The Republic
him; or, perhaps, from the composition of the work at different
times—are questions, like the similar question about the Iliad and the
Odyssey, which are worth asking, but which cannot have a distinct
answer. In the age of Plato there was no regular mode of publication,
and an author would have the less scruple in altering or adding to a
work which was known only to a few of his friends. There is no
absurdity in supposing that he may have laid his labours aside for a
time, or turned from one work to another; and such interruptions would
be more likely to occur in the case of a long than of a short writing.
In all attempts to determine the chronological order of the Platonic
writings on internal evidence, this uncertainty about any single
Dialogue being composed at one time is a disturbing element, which must
be admitted to affect longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws,
more than shorter ones. But, on the other hand, the seeming
discrepancies of the Republic may only arise out of the discordant
elements which the philosopher has attempted to unite in a single
whole, perhaps without being himself able to recognise the
inconsistency which is obvious to us. For there is a judgment of after
ages which few great writers have ever been able to anticipate for
themselves. They do not perceive the want of connexion in their own
writings, or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough to
those who come after them. In the beginnings of literature and
philosophy, amid the first efforts of thought and language, more
inconsistencies occur than now, when the paths of speculation are well
worn and the meaning of words precisely defined. For consistency, too,
is the growth of time; and some of the greatest creations of the human
mind have been wanting in unity. Tried by this test, several of the
Platonic Dialogues, according to our modern ideas, appear to be
defective, but the deficiency is no proof that they were composed at
different times or by different hands. And the supposition that the
Republic was written uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort is in
some degree confirmed by the numerous references from one part of the
work to another.
The second title, ‘Concerning Justice,’ is not the one by which the
Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity, and,
like the other second titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore
be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and others have asked
whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the
construction of the State is the principal argument of the work. The
answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same
truth; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the
visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of
the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body. In
Hegelian phraseology the state is the reality of which justice is the
idea. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of God is
within, and yet developes into a Church or external kingdom; ‘the house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ is reduced to the
proportions of an earthly building. Or, to use a Platonic image,
justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the
whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed, the
conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same or
different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of the
individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and
punishments in another life. The virtues are based on justice, of which
common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice is
based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is
reflected both in the institutions of states and in motions of the
heavenly bodies (cp. Tim. 47). The Timaeus, which takes up the
political rather than the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly
occupied with hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains
many indications that the same law is supposed to reign over the State,
over nature, and over man.
Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient and
modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which all works, whether
of nature or of art, are referred to design. Now in ancient writings,
and indeed in literature generally, there remains often a large element
which was not comprehended in the original design. For the plan grows
under the author’s hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of
writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before he
begins. The reader who seeks to find some one idea under which the
whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest and most
general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the ordinary
explanations of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself to have
found the true argument ‘in the representation of human life in a State
perfected by justice, and governed according to the idea of good.’
There may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can hardly
be said to express the design of the writer. The truth is, that we may
as well speak of many designs as of one; nor need anything be excluded
from the plan of a great work to which the mind is naturally led by the
association of ideas, and which does not interfere with the general
purpose. What kind or degree of unity is to be sought after in a
building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a problem which
has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter. To Plato
himself, the enquiry ‘what was the intention of the writer,’ or ‘what
was the principal argument of the Republic’ would have been hardly
intelligible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed (cp. the
Introduction to the Phaedrus).
Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to
Plato’s own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the
State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah, or ‘the day
of the Lord,’ or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the ‘Sun of
righteousness with healing in his wings’ only convey, to us at least,
their great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals
to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of
good—like the sun in the visible world;—about human perfection, which
is justice—about education beginning in youth and continuing in later
years—about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers
and evil rulers of mankind—about ‘the world’ which is the embodiment of
them—about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in
heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life. No such inspired
creation is at unity with itself, any more than the clouds of heaven
when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of light and dark, of
truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is allowable in a
work of philosophical imagination. It is not all on the same plane; it
easily passes from ideas to myths and fancies, from facts to figures of
speech. It is not prose but poetry, at least a great part of it, and
ought not to be judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of
history. The writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole;
they take possession of him and are too much for him. We have no need
therefore to discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is
practicable or not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came
first into the mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas
has nothing to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which
he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest ‘marks of
design’—justice more than the external frame-work of the State, the
idea of good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or the
organisation of ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the
method or spirit in which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the
spectator of all time and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and
seventh books that Plato reaches the ‘summit of speculation,’ and
these, although they fail to satisfy the requirements of a modern
thinker, may therefore be regarded as the most important, as they are
also the most original, portions of the work.
It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has
been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the
conversation was held (the year 411 B.C. which is proposed by him will
do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction, and especially a
writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of chronology (cp.
Rep., Symp., 193 A, etc.), only aims at general probability. Whether
all the persons mentioned in the Republic could ever have met at any
one time is not a difficulty which would have occurred to an Athenian
reading the work forty years later, or to Plato himself at the time of
writing (any more than to Shakespeare respecting one of his own
dramas); and need not greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be a
question having no answer ‘which is still worth asking,’ because the
investigation shows that we cannot argue historically from the dates in
Plato; it would be useless therefore to waste time in inventing
far-fetched reconcilements of them in order to avoid chronological
difficulties, such, for example, as the conjecture of C.F. Hermann,
that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the brothers but the uncles of
Plato (cp. Apol. 34 A), or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato
intentionally left anachronisms indicating the dates at which some of
his Dialogues were written.
The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus, Polemarchus,
Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Cephalus appears in
the introduction only, Polemarchus drops at the end of the first
argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence at the close of the
first book. The main discussion is carried on by Socrates, Glaucon, and
Adeimantus. Among the company are Lysias (the orator) and Euthydemus,
the sons of Cephalus and brothers of Polemarchus, an unknown
Charmantides—these are mute auditors; also there is Cleitophon, who
once interrupts, where, as in the Dialogue which bears his name, he
appears as the friend and ally of Thrasymachus.
Cephalus, the patriarch of the house, has been appropriately engaged in
offering a sacrifice. He is the pattern of an old man who has almost
done with life, and is at peace with himself and with all mankind. He
feels that he is drawing nearer to the world below, and seems to linger
around the memory of the past. He is eager that Socrates should come to
visit him, fond of the poetry of the last generation, happy in the
consciousness of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the
tyranny of youthful lusts. His love of conversation, his affection, his
indifference to riches, even his garrulity, are interesting traits of
character. He is not one of those who have nothing to say, because
their whole mind has been absorbed in making money. Yet he acknowledges
that riches have the advantage of placing men above the temptation to
dishonesty or falsehood. The respectful attention shown to him by
Socrates, whose love of conversation, no less than the mission imposed
upon him by the Oracle, leads him to ask questions of all men, young
and old alike, should also be noted. Who better suited to raise the
question of justice than Cephalus, whose life might seem to be the
expression of it? The moderation with which old age is pictured by
Cephalus as a very tolerable portion of existence is characteristic,
not only of him, but of Greek feeling generally, and contrasts with the
exaggeration of Cicero in the De Senectute. The evening of life is