει κακόν.
[602]: Cf. George Eliot, Adam Bede, chap. xiv.: It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension by a good deal of hard experience.
[603]: Cf. Theaetetus 176 D It is far best not to concede to the unjust that they are clever knaves, for they glory in the taunt. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, n. 21.
[604]: Only the incurable suffer a purely exemplary and deterrent punishment in this world or the next. Cf. 615 E, Protagoras 325 A, Gorgias 525 C, Phaedo 113 E.
[605]: ultro, as opposed to ἐάσουσιν.
[606]: Cf. 405 C. Plato always allows for the limitation of the ideal by necessity.
[607]: The welfare of the soul is always the prime object for Plato. (Cf. 591 C) But he cannot always delay to correct ordinary speech in this sense. The correction of 376 E here is of course not a change of opinion, and it is no more a criticism of Isocrates, Antidosis 180-185, than it is of Gorgias 464 B, or Soph. 228 E, or Republic 521 E.
[608]: μεταχειρίζονται: this reading of Galen is more idiomatic than the MS. μεταχειριεῖται. Where English says he is not covetous of honor as other men are, Greek says he (is) not as other men are covetous of honor.
[609]: Plato half seriously attributes his own purposes to the founders. Cf. 405-406 on medicine and Philebus 16 C on dialectics.
[610]: For the thought cf. Euripides Suppl. 882 f. and Polybius’s account of the effect of the neglect of music on the Arcadians (iv. 20).
[611]: Cf. 375 C. With Plato’s doctrine of the two temperaments cf. the distinction of quick-wits and hard-wits in Ascham’s Schoolmaster. Ascham is thinking of Plato, for he says: Galen saith much music marreth men’s manners; and Plato hath a notable place of the same thing in his book De rep., well marked also and excellently translated by Tully himself.
[612]: Cf. 561 C.
[613]: Demetrius, Περὶ Ἑρμ. 51, quotes this and the following sentence as an example of the more vivid expression following the less vivid. For the image cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Thesm. 18, Aeschylus Choeph. 451, Shakespeare, CymbelineIII. ii. 59 Love’s counsellor should fill the bores of hearing.
[614]: Cf. 398 D-E, where the θρηνώδεις ἁρμονίαι are rejected altogether, while here they are used to illustrate the softening effect of music on a hard temperament. It is misspent ingenuity to harp on such contradictions.
[615]: For images drawn from the tempering of metals cf. Aeschylus Agamemnon 612 and Jebb on Sophocles Ajax 650.
[616]: Cf. Theaetetus 165 E ἐπέχων καὶ οὐκ ἀνιείς, and Blaydes on Aristophanes Peace 1121.
[617]: Cf. Tennyson’s Molten down in mere uxoriousness (Geraint and Enid).
[618]: A familiar Homeric reminiscence (Iliad xvii. 588) quoted also in Symposium 174 C. Cf. Froissart’s un mol chevalier.
[619]: Etymologically ἄθυμος = deficient in θυμός.
[620]: A hater of rational discussion, as explained in Laches 188 C, and the beautiful passage in the Phaedo 89 D ff. Cf. Minucius Felix, Octavius 14. 6 Igitur nobis providendum est ne odio identidem sermonum laboremus. John Morley describes obscurantists as sombre hierophants of misology.
[621]: For virtue as music Cf. Phaedo61 A, Laches 188 D, and Iago’s There is a daily music in his life. The perfect musician is the professor of the royal art of Politicus 306-308 ff. which harmonizes the two temperaments, not merely by education, but by elminating extremes through judicious marriages.
[622]: This epistates is not the director of education of Laws 765 D ff., though of course he or it will control education. It is rather an anticipation of the philosophic rulers, as appears from 497 C-D, and corresponds to the nocturnal council of Laws 950 B ff. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 86, note 650.
[623]: γάρ explains τύποι, or outlines. Both in the Republic and the LawsPlato frequently states that many details must be left to subsequent legislation. Cf. Republic 379 A, 400 B-C, 403 D-E, 425 A-E, Laws 770 B, 772 A-B, 785 A, 788 A-B, 807 E, 828 B, 846 C, 855 D, 876 D-E, 957 A, 968 C.
[624]: αὐτῶν τούτων marks a class within a class. Cf. Class. Phil. vol. vii. (1912) p. 485. 535 A refers back to this passage.
[625]: The argument proceeds by minute links. Cf. on 338 D.
[626]: Cf. Crito 46 B, Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 12. 7.
[627]: Cf. on 382 A and Sophist. 228 C, Marcus Aurelius vii. 63.
[628]: The preceding metaphors are in the high-flown, obscure style of tragedy. Cf. Thompson on Meno 76 E, Cratylus 418 D, Aristophanes Frogs, passim, Wilamowitz, Platon, ii. p. 146.
[629]: Cf. Dionysius ὁ μεταθέμενος, who went over from the Stoics to the Cyrenaics because of the pain in his eyes, Diogenes Laertius vii. 166.
[630]: Cf. 584 A γοητεία.
[631]: The concept μηχανή or ingenious device employed by a superior intelligence to circumvent necessity or play providence with the vulgar holds a prominent place in Plato’s physics, and is for Rousseau-minded readers one of the dangerous features of his political and educational philosophy. Cf. 415 C, Laws 664 A, 752 C, 769 E, 798 B, 640 B.
[632]: Cf. 389 B.
[633]: 389 B f.
[634]: As was the Cadmus legend of the men who sprang from the dragon’s teeth, which the Greeks believed οὕτως ἀπίθανον ὄν, Laws 663 E. Pater, who translates the passage (Plato and Platonism, p. 223), fancifully suggests that it is a miners’ story. Others read into it an allusion to Egyptian castes. The proverb ψεῦσμα Φοινικικόν (Strabo 259 B) probably goes back to the Phoenician tales of the Odyssey.
[635]: Plato never attempts a Voltairian polemic against the general faith in the supernatural, which he is willing to utilize for ethical ends, but he never himself affirms le surnaturel particulier.
[636]: καὶ μάλ’ here as often adds a touch of humorous colloquial emphasis, which our conception of the dignity of Plato does not allow a translator to reproduce.
[637]: Perhaps that so it is that would be better. ὡς ἄρα as often disclaims responsibility for the tale. Plato’s fancy of men reared beneath the earth is the basis of Bulwer-Lytton’s Utopia, The Coming Race, as his use of the ring of Gyges (359 D-360 B) is of H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man.
[638]: The symbolism expresses the Athenian boast of autochthony and Plato’s patriotic application of it, Menexenus 237 E-238 A. Cf. Burgess, Epideictic Literature, University of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology, vol. iii. pp. 153-154; Timaeus 24 C-D, Aeschylus Septem 17, Lucretius ii. 641 f., and Swineburne, Erechtheus: All races but one are as aliens engrafted or sown,Strange children and changelings, but we, O our mother, thine own.
