The Republic
the greater the slavery. You will remember that in the oligarchy were
found two classes—rogues and paupers, whom we compared to drones with
and without stings. These two classes are to the State what phlegm and
bile are to the human body; and the State-physician, or legislator,
must get rid of them, just as the bee-master keeps the drones out of
the hive. Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but they are more
numerous and more dangerous than in the oligarchy; there they are inert
and unpractised, here they are full of life and animation; and the
keener sort speak and act, while the others buzz about the bema and
prevent their opponents from being heard. And there is another class in
democratic States, of respectable, thriving individuals, who can be
squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions; there is
moreover a third class, who are the labourers and the artisans, and
they make up the mass of the people. When the people meet, they are
omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together unless they are
attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey,
of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a
taste only to the mob. Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven
mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs in
self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for treason. The
people have some protector whom they nurse into greatness, and from
this root the tree of tyranny springs. The nature of the change is
indicated in the old fable of the temple of Zeus Lycaeus, which tells
how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims
will turn into a wolf. Even so the protector, who tastes human blood,
and slays some and exiles others with or without law, who hints at
abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become
a wolf—that is, a tyrant. Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes
back from exile; and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by
lawful means, they plot his assassination. Thereupon the friend of the
people makes his well-known request to them for a body-guard, which
they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of their own.
Now let the rich man make to himself wings, for he will never run away
again if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector, having
crushed all his rivals, stands proudly erect in the chariot of State, a
full-blown tyrant: Let us enquire into the nature of his happiness.
In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon everybody; he
is not a ‘dominus,’ no, not he: he has only come to put an end to debt
and the monopoly of land. Having got rid of foreign enemies, he makes
himself necessary to the State by always going to war. He is thus
enabled to depress the poor by heavy taxes, and so keep them at work;
and he can get rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy.
Then comes unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to
oppose him. The consequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the
State; but, unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get
rid of the high-spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no
choice between death and a life of shame and dishonour. And the more
hated he is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he
obtain them? ‘They will come flocking like birds—for pay.’ Will he not
rather obtain them on the spot? He will take the slaves from their
owners and make them his body-guard; these are his trusted friends, who
admire and look up to him. Are not the tragic poets wise who magnify
and exalt the tyrant, and say that he is wise by association with the
wise? And are not their praises of tyranny alone a sufficient reason
why we should exclude them from our State? They may go to other cities,
and gather the mob about them with fine words, and change commonwealths
into tyrannies and democracies, receiving honours and rewards for their
services; but the higher they and their friends ascend constitution
hill, the more their honour will fail and become ‘too asthmatic to
mount.’ To return to the tyrant—How will he support that rare army of
his? First, by robbing the temples of their treasures, which will
enable him to lighten the taxes; then he will take all his father’s
property, and spend it on his companions, male or female. Now his
father is the demus, and if the demus gets angry, and says that a great
hulking son ought not to be a burden on his parents, and bids him and
his riotous crew begone, then will the parent know what a monster he
has been nurturing, and that the son whom he would fain expel is too
strong for him. ‘You do not mean to say that he will beat his father?’
Yes, he will, after having taken away his arms. ‘Then he is a parricide
and a cruel, unnatural son.’ And the people have jumped from the fear
of slavery into slavery, out of the smoke into the fire. Thus liberty,
when out of all order and reason, passes into the worst form of
servitude...
In the previous books Plato has described the ideal State; now he
returns to the perverted or declining forms, on which he had lightly
touched at the end of Book IV. These he describes in a succession of
parallels between the individuals and the States, tracing the origin of
either in the State or individual which has preceded them. He begins by
asking the point at which he digressed; and is thus led shortly to
recapitulate the substance of the three former books, which also
contain a parallel of the philosopher and the State.
