Authors of Greece

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Yet even this method of describing Justice is not satisfactory to
Plato, who was not content unless he started from the universal
concepts of the Ideal world. The second portion of the dialogue
describes how knowledge is gained. The mind discards the sensible and
material world, advancing to the Ideas themselves. Yet even these are
insufficient, for they all are interconnected and united to one great
and architectonic Idea, that of the Good; to this the soul must
advance before its knowledge can be called perfect. This is the scheme
of education for the Guardians; the philosophic contemplation of
Ideas, however, should be deferred till they are of mature age, for
philosophy is dangerous in young men. Having performed their warlike
functions of defending the State, the Guardians are to be sifted,
those most capable of philosophic speculation being employed as
instructors of the others. Seen from the height of the Ideal world,
Justice again turns out to be the performance of one's own particular
duties.

This ideal society Plato admits to be a difficult aim for our weak
human nature; he stoutly maintains, however, that "a pattern of it is
laid up in heaven", man's true home. He mournfully grants that a
declension from excellence is often possible and describes how this
rule of philosophers, if established, would be expected to pass
through oligarchy to democracy, the worst form of all government,
peopled by the democratic man whose soul is at war with itself because
it claims to do as it likes. The whole dialogue ends in an admirable
vision in which he teaches that man chose his lot on earth in a
preexisting state.

Such is a fragmentary description of this masterpiece. What is it all
about? First it is necessary to point out a serious misconception.
Plato is not here advocating universal communism; his state postulates
a money-making class and a labouring class also. Apart from the fact
that he explicitly mentions these and allows them private property, it
would be difficult to imagine that they are not rendered necessary by
his very description of Justice. Not all men are fit for
government--and therefore those who are governed must "do their
particular business" for which they are fitted; in some cases it is
the rather mean business of piling up fortunes. Communism is advocated
as the only means of creating first and then propagating the small
Guardian caste. Nor again is the caste rigid, for some of the children
born of communistic intercourse will be unfit for their position and
will be degraded into the money-making or property owning section.
Communism to Plato is a high creed, too high for everybody, fit only
for the select and enlightened or teachable few.

Nor is the _Republic_ an instance of Utopian theorising. It is a
criticism of contemporary Greek civilisation, intended to remove the
greatest practical difficulty in life. Man has tried all kinds of
governments and found none satisfactory. All have proved selfish and
faithless, governing for their own interests only. Kings, oligarchs,
democrats and mob-leaders have without exception regarded power as the
object to be attained because of the spoils of office. Political
leadership is thus a direct means of self-advancement, a temptation
too strong for weak human nature. As a well-known Labour leader
hinted, five thousand a year does not often come in men's way. There
is only one way of securing honest government and that is Plato's. A
definite class must be created who will exercise political power only,
economic inclinations of any sort disqualifying any of its members
from taking office. The ruling class should rule only, the
money-making class make money only. In this way no single section will
tax the rest to fill its own pockets. The one requisite is that these
Guardians should be recognised as the fittest to rule and receive the
willing obedience of the rest. If any other sane plan is available for
preserving the governed from the incessant and rapacious demands of
tax-collectors, no record of it exists in literature. Practical
statesmanship of a high and original order is manifest in the
_Republic_; in England, where the official qualifications for
governing are believed to be equally existent in everybody whether
trained or untrained in the art of ruling, the _Republic_, if read at
all, may be admired but is sure to be misunderstood.

It seems that Plato's teaching at the Academy raised formidable
criticism. The next group of dialogues is marked by metaphysical
teaching. The _Parmenides_ is a searching examination of the Ideas. If
these are in a world apart, they cannot easily be brought into
connection with our world; a big thing on earth and the Idea of Big
will need another Idea to comprehend both. Besides, Ideas in an
independent existence will be beyond our ken and their study will be
impossible. Socrates' system betrays lack of metaphysical practice; at
most the Ideas should have been regarded as part of a theory whose
value should have been tested by results. This process is exemplified
by a discussion of the fundamental opposition between the One and the
infinite Many which are instances of it.

This criticism shows the advantage Plato enjoyed in making Socrates
the mouthpiece of his own speculations; he could criticise himself as
it were from without. He has put his finger on his own weak spot, the
question whether the Ideas are immanent or transcendent. The results
of this examination were adopted by the Aristotelian school, who
suggested another theory of Knowledge.

The _Philebus_ discusses the question whether Pleasure or Knowledge is
the chief good. A metaphysical argument which follows that of the
_Parmenides_ ends in the characteristic Greek distinction between the
Finite and the Infinite. Pleasure is infinite, because it can exist in
greater or less degree; there is a mixed life compounded of finite and
infinite and there is a creative faculty to which mind belongs.
Pleasure is of two kinds; it is sometimes mixed with pain, sometimes
it is pure; the latter type alone is worth cultivating and includes
the pleasures of knowledge. Yet pleasure is not an end, but only a
means to it. It cannot therefore be the Good, which is an end.
Knowledge is at its best when it is dealing with the eternal and
immutable, but even then it is not self-sufficient--it exists for the
sake of something else, the good. This latter is characterised by
symmetry, proportion and truth. Knowledge resembles it far more than
even pure pleasure.

The _Theaetetus_ discusses more fully the theory of knowledge. It
opens with a comparison of the Socratic method to midwifery; it
delivers the mind of the thoughts with which it is in travail. The
first tentative definition of knowledge is that it is sensation. This
is in agreement with the Protagorean doctrine that man is the measure
of all things. Yet sensation implies change, whereas we cannot help
thinking that objects retain their identity; if knowledge is sensation
a pig has as good a claim to be called the measure of all things as a
man. Again, Protagoras has no right to teach others if each man's
sensations are a law unto him. Nor is the Heracleitean doctrine much
better which taught that all things are in a state of flux. If nothing
retains the same quality for two consecutive moments it is impossible
to have predication, and knowledge must be hopeless. In fact,
sensation is not man's function as a reasoning being, but rather
comparison. Neither is knowledge true opinion, for this at once
demands the demarcation of false opinion or error; the latter is
negative, and will be understood only when positive knowledge is
determined. Perhaps knowledge is true opinion plus reason; but it is
difficult to decide what is gained by adding "with reason", words
which may mean either true opinion or knowledge itself, thus involving
either tautology or a begging of the question. The dialogue at least
has shown what knowledge is not.

Locke, Berkeley and Hume, the eighteenth century sensation
philosophers, were similarly refuted by Kant. The mind by its mere
ability to compare two things proves that it can have two concepts at
least before it at the same time, and can retain them for a longer
period than a mere passing sensation implies. Yet the problem of
knowledge still remains as difficult as Plato knew it to be.

"Is the Sophist the same as the Statesman and the Philosopher?" Such
is the question raised in the _Sophist_. Six definitions are
suggested, all unsatisfactory. The fixed characteristic of the Sophist
is his seeming to know everything without doing so; this definition
leads straight to the concept of false opinion, a thing whose object
both is and is not. "That which is not" provokes an inquiry into what
is, Being. Dualism, Monism, Materialism and Idealism are all
discussed, the conclusion being that the Sophist is a counterfeit of
the Philosopher, a wilful impostor who makes people contradict
themselves by quibbling.

The _Politicus_ carries on the discussion. In this dialogue we may see
the dying glories of Plato's genius. In his search for the true pastor
or king he separates the divine from the human leader; the true king
alone has scientific knowledge superior to law and written enactments
which men use when they fail to discover the real monarch. This
scientific knowledge of fixed and definite principles can come only
from Education. A most remarkable myth follows, which is practically
the Greek version of the Fall. The state of innocence is described as
preceding a decline into barbarism; a restoration can be effected only
by a divine interposition and by the growth of a study of art or by
the influence of society. The arts themselves are the children of a
supernatural revelation.

The _Timaeus_ and the long treatise the _Laws_ criticise the theories
of the Republic. The former is full of world-speculations of a most
difficult kind, the latter admits the weakness of the Ideal State,
making concessions to inevitable human failings.

Though written in an early period, the _Apology_ may form a fitting
end to these dialogues. Socrates was condemned on the charge of
corrupting the Athenian youth and for impiety. To most Athenians he
must have been not only not different from the Sophists he was never
weary of exposing, but the greatest Sophist of them all. He was
unfortunate in his friends, among whom were Critias the infamous
tyrant and Alcibiades who sold the great secret. The older men must
have regarded with suspicion his influence over the youth in a city
which seemed to be losing all its national virtues; many of them were
personally aggrieved by his annoying habit of exposing their ignorance.
He was given a chance of escape by acknowledging his fault and
consenting to pay a small fine. Instead, he proposed for himself the
greatest honour his city could give any of her benefactors, public
maintenance in the town-hall.

His defence contains many superb passages and is a masterpiece of
gentle irony and subtle exposure of error. Its conclusion is masterly.

"At point of death men often prophesy. My prophecy to you, my
slayers, is that when I am gone you will have to face a far more
serious penalty than mine. You have killed me because you wish
to avoid giving an account of your lives. After me will come more
accusers of you and more severe. You cannot stop criticism except
by reforming yourselves. If death is a sleep, then to me it is
gain; if in the next world a man is delivered from unjust judges
and there meets with true judges, the journey is worth while.
There will be found all the heroes of old, slain by wicked
sentences; them I shall meet and compare my agonies with theirs.
Best of all, I shall be able to carry out my search into true and
false knowledge and shall find out the wise and the unwise. No
evil can happen to a virtuous man in life or in death. If my sons
when they grow up care about riches more than virtue, rebuke them
for thinking they are something when they are naught. My time has
come; we must separate. I go to death, you to life; which of the
two is better only God knows."

Two lessons of supreme importance are to be learned from Plato. In the
first place he insists on credentials from the accepted teachers of a
nation. On examination most of them, like Gorgias, would be found
incapable of defining the subjects for the teaching of which they
receive money. The sole hope of a country is Education, for it alone
can deliver from ignorance, a slavery worse than death; the uneducated
person is the dupe of his own passions or prejudices and is the
plaything of the horde of impostors who beg for his vote at elections
or stampede him into strikes.

Again, the possibility of knowledge depends upon accurate definition
and the scientific comparisons of instances. These involve long and
fatiguing thought and very often the reward is scanty enough; no
conclusion is possible sometimes except that it is clear what a thing
cannot be. The human intelligence has learned a most valuable lesson
when it has recognised its own impotence at the outset of an inquiry
and its own limitations at the end thereof. Knowledge, Good, Justice,
Immortality are conceptions so mighty that our tiny minds have no
compasses to set upon them. Better far a distrust in ourselves than
the somewhat impudent and undoubtedly insistent claim to certitude
advanced by the materialistic apostles of modern non-humanitarianism.
When questioned about the ultimates all human knowledge must admit
that it hangs upon the slender thread of a theory or postulate. The
student of philosophy is more honest than others; he has the candour
to confess the assumptions he makes before he tries to think at all.

At times it must be admitted that Plato sounds very unreal. His faults
are clear enough. The dialogue form makes it very easy for him to
invent questions of such a nature that the answer he wants is the only
one possible. Again, his conclusions are often arrived at by methods
or arguments which are frankly inadmissible; in the earlier dialogues
are some very glaring instances of sheer logical worthlessness.
Frequently the whole theme of discussion is such that no modern
philosopher could be expected to approve of it. A supposed explanation
of a difficulty is sometimes afforded by a myth, splendid and poetical
but not logically valid. Inconsistencies can easily be pointed out in
the vast compass of his speculations. It remained for Aristotle to
invent a genuine method of sorting out a licit from an illicit type of
argument.

These faults are serious. Against them must be placed some positive
excellences. Plato was one of the first to point out that there is a
problem; a question should be asked and an answer found if possible,
for we have no right to take things for granted. More than this, he
was everywhere searching for knowledge, ridding himself of prejudice,
doing in perfect honesty the most difficult of all things, the duty of
thinking clearly. These thoughts he has expressed in the greatest of
all types of Greek prose, a blend of poetic beauty with the precision
of prose.