[639]: οὐκ ἐτός is comic. Cf. 568 A, and Blaydes on Aristophanes Acharnians 411.
[640]: Cf. 468 E, 547 A, and already Cratylus 394 D, 398 A. Hesiod’s four metals, Works and Days 109-201, symbolize four succcessive ages. Plato’s myth cannot of course be interpreted literally or made to express the whole of his apparently undemocratic theory, of which the biologist Huxley in his essay on Administrative Nihilism says: The lapse of more than 2000 years has not weakened the force of these wise words.
[641]: The four classes are not castes, but are species which will generally breed true. Cf. Cratylus 393 B, 394 A.
[642]: The phrasing of this injunction recalls Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, in fine: I’ll fear no other thing So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring. The securing of disinterested capacity in the rulers is the pons asinorum of political theory. Plato constructs his whole state for this end. Cf. Introduction p. xv. Aristotle, Politics 1262 b 27, raises the obvious objection that the transference from class to class will not be an easy matter. But Plato here and in 423 D-E is merely stating emphatically the postulates of an ideal state. He admits that even if established it will some time break down, and that the causes of its failure will lie beyond human ken, and can only be expressed in symbol. See on 546-547.
[643]: The summary in Timaeus 19 A varies somewhat from this. Plato does not stress the details. Cf. Introduction p. viii.
[644]: Plato’s oracle aptly copies the ambiguity of the bronze men’s answer to Psammetik (Herodotus ii. 152), and admits of both a moral and a literal physical interpretation, like the lame reign against which Sparta was warned. Cf. Xenophon Hellenica iii. 3. 3.
[645]: Plato repeats the thought that since the mass of men can be brought to believe anything by repetition, myths framed for edification are a useful instrument of education and government. Cf. Laws 663 E-664 A.
[646]: φήμη, not any particular oracular utterance, but popular belief from mouth to mouth.
[647]: The Platonic guardians, like the ruling class at Sparta, will live the life of a camp. Cf. Laws 666 E, Isocrates Archedamus.
[648]: Partly from caution, partly from genuine religious feeling, Plato leaves all the details of the cult to Delphi. Cf. 427 B.
[649]: For the limiting γε cf. 430 E.
[650]: Aristotle’s objection (Politics 1264 a 24) that the Platonic state will break up into two hostile camps, is plagiarized in expression from Plato’s similar censure of existing Greek cities (422 E) and assumes that the enforced disinterestedness, the higher education, and other precautions of the Platonic Republic will not suffice to conjure away the danger to which Plato first calls attention.
[651]: This is not so much a reservation in reference to the higher education as a characteristic refusal of Plato to dogmatize. Cf. Meno 86 B and my paper Recent Platonism in England, A.J.P. vol. ix. pp. 7-8.
[652]: Plato’s communism is primarily a device to secure disinterestedness in the ruling class, though he sometimes treats it as a counsel of perfection for all men and states. Cf. Introduction p. xv note a.
[653]: Cf. 403 E.
[654]: Cf. 551 B, Meno 91 B, Thucydides i. 108, G.M.T. 837.
[655]: They are worthy of their hire. Cf. on 347 A. It is a strange misapprehension to speak of Plato as careless of the welfare of the masses. His aristocracy is one of social service, not of selfish enjoyment of wealth and power.
[656]: This is precisely Aristophanes’ distinction between beggary and honorable poverty, Plutus 552-553.
[657]: As at Sparta. Cf. 458 C, Newman, Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, p. 334.
[658]: As if the accursed and tainted metal were a polluted murderer or temple-robber. Cf. my note on Horace, Odes iii. 2. 27 sub isdem trabibus, Antiphon v. 11.
[659]: Cf. 621 B-C, and Laws692 A.
[660]: δεσπόται. Cf. Menexenus 238 E.
[661]: Cf. Laws 697 D in a passage of similar import, μισοῦντες μισοῦνται.
[662]: more and rather: so 396 D, 551 B.
[663]: The image is that of a ship nearing the fatal reef. Cf. Aeschylus, Eumenides 562. The sentiment and the heightened rhetorical tone of the whole passage recalls the last page of the Critias, with Ruskin’s translation and comment in A Crown of Wild Olive.
[664]: Adeimantus’s criticism is made from the point of view of a Thrasymachus (343 A, 345 B) or a Callicles (Gorgias 492 B-C or of Solon’s critics (cf. my note on Solon’s Trochaics to Phokos, Class. Phil. vol. vi. pp. 216 ff.). The captious objection is repeated by Aristotle, Politics 1264 b 15 ff., though he later (1325 a 9-10) himself uses Plato’s answer to it, and by moderns, as Herbert Spencer, Grote, Newman to some extent (Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, p. 69.), and Zeller (Aristotle, ii. p. 224) who has the audacity to say that Plato demanded the abolition of all private possession and the suppression of all individual interests because it is only in the Idea or Universal that he acknowledges any title to true reality. Leslie Stephen does not diverge so far from Plato when he says (Science of Ethics, p. 397): The virtuous men may be the very salt of the earth, and yet the discharge of a function socially necessary may involve their own misery. By the happiness of the whole Plato obviously maens not an abstraction but the concrete whole of which Leslie Stephen is thinking. But from a higher point of view Plato eloquently argues (465 B-C) that duty fulfilled will yield truer happiness to the guardians than seeking their own advantage in the lower sense of the word.
[665]: Cf. 362 C, and Laws 909 D ff. where they are forbidden.
[666]: Other men, ordinary men. Cf. 543 B ὧν νῦν οἱ ἄλλοι, which disposes of other interpretations and misunderstandings.
[667]: This is, for other reasons, one of the deprivations of a tyrant (579 B). The Laws strictly limits travel (949 E). Here Plato is speaking from the point of view of the ordinary citizen.
[668]: The Platonic Socrates always states the adverse case strongly (Introduction p. xi), and observes the rule: Would you adopt a strong logical attitudeAlways allow your opponent full latitude.
[669]: Cf. 369 A.
[670]: ἀπολαβόντες, separating off, abstracting, may be used absolutely as in Gorgias 495 E, or with any object as 392 E.
[671]: That is 449 A and books VIII. and IX. The degenerate types of state are four, but the extreme opposite of the good state, the tyranny, is one.
[672]: So Hippias Major 290 B.
[673]: For this principle of aesthetics Cf. Phaedrus 264 C, Aristotle Poetics 1450 b 1-2.
[674]: We know how to. For the satire of the Socialist millenium which follows cf. Introduction p. xxix, and Ruskin, Fors Clavigera. Plato may have been thinking of the scene on the shield of Achilles, Iliad xviii. 541-560.