Of the first decline he gives no intelligible account; he would not
have liked to admit the most probable causes of the fall of his ideal
State, which to us would appear to be the impracticability of communism
or the natural antagonism of the ruling and subject classes. He throws
a veil of mystery over the origin of the decline, which he attributes
to ignorance of the law of population. Of this law the famous
geometrical figure or number is the expression. Like the ancients in
general, he had no idea of the gradual perfectibility of man or of the
education of the human race. His ideal was not to be attained in the
course of ages, but was to spring in full armour from the head of the
legislator. When good laws had been given, he thought only of the
manner in which they were likely to be corrupted, or of how they might
be filled up in detail or restored in accordance with their original
spirit. He appears not to have reflected upon the full meaning of his
own words, ‘In the brief space of human life, nothing great can be
accomplished’; or again, as he afterwards says in the Laws, ‘Infinite
time is the maker of cities.’ The order of constitutions which is
adopted by him represents an order of thought rather than a succession
of time, and may be considered as the first attempt to frame a
philosophy of history.
The first of these declining States is timocracy, or the government of
soldiers and lovers of honour, which answers to the Spartan State; this
is a government of force, in which education is not inspired by the
Muses, but imposed by the law, and in which all the finer elements of
organization have disappeared. The philosopher himself has lost the
love of truth, and the soldier, who is of a simpler and honester
nature, rules in his stead. The individual who answers to timocracy has
some noticeable qualities. He is described as ill educated, but, like
the Spartan, a lover of literature; and although he is a harsh master
to his servants he has no natural superiority over them. His character
is based upon a reaction against the circumstances of his father, who
in a troubled city has retired from politics; and his mother, who is
dissatisfied at her own position, is always urging him towards the life
of political ambition. Such a character may have had this origin, and
indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a
similar kind. But there is obviously no connection between the manner
in which the timocratic State springs out of the ideal, and the mere
accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a retired statesman.
The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even less
historical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek history of a
polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an oligarchy of wealth,
or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The order of
history appears to be different; first, in the Homeric times there is
the royal or patriarchal form of government, which a century or two
later was succeeded by an oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and
in which wealth was only the accident of the hereditary possession of
land and power. Sometimes this oligarchical government gave way to a
government based upon a qualification of property, which, according to
Aristotle’s mode of using words, would have been called a timocracy;
and this in some cities, as at Athens, became the conducting medium to
democracy. But such was not the necessary order of succession in
States; nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the endless
fluctuation of Greek history (like the tides in the Euripus), except,
perhaps, in the almost uniform tendency from monarchy to aristocracy in
the earliest times. At first sight there appears to be a similar
inversion in the last step of the Platonic succession; for tyranny,
instead of being the natural end of democracy, in early Greek history
appears rather as a stage leading to democracy; the reign of
Peisistratus and his sons is an episode which comes between the
legislation of Solon and the constitution of Cleisthenes; and some
secret cause common to them all seems to have led the greater part of
Hellas at her first appearance in the dawn of history, e.g. Athens,
Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, and nearly every State with the exception of
Sparta, through a similar stage of tyranny which ended either in
oligarchy or democracy. But then we must remember that Plato is
describing rather the contemporary governments of the Sicilian States,
which alternated between democracy and tyranny, than the ancient
history of Athens or Corinth.
The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later Greek
delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives
of mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the conduct and actions of one
were attributed to another in order to fill up the outline. There was
no enormity which the Greek was not today to believe of them; the
tyrant was the negation of government and law; his assassination was
glorious; there was no crime, however unnatural, which might not with
probability be attributed to him. In this, Plato was only following the
common thought of his countrymen, which he embellished and exaggerated
with all the power of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he
drew from life; or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a
personal acquaintance with Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of
them would rather tend to render doubtful his ever having ‘consorted’
with them, or entertained the schemes, which are attributed to him in
the Epistles, of regenerating Sicily by their help.
Plato in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of
democracy which he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy
is a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing
what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit
of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host, which is the
leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems
to think. But if he is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a
lover of tyranny. His deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved
for the tyrant, who is the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness,