The Republic
have none of your own at home? And yet there IS a worse stage of the
same disease—when men have learned to take a pleasure and pride in the
twists and turns of the law; not considering how much better it would
be for them so to order their lives as to have no need of a nodding
justice. And there is a like disgrace in employing a physician, not for
the cure of wounds or epidemic disorders, but because a man has by
laziness and luxury contracted diseases which were unknown in the days
of Asclepius. How simple is the Homeric practice of medicine. Eurypylus
after he has been wounded drinks a posset of Pramnian wine, which is of
a heating nature; and yet the sons of Asclepius blame neither the
damsel who gives him the drink, nor Patroclus who is attending on him.
The truth is that this modern system of nursing diseases was introduced
by Herodicus the trainer; who, being of a sickly constitution, by a
compound of training and medicine tortured first himself and then a
good many other people, and lived a great deal longer than he had any
right. But Asclepius would not practise this art, because he knew that
the citizens of a well-ordered State have no leisure to be ill, and
therefore he adopted the ‘kill or cure’ method, which artisans and
labourers employ. ‘They must be at their business,’ they say, ‘and have
no time for coddling: if they recover, well; if they don’t, there is an
end of them.’ Whereas the rich man is supposed to be a gentleman who
can afford to be ill. Do you know a maxim of Phocylides—that ‘when a
man begins to be rich’ (or, perhaps, a little sooner) ‘he should
practise virtue’? But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent
with an ordinary occupation, and yet consistent with that practice of
virtue which Phocylides inculcates? When a student imagines that
philosophy gives him a headache, he never does anything; he is always
unwell. This was the reason why Asclepius and his sons practised no
such art. They were acting in the interest of the public, and did not
wish to preserve useless lives, or raise up a puny offspring to
wretched sires. Honest diseases they honestly cured; and if a man was
wounded, they applied the proper remedies, and then let him eat and
drink what he liked. But they declined to treat intemperate and
worthless subjects, even though they might have made large fortunes out
of them. As to the story of Pindar, that Asclepius was slain by a
thunderbolt for restoring a rich man to life, that is a lie—following
our old rule we must say either that he did not take bribes, or that he
was not the son of a god.
Glaucon then asks Socrates whether the best physicians and the best
judges will not be those who have had severally the greatest experience
of diseases and of crimes. Socrates draws a distinction between the two
professions. The physician should have had experience of disease in his
own body, for he cures with his mind and not with his body. But the
judge controls mind by mind; and therefore his mind should not be
corrupted by crime. Where then is he to gain experience? How is he to
be wise and also innocent? When young a good man is apt to be deceived
by evil-doers, because he has no pattern of evil in himself; and
therefore the judge should be of a certain age; his youth should have
been innocent, and he should have acquired insight into evil not by the
practice of it, but by the observation of it in others. This is the
ideal of a judge; the criminal turned detective is wonderfully
suspicious, but when in company with good men who have experience, he
is at fault, for he foolishly imagines that every one is as bad as
himself. Vice may be known of virtue, but cannot know virtue. This is
the sort of medicine and this the sort of law which will prevail in our
State; they will be healing arts to better natures; but the evil body
will be left to die by the one, and the evil soul will be put to death
by the other. And the need of either will be greatly diminished by good
music which will give harmony to the soul, and good gymnastic which
will give health to the body. Not that this division of music and
gymnastic really corresponds to soul and body; for they are both
equally concerned with the soul, which is tamed by the one and aroused
and sustained by the other. The two together supply our guardians with
their twofold nature. The passionate disposition when it has too much
gymnastic is hardened and brutalized, the gentle or philosophic temper
which has too much music becomes enervated. While a man is allowing
music to pour like water through the funnel of his ears, the edge of
his soul gradually wears away, and the passionate or spirited element
is melted out of him. Too little spirit is easily exhausted; too much
quickly passes into nervous irritability. So, again, the athlete by
feeding and training has his courage doubled, but he soon grows stupid;
he is like a wild beast, ready to do everything by blows and nothing by
counsel or policy. There are two principles in man, reason and passion,
and to these, not to the soul and body, the two arts of music and
gymnastic correspond. He who mingles them in harmonious concord is the
true musician,—he shall be the presiding genius of our State.
The next question is, Who are to be our rulers? First, the elder must
rule the younger; and the best of the elders will be the best
guardians. Now they will be the best who love their subjects most, and
think that they have a common interest with them in the welfare of the
state. These we must select; but they must be watched at every epoch of
life to see whether they have retained the same opinions and held out
against force and enchantment. For time and persuasion and the love of
pleasure may enchant a man into a change of purpose, and the force of
grief and pain may compel him. And therefore our guardians must be men
who have been tried by many tests, like gold in the refiner’s fire, and
have been passed first through danger, then through pleasure, and at
every age have come out of such trials victorious and without stain, in
full command of themselves and their principles; having all their
faculties in harmonious exercise for their country’s good. These shall
receive the highest honours both in life and death. (It would perhaps
be better to confine the term ‘guardians’ to this select class: the
younger men may be called ‘auxiliaries.’)
And now for one magnificent lie, in the belief of which, Oh that we
could train our rulers!—at any rate let us make the attempt with the
rest of the world. What I am going to tell is only another version of
the legend of Cadmus; but our unbelieving generation will be slow to
accept such a story. The tale must be imparted, first to the rulers,
then to the soldiers, lastly to the people. We will inform them that
their youth was a dream, and that during the time when they seemed to
be undergoing their education they were really being fashioned in the
earth, who sent them up when they were ready; and that they must
protect and cherish her whose children they are, and regard each other
as brothers and sisters. ‘I do not wonder at your being ashamed to
propound such a fiction.’ There is more behind. These brothers and
sisters have different natures, and some of them God framed to rule,
whom he fashioned of gold; others he made of silver, to be auxiliaries;
others again to be husbandmen and craftsmen, and these were formed by
him of brass and iron. But as they are all sprung from a common stock,
a golden parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son,
and then there must be a change of rank; the son of the rich must
descend, and the child of the artisan rise, in the social scale; for an
oracle says ‘that the State will come to an end if governed by a man of
brass or iron.’ Will our citizens ever believe all this? ‘Not in the
present generation, but in the next, perhaps, Yes.’
Now let the earthborn men go forth under the command of their rulers,
and look about and pitch their camp in a high place, which will be safe
against enemies from without, and likewise against insurrections from
within. There let them sacrifice and set up their tents; for soldiers
they are to be and not shopkeepers, the watchdogs and guardians of the
sheep; and luxury and avarice will turn them into wolves and tyrants.
Their habits and their dwellings should correspond to their education.
They should have no property; their pay should only meet their
expenses; and they should have common meals. Gold and silver we will
tell them that they have from God, and this divine gift in their souls
they must not alloy with that earthly dross which passes under the name
of gold. They only of the citizens may not touch it, or be under the
same roof with it, or drink from it; it is the accursed thing. Should
they ever acquire houses or lands or money of their own, they will
become householders and tradesmen instead of guardians, enemies and
tyrants instead of helpers, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves
and the rest of the State, will be at hand.
The religious and ethical aspect of Plato’s education will hereafter be
considered under a separate head. Some lesser points may be more
conveniently noticed in this place.
1. The constant appeal to the authority of Homer, whom, with grave
irony, Plato, after the manner of his age, summons as a witness about
ethics and psychology, as well as about diet and medicine; attempting
to distinguish the better lesson from the worse, sometimes altering the
text from design; more than once quoting or alluding to Homer
inaccurately, after the manner of the early logographers turning the
Iliad into prose, and delighting to draw far-fetched inferences from
his words, or to make ludicrous applications of them. He does not, like
Heracleitus, get into a rage with Homer and Archilochus (Heracl.), but
uses their words and expressions as vehicles of a higher truth; not on
a system like Theagenes of Rhegium or Metrodorus, or in later times the
Stoics, but as fancy may dictate. And the conclusions drawn from them
are sound, although the premises are fictitious. These fanciful appeals
to Homer add a charm to Plato’s style, and at the same time they have
the effect of a satire on the follies of Homeric interpretation. To us
(and probably to himself), although they take the form of arguments,
they are really figures of speech. They may be compared with modern
citations from Scripture, which have often a great rhetorical power
even when the original meaning of the words is entirely lost sight of.
The real, like the Platonic Socrates, as we gather from the Memorabilia
of Xenophon, was fond of making similar adaptations. Great in all ages
and countries, in religion as well as in law and literature, has been
the art of interpretation.
2. ‘The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style.’
Notwithstanding the fascination which the word ‘classical’ exercises
over us, we can hardly maintain that this rule is observed in all the
Greek poetry which has come down to us. We cannot deny that the thought
often exceeds the power of lucid expression in Aeschylus and Pindar; or
that rhetoric gets the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet
Euripides. Only perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the
two; in him alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a
Greek statue, in which there is nothing to add or to take away; at
least this is true of single plays or of large portions of them. The
connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not
unfrequently a tangled thread which in an age before logic the poet was
unable to draw out. Many thoughts and feelings mingled in his mind, and
he had no power of disengaging or arranging them. For there is a subtle