[675]: i.e. so that the guest on the right hand occupied a lower place and the wine circulated in the same direction. Many write ἐπὶ δεξιά, but A ἐπιδέξια. Forever, ’tis a single word. Our rude forefathers thought it two.
[676]: Note the ab urbe condita construction. For the thought cf. 374 B. Zeller and many who follow him are not justified in inferring that Plato would not educate the masses. (Cf. Newman, Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, i. p. 160.) It might as well be argued that the high schools of the United States are not intended for the masses because some people sometimes emphasize their function of fitting for college. In the Republic Plato describes secondary education as a preparation for the higher training. The secondary education of the entire citizenry in the Laws marks no change of opinion (Laws 818 ff.). Cf. Introduction p. xxxiii.
[677]: The expression is loose, but the meaning is plain. The principle one man, one task makes the guardians real guardians. The assumption that their happiness is the end is incompatible with the very idea of a state. Cf. Introduction pp. xxix f. ἑστιάτορας recalls μέλλοντα ἑστιάσεσθαι345 C, but we are expected to think also of the farmers of 420 E.
[678]: The guardians are δημιουργοὶ ἐλευθερίας (395 C).
[679]: ὥστε καὶ κακούς, I think, means so that they become actually bad, not so that they also become bad. Cf. Lysis 217 B.
[680]: For the dangers of wealth cf. 550, 553 D, 555 B, 556 A, 562, Laws 831 C, 919 B, and for the praises of poverty cf. Aristophanes Plutus 510-591, Lucian, Nigrinus 12, Euripides fr. 55 N., Stobaeus, Flor. 94 (Meineke iii. 198), Class. Phil. vol. xxii. pp. 235-236.
[681]: Apparent paradox to stimulate attention. Cf. 377 A, 334 A, 382 A, 414 B-C, 544 C, Laws 919 B. For images from boxing cf. Aristotle Met. 985 a 14, and Demosthenes’ statement (Philip. i. 40-41) that the Athenians fight Philip as the barbarians box. The Greeks felt that lesser breeds without the law were inferior in this manly art of self-defense. Cf. the amusing description of the boxing of Orestes and Plylades by the ἄγγελος in Euripides I. T. 1366 ff.
[682]: Cf. 416 E, 403 E.
[683]: Cf. Herodotus iv. 111.
[684]: Two elements of the triad φύσις, μελέτη, ἐπιστήμη. Cf. 374 D.
[685]: Cf. Herodotus vii. 233 τὸν ἀληθέστατον τῶν λόγων, Catullus x. 9 id quod erat.
[686]: The style is of intentional Spartan curtness.
[687]: As they say in the game or in the jest. The general meaning is plain. We do not know enough about the game called πόλεις (cf. scholiast, Suidas, Hesychius, and Photius) to be more specific. Cf. for conjectures and deatils Adam’s note, and for the phrase Thompson on Meno 77 A.
[688]: Cf. Aristotle Politics 1316 b 7 and 1264 a 25.
[689]: Aristotle, Politics 1261 b 38, takes this as the actual number of the military class. Sparta, according to Xenephon, Rep. Lac. 1. 1, was τῶν ὀλιγανθρωποτάτων πόλεων, yet one of the strongest. Cf. also Aristotle Politics 1270 a 14 f. In the LawsPlato proposes the number 5040 which Aristotle thinks too large, Politics 1265 a 15.
[690]: Commentators, I think, miss the subtlety of this sentence; μίαν means truly one as below in D, and its antithesis is not so much πολλάς as δοκούσας which means primarily the appearance of unity, and only secondarily refers to μεγάλην. καί then is rather and than even. So large a city that is really one you will not easily find, but the semblance (of one big city) you will find in cities many and many times the size of this. Cf. also 462 A-B, and my paper Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, Class. Phil. 1914, p. 358. For Aristotle’s comment Cf. Politics 1261 a 15.
[691]: The Greek idea of government required that the citizens know one another. They would not have called Babylon, London, or Chicago cities. Cf. Introduction p. xxviii, Fowler, Greek City State, passim, Newman, Aristotle Politics vol. i. Introduction pp. 314-315, and Isocrates’ complaint that Athens was too large, Antidosis 171-172.
[692]: Ironical, of course.
[693]: Ironical, of course.
[694]: Cf. on 415 B.
[695]: The special precept with regard to the guardians was significant of the universal principle, one man, one task. Cf. 443 C, 370 B-C (note), 394 E, 374 A-D, Laws 846 D-847 B.
[696]: It is a natural growth, not an artificial contrivance. For Aristotle’s criticism cf. Politics 1261 A.
[697]: The proverbial one great thing (one thing needful). The proverb perhaps is: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (Suidas). Cf. Archil. fr. 61 ἓν δ’ ἐπίσταμαι μέγα, Politicus 297 A μέχριπερ ἂν ἓν μέγα φυλάττωσι.
[698]: μέγα has the unfavorable associations of ἔπος μέγα, and ἱκανόν, adequate, is characteristically preferred by Plato.
[699]: Cf. on 416 E. Plato of course has in mind the education already described and the higher education of books VI. and VII.
[700]: The indirect introduction of the proverb is characteristic of Plato’s style. Cf. on 449 C, where the paradox thus lightly introduced is taken up for serious discussion. Quite fantastic is the hypothesis on which much ink has been wasted, that the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes was suggested by this sentence and is answered by the fifth book. Cf. introduction pp. xxv and xxxiv. It ought not to be necessary to repeat that Plato’s communism applies only to the guardians, and that its main purpose is to enforce their disinterestedness. Cf. Introduction pp. xv and note a, xxxiv, xlii, xliv, and Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 358. Aristotle’s criticism is that the possessions of friends ought to be common in use but not in ownership. Cf. Politics 1263 a 30, and Euripides Andromache 376-377.
[701]: Cf. Politcus 305 D τὴν ἀρχήν τε καὶ ὁρμήν.
[702]: No concrete metaphor of wheel, hook or circle seems to be intended, but only the cycle of cumulative effect of education on nature and nature on education, described in what follows. See the evidence collected in my note, Class. Phil. vol. v. pp. 505-507.
[703]: Cf. 459 A.
[704]: Hom. Od. 1.351
[705]: Our text has ἐπικλείους’ and ἀκουόντεσσι. For the variant cf. Howes in Harvard Studies, vi. p. 205. For the commonplace that new songs are best cf. Pindar, Ol. 9. 52.
[706]: Cf. Stallbaum on Phaedrus 238 D-E, Forman, Plato Selections, p. 457.
[707]: The meaning of the similar phrase in Pindar, Ol. iii. 4 is different.
[708]: μουσικῆς τρόποι need not be so technical as it is in later Greek writers on music, who, however, were greatly influenced by Plato. For the ethical and social power of music cf. Introduction p. xiv note c, and 401 D-404 A, also Laws 700 D-E, 701 A.
[709]: Cf. Protagoras 316 A, Julian 150 B.
[710]: The etymological force of the word makes the metaphor less harsh than the English translation guard-house. Cf. Laws 962 C, where Bury renders safeguard. Cf. Pindar’s ἀκόνας λιγυρᾶς, the sharpening thing, that is, the whetstone, Ol. vi. 82.
[711]: παρανομία besides its moral meaning (537 E) suggests lawless innovation in music, from association with the musical sense of νόμος. Cf. Chicago Studies in Class. Phil. i. p. 22 n. 4.
[712]: So Aristotle Politics 1307 b 33.
[713]: Cf. the warning aagainst innovation in children’s games, Laws 797 A-B. But music is παιδεία as well as παιδιά. Cf. Aristotle’s three uses of music, for play, education, and the entertainment of leisure (Politics 1339 a 16).
[714]: Cf. Demosthenes xix. 228. The image is that of a stream overflowing and spreading. Cf. Euripides fr. 499 N. and Cicero’s use of serpit, Cat. iv. 3, and passim.
[715]: Cf. on 389 D.
[716]: The reference is to the general tenor of what precedes.
[717]: πρότερον is an unconscious lapse from the construction of an ideal state to the reformation of a degenerate Athens. Cf. Isocrates Areopagiticus 41 ff., and Laws 876 B-C, 948 C-D.
[718]: For these traits of old-fashioned decorum and modesty cf. Aristophanes Clouds 961-1023, Blaydes on 991, Herodotus ii. 80, Isocrates Areopagiticus 48-49.
[719]: Cf. Starkie on Aristophanes Wasps 1069.
[720]: Cf. on 412 B, Isocrates Areopagiticus 41, and Laws 788 B, where the further, still pertinent consideration is added that the multiplication of minor enactments tends to bring fundamental laws into contempt. Cf. Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 353, n. 2.
[721]: Cf. 401 C, Demosthenes Olynth. iii. 33 τέλειόν τι καὶ μέγα.
[722]: τὰ τοιαῦτα is slightly contemptuous. Specific commercial, industrial and criminal legislation was not compatible with the plan of the Republic, and so Plato omits it here. Much of it is given in the Laws, but even there details are left to the citizens and their rulers. Cf. on 412 B.
[723]: Cf. Laws 922 A, Aristotle Politics 1263 b 21. All legal relations of contract, impied contract and tort.
[724]: In Laws 920 D Plato allows a δίκη ἀτελοῦς ὁμολογίας against workmen or contractors who break or fail to complete contracts.
[725]: Cf. Laws 935 C.There was no λοιδορίας δίκη under that name at Athens, but certain words were actionable, ἀπόρρητα and there was a δίκη κακηγορίας.
[726]: Plato shows his contempt for the subject by this confused enumeration, passing without warning from contracts and torts to procedure and then to taxes, market, harbor and police regulations.
[727]: τολμήσομεν is both venture and deign.
[728]: Cf. Isocrates Panegyr. 78 ὅτι τοῖς καλοῖς κἀγαθοῖς τῶν ἀνθρώπων οὐδὲν δεήσει πολλῶν γραμμάτων.
[729]: Cf. Emerson, Experience: They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that as the first condition of advice.
[730]: Ironical. Quite fanciful is Dümmler’s supposition (Kleine Schriften, i, p. 99) that this passage was meant as destructive criticism of Isocrates Panegyricus and that Antidosis 62 is a reply. Plato is obviously thinking of practical politicians rather than of Isocrates.
[731]: πλήν γε etc., is loosely elliptical, but emendations are superfluous.
[732]: For the list cf. Pindar, Pyth. iii. 50-54. οὐδ’ αὖ emphasizes the transition to superstitious remedies in which Plato doesn’t really believe. Cf. his rationalizing interpretations of ἐπῳδαί, Charmides 157 A, Theaetetus 149 C. Laws 933 A-B is to be interpreted in the spirit of the observation in Selden’s Table Talk: The law against witches does not prove that there be any but it punishes the malice, etc. [Demosthenes] xxv. 80 is sceptical.
[733]: Cf. any lexicon, Shakespeare 1 Henry VI. v. iii. 2 Now help, ye charming spells and periapts, and Plutarch’s story of the women who hung them on Pericles’ neck on his death-bed.
[734]: Cf. 480 A, 354 A.
[735]: The noun is more forcible than the verb would be. Cf. Protagoras 309 A ἐπαινέτης.
[736]: We return from the illustration to its application to the state.
[737]: Cf. 497 B, Aristotle Politics 1301 b 11. Cf. the obvious imitation in the (probably spurious) Epistle vii. 330 E. For the thought, from the point of view of an enemy of democracy, cf. the statement in [Xenophon] Rep. Ath. 3. 9, that the faults of Athens cannot be corrected while she remains a democracy. The Athenians naturally guarded their constitution and viewed with equal suspicion the idealistic reformer and the oligarchical reactionary.
[738]: Cf. , p. 65 note d, and Laws 923 B. The phraseology here recalls Gorgias 517 B, Aristophanes Knights 46-63. Cf. Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, Class Phil. vol. ix. (Oct. 1914) p. 363, n. 3.
[739]: Almost technical. Cf. 538 B.
[740]: Here serve, not flatter.
[741]: This word εὐχέρεια is often misunderstood by lexicons and commentators. It is of course not dexterity (L. and S.) nor yet probably complaisance, nor yet humanitas or Gutmütigkeit as Adam and Schneider think. It expresses rather the light-heartedness with which such politicians rush in where wiser men fear to tread, which is akin to the lightness with which men plunge into crime. Cf. Laws 690 D τῶν ἐπὶ νόμων θέσιν ἰόντων ῥᾳδίως and 969 ἀνδρειότατος. Plato’s political physician makes come out of that a precondition of his treatment. Cf. Laws 736-737, Politicus 299 A-B, 501 A, 540 E, Epistle vii. 330 C-D, and the story in Aelian. V.H. ii. 42. of Plato’s refusal to legislate for the Arcadians because they would not accept an equalization of property.
[742]: Cf. Euthyphro 2 C-D, Gorgias 513 B, Politicus 275 C and 292 D.
[743]: Plato often condescendingly and half ironically pardons psychologically inevitable errors. Cf. 366 C, Phaedrus 269 B, Euthydemus 306 C.
[744]: For οὐκ αὖ cf. 393 D, 442 A, Theaetetus 161 A, Class. Phil. vol. xxiii. pp. 285-287. ἔγωγε above concurs with ἄγασαι, ignoring the irony. πλήν γε etc. marks dissent on one point. This dissent is challenged, and is withdrawn by οὐκ αὖ . . . τοῦτο γε (οἶμαι).
[745]: τῷ ὄντι points the application of the proverbial ὕδραν τέμνειν, which appears in this now trite metaphorical use for the first time here and in Euthydemus 297 C. Cf. my note on Horace iv. 4. 61. For the thought cf. Isocrates vii. 40, Macrob. Sat. ii. 13 leges bonae ex malis moribus procreantur, Arcesilaus apud Stobaeus Flor. xliii. 981 οὕτω δὴ καὶ ὅπου νόμοι πλεῖστοι ἐκεῖ καὶ ἀδικίαν εἶναι μεγίστην, Theophrastus apud Stobaeus Flor. xxxvii. 21 ὀλίγων οἱ ἀγαθοὶ νόμων δέονται.
[746]: Ironically, I should not have supposed, but for the practice of our politicians.
[747]: εἶδος νόμων πέρι is here a mere periphrasis, though the true classification of laws was a topic of the day. Cf. Laws 630 E, Aristotle Politics 1267 b 37. Plato is not always careful to mark the distinction between the legislation which he rejects altogether and that which he leaves to the discretion of the citizens.
[748]: ἐκεῖ=in the other world. So often.
[749]: For the exegete as a special religious functionary at Athens. cf. L. and S. s. v. and Laws 759 C-D. Apollo in a higher sense is the interpreter of religion for all mankind. He is technically πατρῷος at Athens (Euthydemus 302 D) but he is πάτριος for all Greeks and all men. Plato does not, as Thümser says (p. 301), confuse the Dorian and the Ionian Apollo, but rises above the distinction.
[750]: Plato prudently or piously leaves the deatils of ceremonial and institutional religion to Delphi. Cf. 540 B-C, Laws 759 C, 738 B-C, 828 A, 856 E, 865 B, 914 A, 947 D.
[751]: This navel stone, supposed to mark the center of the earth, has now been found. Cf. Poulsen’s Delphi, pp. 19, 29, 157, and Frazer on Pausanias x. 16.
[752]: Not the ἀναγκαιοτάτη πόλις of 369 E, nor the φλεγμαίνουσα πόλις of 372 E, but the purified city of 399 E has now been established and described. The search for justice that follows formulates for the first time the doctrine of the four cardinal virtues and defines each provisionally and sufficiently for the present purpose, and solves the problems dramatically presented in the minor dialogues, Charmides, Laches, etc. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 15-18, nn. 81-102, and the introduction to the second volume of this translation.
[753]: αὐτός τε καί: cf. 398 A.
[754]: See on 369 A. Matter-of-fact critics may object that there is no injustice in the perfectly good state. But we know the bad best by the canon of the good. Cf. on 409 A-B. The knowledge of opposites is the same. Injustice can be defined only in relation to its opposite (444 A-B), and in the final argument the most unjust man and state are set up as the extreme antitypes of the ideal (571-580). By the perfect state Plato does not mean a state in which no individual retains any human imperfections. It is idle then to speak of difficulties or contradictions or changes of plan in the composition of the Republic.
[755]: For ἐάν τε . . . ἐάν τε cf. 367 E.
[756]: Cf. 331 E. Emphatic as in 449 D-450 A, Phaedo 95 A, and Alc. I. 135 D.
[757]: Cf. 368 B-C.
[758]: Cf. 434 E, 449 A. This in a sense begs the original question in controversy with Thrasymachus, by the assumption that justice and the other moral virtues are goods. Cf. Gorgias 507 C. See The Idea of Good in Plato’s Republic, p. 205. For the cardinal virtues cf. Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen, i. p. 304, Pearson, Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, pp. 173 f., and commentators on Pindar, Nem. iii. 74, which seems to refer to four periods of human life, and Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 9. 1-5, and iv. 6. 1-12. Plato recognizes other virtues even in the Republic (402 C ἐλευθεριότης and μεγαλοπρέπεια. Cf. 536 A), and would have been as ready to admit that the number four was a part of his literary machinery as Ruskin was to confess the arbitrariness of his Seven Lamps of Architecture.
[759]: It is pedantry to identify this with Mill’s method of residues and then comment on the primitive naïveté of such an application of logic to ethics. One might as well speak of Andocides’ employment of the method (De myst. 109) or of its use by Gorgias in the disjunctive dilemma of the Palamedes 11 and passim, or say that the dog of the anecdote employs it when he sniffs up one trail and immediately runs up the other. Plato obviously employs it merely as a literary device for the presentation of his material under the figure of a search. He, in the infancy of philosophy, is quite as well aware as his censors can be in the senility of criticism that he is not proving anything by this method, but merely setting forth what he has assumed for other reasons.
[760]: σοφία is wisdom par excellence. Aristotle, Met. i., traces the history of the idea from Homer to its identification in Aristotle’s mind with first philosophy for metaphysics. For Plato, the moralist, it is virtue and the fear of the Lord; for his political theory it is the political or royal art which the dramatic dialogues fail to distinguish from the special sciences and arts. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 17, n. 97, Protagoras 319 A, Euthydemus 282 E, 291 C, Gorgias 501 A-B, etc. In the unreformed Greek state its counterfeit counterpart is the art of the politician. In the Republic its reality will be found in the selected guardians who are to receive the higher education, and who alone will apprehend the idea of the good, which is not mentioned here simply because Plato, not Krohn, is writing the Republic.
[761]: Protagoras, like Isocrates, professed to teach εὐβουλία (Protagoras 318 E), which Socrates identifies at once with the political art. Plato would accept Protagoras’s discrimination of this for the special arts (ibid. 318 ff.), but he does not believe that such as Protagoras can teach it. His political art is a very different thing from Protagoras’s εὐβουλία and is apprehended by a very different education from that offered by Protagoras. Cf. Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 348, n. 5, Euthydemus 291 B-C, Charmides 170 B, Protagoras 319 A, Gorgias 501 A-B, 503 D, Politicus 289 C, 293 D, 309 C.
[762]: βουλευομένη: Heindorf’s βουλευομένην is perhaps supported by ᾗ . . . βουλεύεται below, but in view of Plato’s colloquial anacloluthic style is unnecessary.
[763]: Cf. on 416 C.
[764]: Cf. Protagoras 311 E τί ὄνομα ἄλλο γε λεγόμενον περὶ Πρωταγόρου ἀκούομεν; ὥσπερ περὶ Φειδίου ἀγαλματοποιὸν καὶ περὶ Ὁμήρου ποιητήν.
[765]: τοιαύτη such, that is, brave. The courage of a state, qua such, also resides in a small class, the warriors.
[766]: ἀνδρεῖοι ὄντες: the ab urbe condita construction. Cf. 421 A.
[767]: τοίαν . . . ἢ τοίαν: cf. 437 E, Phaedrus 271 D, Laws 721 B.
[768]: Cf. 442 C, Aristotle Eth. Nic. 1129 b 19 προστάττει δ’ ὁ νόμος καὶ τὰ τοῦ ἀνδρείου ἔργα ποιεῖν.
[769]: Cf. on 347 A.
[770]: σωτηρίαν is the genus; Philebus 34 A, Def. Plat. 412 A-B. Hence ποίαν as often in the minor dialogues sometimes with a play on its idiomatic, contemptuous meaning. Cf. Laches 194 D.
[771]: In the Laches 191 D-E, and the Laws 633 D also, Plato generalizes courage to include resistance to the lure of pleasure.
[772]: Cf. 412 E.
[773]: The moral training of the guardians is likened to the dyeing of selected white wools with fast colors. Cf. Aristotle Eth. Nic. 1105 a 2, Marc. Aurel. iii. 4. 3 δικαιοσύνῃ βεβαμμένον εἰς βάθος, Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, i. 9 Be what thou virtuously art, and let not the ocean wash away thy tincture. The idea that the underlying subsatnce must be of neutral quality may have been suggested to Plato by Anaxagoras. It occurs in the Timaeus 50 D-E, whence it passed to Aristotle’s psychology and Lucretius. Cf. my paper on Plato, Epicurus, and Lucretius, Harvard Studies, vol. xii. p. 204.
[774]: For the technique cf. Blummer, Technologie, vol. i. pp. 227 ff. The θεράπευσις seems to be virtually identical with the προπαρασκευή, so that the aorist seems appropriate, unless with Adam’s earlier edition we transpose it immediately before οὕτω δή.
[775]: For δευσοποιός cf. L. and S., and Nauck, Ἀδέσποτα 441 τοῖς δευσοποιοῖς φαρμάκοις ξανθίζεται.
[776]: The two points of precaution are (1) to select white wool, not ἄλλα χρώματα, (2) to prepare by treatment even this.
[777]: Cf. 522 A, Philebus 17 B.
[778]: γίγνοιτο is process; ἐκπλύναι (aorist) is a single event (μή).
[779]: δεινά: it is not fanciful to feel the unity of Plato’s imagination as well as of his thought in the recurrence of this word in the δεινὰ καὶ ἀναγκαῖα of the mortal soul in Timaeus 69 C.
[780]: Cf. Protagoras 360 C-D, Laws 632 C, Aristotle Eth. Nic. 1116 b 24. Strictly speaking, Plato would recognize four grades, (1) philosophic bravery, (2) the bravery of the ἐπίκουροι here defined, (3) casual civic bravery in ordinary states, (4) animal instinct, which hardly deserves the name. Cf. Laches 196 E, Mill, Nature, p. 47 Consistent courage is always the effect of cultivation, etc., Unity of Plato’s Thought, nn. 46 and 77.
[781]: Phaedo 69 B.
[782]: νόμιμον of the Mss. yields quite as good a meaning as Stobaeus’s μόνιμον. The virtuous habit that is inculcated by law is more abiding than accidental virtue.
[783]: γε marks a reservation as 415 E στρατιωτικάς γε, Politicus 30 E, Laws 710 A τὴν δημώδη γε. Plotinus, unlike some modern commentators, perceived this. Cf. Enn. i. 2. 3. In Phaedo 82 A πολιτικήν is used disparagingly of ordinary bourgeois virtue. In Xenophon Rep. Lac. 10. 7 and Aristotle Eth. Nic. iii. 8. 1 (1116 a 17) there is no disparagement. The word is often used of citizen soldiery as opposed to professional mercenaries.
[784]: This dismissal of the subject is sometimes fancifully taken as a promise of the Laches. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, nn. 77 and 603.
[785]: Matthew Arnold’s word. But cf. on 398 D and 430 E — sobriety, temperance, Besonnenheit.
[786]: εἰ μὴ ἀδικῶ is idiomatic, I ought to. Cf. 608 D, 612, Menexenus 236 B.
[787]: Cf. Gorgias 506 E ff. σωφροσύνη and σωφρονεῖν sometimes mean etymologically of sound mind or level head, with or without ethical suggestion, according to the standpoint of the spaeker. Cf. Protagoras 333 B-C. Its two chief meanings in Greek usage are given in 389 D-E: subordination to due authority, and control of appetite, both raised to higher significance in Plato’s definition. As in the case of bravery, Plato distinguishes the temperamental, the bourgeois, the disciplined, and the philosophical virtue. But he affects to feel something paradoxical in the very idea of self-control, as perhaps there is. Cf. Laws 626 E ff., 863 D, A.J.P. vol. xiii. pp. 361 f., Unity of Plato’s Thought, nn. 77 and 78.
[788]: Cf. Phaedrus 250 A.
[789]: Cf. 442 A, Laws 689 A-B. The expression is intended to remind us of the parallelism between man and state. See Introduction.
[790]: Cf. Symposium 189 E.
[791]: Cf. 441 D, 443 B, 573 D.
[792]: παντοδαπός is disparaging in Plato.
[793]: παισί: so Wolf, for Ms. πᾶσι, a frequent error. Cf. 494 B. Plato, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind, brackets boys and women as creatures who have for every passion something and for no passion truly anything.
[794]: Cf. on 336 A. The ordinary man who is passion’s slave is not truly free. The Stoics and Cynics preached many sermons on this text. See Persius, Sat. v. 73. and 124, Epictetus Diss. iv. 1, Xenophon Memorabilia iv. 5. 4, Xenophon Oecon. 1. 22-23.
[795]: Plato is again proceeding by seemingly minute verbal links. Cf. 354 A, 379 B, 412 D. καὶ μήν introduces a further verification of the definition.
[796]: που marks the slight hesitation at the deviation from the symmetry of the scheme which would lead us to expect, as Aristotle and others have taken it, that σωφροσύνη is the distinctive virtue of the lowest class. It is so practically for the lower sense of σωφροσύνη, but in the higher sense of the willingness of each to fulfil his function in due subordination to the whole, it is common to all classes.
[797]: Cf. 430 E. Aristotle gives this as an example of (faulty) defintion by metaphor (Topics iv. 3. 5).
[798]: δι’ ὅλης: sc. τῆς πόλεως, but as ἀτεχνῶς shows (Cf. on 419 E) it already suggets the musical metaphor of the entire octave διὰ πασῶν.
[799]: The word order of the following is noteworthy. The translation gives the meaning. ταὐτόν, the object of συνᾴδοντας, is, by a trait of style that grows more frequent in the Laws and was imitated by Cicero, so placed as to break the monotony of the accusative terminations.
[800]: For the comparison the kind of superiority is indifferent. See Thompson on Meno 71 E and compare the enumeration of claims to power in the Laws, ἀξιώματα . . . τοῦ ἀρχεῖν, Laws 690 A ff. and 434 B.
[801]: The final statement of the definition, which, however, has little significance for Plato’s thought, when isolated from its explanatory context. Cf. Def. Plat. 413 E, Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 15. f., n. 82. Quite idle is the discussion whether σωφροσύνη is otiose, and whether it can be absolutely distinguished from δικαιοσύνη. They are sufficiently distinguished for Plato’s purpose in the imagery and analogies of the Republic.
[802]: Cf. on 351 E.
[803]: Cf. Demosthenes 18 and 430 E ὥς γε ἐντεῦθεν ἰδεῖν. Plato’s definitions and analyses are never presented as final. They are always sufficient for the purpose in hand. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 13, nn. 63-67 and 519.
[804]: δι’ ὅ: cf. my paper on the Origin of the Syllogism, Class. Phil. vol. xix. pp. 7 ff. This is an example of the terminology of the theory of ideas already in the first four books. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 35, n. 238, p. 38.
[805]: νῦν δή: i.e. νῦν ἤδη.
[806]: Cf. Soph. 235 B, Euthydemus 290 B-C, Phaedo 66 C, Laws 654 E, Parmenides 128 C, Lysis 218 C, Thompson on Meno 96 E, Huxley, Hume, p. 139 There cannot be two passions more nearly resembling each other than hunting and philosophy. Cf. also Hardy’s He never could beat the covert of conversation without starting the game. The elaboration of the image here is partly to mark the importance of δικαιοσύνη and partly to relieve the monotony of continuous argument.
[807]: It is not necessary, though plausible, to emend μετρίως to μετρίῳ. The latter is slightly more idiomatical. Cf. Terence’s benigno me utetur patre.
[808]: Prayer is the proper preface of any act. Cf. Timaeus 27 C, Laws 712 B.
[809]: τὸ πάθος: for the periphrasis cf. 376 A.
[810]: Cf. Theaetetus 201 A.
[811]: A homely figure such as Dante and Tennyson sometimes use.
[812]: This sounds like Hegel but is not Hegelian thought.
[813]: Cf. on 344 E. Justice is a species falling under the vague genus τὸ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν, which Critias in the Charmides proposed as a definition of σωφροσύνη (Charmides 161 B), but failed to sustain owing to his inability to distinguish the various possible meanings of the phrase. In the Republic too we have hitherto failed to learn from ourselves its true meaning, till now when Socrates begins to perceive that if taken in the higher sense of spiritual division of labor in the soul and in the state, it is the long-sought justice. Cf. 433 B-D, 443 C-D.
[814]: This need not refer to any specific passage in the dialogues. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, n. 236. A Greek could at any time say that minding one’s own business and not being a busybody is σῶφρον or δίκαιον or both.
[815]: τρόπον τινὰ γιγνόμενον: as in the translation, not justice seems somehow to be proving to be this. Cf. 432 E, 516 C, Lysis 217 E, Laws 910 B, 495 A, 596 D, Goodwin, Moods and Tenses, 830. Yet, Cf. Politicus 291 D.
[816]: καίτοι: cf. on 360 C and 376 B. Here it points out the significance of τὸ ὑπόλοιπον if true, while ἀλλὰ μέντοι introduces the considerations that prove it true.
[817]: γε argues from the very meaning of ἐνάμιλλον. Cf. 379 B.
[818]: So Phaedo 79 E ὅρα δὴ καὶ τῇδε. It introduces a further confirmation. The mere judicial and conventional conception of justice can be brought under the formula in a fashion (πῃ), for legal justice est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuens. Cf. 331 E and Aristotle Rhet. 1366 b 9 ἔστι δὲ δικαιοσύνη μὲν ἀρετὴ δι’ ἣν τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστα ἔχουσι, καὶ ὡς ὁ νόμος.
[819]: τἀλλότρια: the article is normal; Stallb. on Phaedrus 230 A. For the ambiguity of τἀλλότρια cf. 443 D. So οἰκείου is one’s own in either literal or the ideal sense of the Stoics and Emerson, and ἑαυτοῦ is similarly ambiguous. Cf. on 443 D.
[820]: ἕξις is still fluid in Plato and has not yet taken the technical Aristotelian meaning of habit or state.
[821]: A further confirmation. For what follows cf. 421 A.
[822]: μάλιστα with κακουργία.
[823]: πάλιν, again, here means conversely. Cf. 425 A. The definition is repeated in terms of the three citizen classes to prepare the way for testing it in relation to the individual soul, which, if the analogy is to hold, must possess three corresponding faculties or parts. The order of words in this and many Platonic sentences is justified by the psychological investigation, which showed that when the question which do you like best, apples, pears, or cherries? was presented in the form apples, pears, cherries, which do you like best? the reaction time was appreciably shortened.
[824]: οἰκειοπραγία: this coinage is explained by the genitive absolute. Proclus (Kroll i. p. 207) substitutes αὐτοπραγία. So Def. Plat. 411 E.
[825]: ἐκείνου: cf. ἐκείνοις, 425 A.
[826]: παγίως: cf. 479 C, Aristotle Met. 1062 b 15.
[827]: The doctrine of the transcendental ideas was undoubtedly familiar to Plato at this time. Cf. on 402 B, and Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 31, n. 194, p. 35. But we need not evoke the theory of παρουσία here to account for this slight personification of the form, idea, or definition of justice. Cf. 538 D, and the use of ἐλθών in Euripides Suppl. 562 and of ἰόν in Philebus 52 E. Plato, in short, is merely saying vivaciously what Aristotle technically says in the words δεῖ δὲ τοῦτο μὴ μόνον καθόλου λέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς καθ’ ἕκαστα ἐφαρμόττειν, Eth. Nic. 1107 a 28.
[828]: In 368 E. For the loose internal accusative ἥν cf. 443 B, Laws 666 B, Phaedrus 249 D, Sophist 264 B, my paper on Illogical Idiom, T.A.P.A., 1916, vol. xlvii. p. 213, and the school-girl’s This is the play that the reward is offered for the best name suggested for it.
[829]: ἐκεῖ though redundant need not offend in this intentionally ancoluthic and resumptive sentence. Some inferior Mss. read ἐκεῖνο. Burnet’s ἢ is impossible.
[830]: ἔν γε τῇ ἀγαθῇ: cf. on 427 E, and for the force of γε cf. 379 B, 403 E.
[831]: Cf. Sophist 230 B τιθέασι παρ’ ἀλλήλας, Isocrates Areopagiticus 79, Nic. 17.
[832]: Cf. L and S. and Morgan, De Ignis Eliciendi Modis, Harvard Studies, vol. i. pp. 15, 21 ff. and 30; and Damascius (Ruelle, p. 54, line 18) καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν ὅπερ εξαίφνης ἀνάπτεται φῶς ἀληθείας ὥσπερ ἐκ πυρείων προστριβομένων.
[833]: Cf. Gorgias 484 B, Epistle vii. 344 B.
[834]: Plato often observes that a certain procedure is methodical and we must follow it, or that it is at least methodical or consistent, whatever the results may be.
[835]: ὅ γε ταὐτόν: there are several reasons for the seeming over-elaboration of the logic in the next few pages. The analogy between the three classes in the state and the tripartite soul is an important point in Plato’s ethical theory and an essential feature in the structure of the Republic. Very nice distinctions are involved in the attempt to prove the validity of the analogy for the present argument without too flagrant contradiction of the faith elsewhere expressed in the essential unity of the soul. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 42. These distinctions in the infancy of logic Plato is obliged to set forth and explain as he proceeds. Moreover, he is interested in logical method for its own sake (cf.. Introduction p. xiv), and is here stating for the first time important principles of logic afterwards codified in the treatises of Aristotle. γε marks the inference from the very meaning of ταὐτόν. Cf. on 379 B, 389 B, and Politicus 278 E; cf. also Parmenides 139 E. The language suggests the theory of ideas. But Plato is not now thinking primarily of that. He is merely repeating in precise logical form the point already made (434 D-E), that the definition of justice in the individual must correspond point for point with that worked out for the state.
[836]: Cf. 369 A and Meno 72 B. In Philebus 12 E-13 C, Plato points out that the generic or specific identity does not exclude specific or sub-specific differences.
[837]: ἕξεις is here almost the Aristotelian ἕξις. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1105 b 20, regards πάθη, ἕξεις and δυνάμεις as an exhaustive enumeration of mental states. For δυνάμεις cf. 477 C, Simplic. De An. Hayduck, p. 289 ἀλλὰ τὰ ὧν πρὸς πρακτικὴν ἐδεῖτο ζωήν, τὰ τρία μόνα παρείληφεν.
[838]: Cf. 423 C.
[839]: A proverb often cited by Plato with variations. Cf. 497 D-E.
[840]: τοῦτο by strict grammatical implication means the problem of the tripartite soul, but the reference to this passage in 504 B shows that it includes the whole question of the definition of the virtues, and so ultimately the whole of ethical and political philosophy. We are there told again that the definitions of the fourth book are sufficient for the purpose, but that complete insight can be attained only by relating them to the idea of the good. That required a longer and more circuitous way of discipline and training. Plato then does not propose the longer way as a method of reasoning which he himself employs to correct the approximations of the present discussion. He merely describes it as the higher education which will enable his philosophical rulers to do that. We may then disregard all idle guesses about a new logic hinted at in the longer way, and all fantastic hypotheses about the evolution of Plato’s thought and the composition of the Republic based on supposed contradictions between this passage and the later books. Cf. Introduction p. xvi, Idea of Good, p. 190, Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 16, n. 90; followed by Professor Wilamowitz, ii. p. 218, who, however, does not understand the connection of it all with the idea of good. Plato the logician never commits himself to more than is required by the problem under discussion (cf. on 353 c), and Plato the moralist never admits that the ideal has been adequately expressed, but always points to heights beyond. Cf. 506 E, 533 A, Phaedo 85 C, Ti. 29 B-C, Soph. 254 C.
[841]: Plato takes for granted as obvious the general correspondence which some modern philosophers think it necessary to reaffirm. Cf. Mill, Logic, vi. 7. 1 Human beings in society have no properties, but those which are derived from and may be resolved into the laws and the nature of individual man; Spencer, Autobiog. ii. p. 543 Society is created by its units. . . . The nature of its organization is determined by the nature of its units. Plato illustrates the commonplace in a slight digression on national characteristics, with a hint of the thought partially anticipated by Hippocrates and now identified with Buckle’s name, that they are determined by climate and environment. Cf. Newman, Introduction to Aristotle Politics pp. 318-320.
[842]: αἰτιάσαιτο: this merely varies the idiom αἰτίαν ἔχειν, predicate of, say of. Cf. 599 E. It was a common boast of the Athenians that the fine air of Athens produced a corresponding subtlety of wit. Cf. Euripides Medea 829-830, Isocrates vii. 74, Roberts, The Ancient Boeotians, pp. 59, 76.
[843]: φιλοχρήματον is a virtual synonym of ἐπιθυμητικόν. Cf. 580 E and Phaedo 68 C, 82 C.
[844]: In Laws 747 C, Plato tells that for this or some other cause the mathematical education of the Phoenicians and Egyptians, which he commends, developed in them πανουργία rather than σοφία.
[845]: The questions debated by psychologists from Aristotle (Eth. Nic. 1102 a 31) to the present day is still a matter of rhetoric, poetry, and point of view rather than of strict science. For some purposes we must treat the faculties of the mind as distinct entities, for others we must revert to the essential unity of the soul. Cf. Arnold’s Lines on Butler’s Sermons and my remarks in The Assault on Humanism. Plato himself is well aware of this, and in different dialogues emphasizes the aspect that suits his purpose. There is no contradiction between this passage and Phaedo 68 C, 82 C, and Republic x. 611-12. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 42-43.
[846]: The first formulation of the law of contradiction. Cf. Phaedo 102 E, Theaetetus 188 A, Soph. 220 B, 602 E. Sophistical objections are anticipated here and below (436 E) by attaching to it nearly all the qualifying distinctions of the categories which Aristotle wearily observes are necessary πρὸς τὰς σοφιστικὰς ἐνοχλήσεις (De interp. 17 a 36-37). Cf. Met. 1005 b 22 πρὸς τὰς λογικὰς δυσχερείας, and Rhet. ii. 24. Plato invokes the principle against Heraclitism and other philosophies of relativity and the sophistries that grew out of them or played with their formulas. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 50 ff., 53, 58, 68. Aristotle follows Plato in this, pronouncing it πασῶν βεβαιοτάτη ἀρχή (Met. 1005 b 18).
[847]: κατὰ ταὐτόν = in the same part or aspect of itself; πρὸς ταὐτόν = in relation to the same (other) thing. Cf. Sophist 230 B ἅμα περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν πρὸς τὰ αὐτὰ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἐναντίας.
[848]: For this method of reasoning cf. 478 D, 609 B, Laws 896 C, Charmides 168 B-C, Gorgias 496 C, Philebus 11 D-E.
[849]: ἦν = was all along and is.