But Plato's praise is not that he is a philosopher so much as
Philosophy itself in poetic form. His great visions of the Eternal
whence we spring, his awe for the real King, the real Virtue, the real
State "laid up in Heaven" fill him with an inspired exaltation which
lifts his readers to the Heaven whence Platonism has descended. There
are two main types of men. One is content with the things of sense;
using his powers of observation and performing experiments he will
become a Scientist; using his powers of speculation he will become an
Aristotelian philosopher; putting his thoughts into simple and logical
order, he will write good prose. The other soars to the eternal
principles behind this world, the deathless forms or the general
concepts which give concrete things their existence. These perfect
forms are the main study of the Artist, Poet, Sculptor, whose work it
is to give us comfort and pleasure unspeakable. So long as man lives,
he must have the perfection of beauty to gladden him, especially if
Science is going to test everything by the ruler or balance or
crucible. This love of Beauty is exactly Platonism. It has never died
yet. From Athens it spread to Alexandria, there to start up into fresh
life in the School of which Plotinus is the chief; its doctrines are
described for the English reader in Kingsley's _Hypatia_. It planted
its seed of mysticism in Christianity, with which it has most strange
affinities. At the Renaissance this mystic element caught the
imagination of northern Europe, notably Germany. Passing to England,
it created at Cambridge a School of Platonists, the issue of whose
thought is evident in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Its last
outburst has been the Transcendental teaching of the nineteenth
century, so curiously Greek and non-Greek in its essence.

For there is in our nature that undying longing for communion with the
Divine which the mere thought of God stirs within us. Our true home is
in the great world where Truth is everything, that Truth which one day
we, like Plato, shall see face to face without any quailing.

TRANSLATIONS:

The version in 4 volumes by Jowett (Oxford) is the standard. It
contains good introductions.

The _Republic_ has been translated by Davies and Vaughan.

Two volumes in the Loeb Series have appeared.

A new method of translation of Plato is needed. The text should be
clearly divided into sections; the steps of the argument should be
indicated in a skeleton outline. Until this is done study of Plato is
likely to cause much bewilderment.

_Plato and Platonism_, by Pater, is still the best interpretation of
the whole system.

DEMOSTHENES

One of the most disquieting facts that history teaches is the
inability of the most enlightened and patriotic men to "discern the
signs of the times". To us the collapse of the Greek city-states seems
natural and inevitable. Their constant bickerings and petty jealousies
justly drew down upon them the armed might of the ambitious and
capable power which destroyed them. Their fate may fill us with pity
and our admiration for those who fought in a losing cause may
prejudice us against their enslavers. But just as the Norman Conquest
in the long run brought more blessing than misery, so the downfall of
the Greek commonwealths was the first step to the conquering progress
of the Greek type of civilisation through the whole world. Our Harold,
fighting manfully yet vainly against an irresistible tendency, has his
counterpart in the last defender of the ancient liberties of Greece.

Demosthenes was born in 384 of a well-to-do business man who died
eight years later. The guardians whom he appointed appropriated the
estate, leaving Demosthenes and his sister in straitened
circumstances. On coming of age the young man brought a suit against
his trustees in 363, of whom Aphobus was the most fraudulent. Though
he won the case, much of his property was irretrievably lost. Nor were
his first efforts at public speaking prophetic of future greatness.
His voice was thin, his demeanour awkward, his speech indistinct; his
style was laboured, being an obvious blend of Thucydides with Isaeus,
an old and practised pleader. Yet he was ambitious and determined; he
longed to copy the career of Pericles, the noblest of Athenian
statesmen. The stories of his self-imposed exercises and their happy
issue are well known; his days he spent in declaiming on the sea-shore
with pebbles in his mouth, his nights in copying and recopying
Thucydides; the speeches which have come down to us show clearly the
gradual evolution of the great style well worthy of the greatest of
all themes, national salvation.

It will be necessary to explain a convention of the Athenian law
courts. A litigant was obliged to plead his own case; if he was unable
to compose his own speech, he applied to some professional retailer of
orations who would write it for him. The art of these speech-writers
was of varying excellence. A first-class practitioner would not only
discover the real or the supposed facts of the dispute, he would
divine the real character of his client, and write the particular type
of speech which would seem most natural on such a person's lips.
Considerable knowledge of human nature was required in such an
exciting and delicate profession, although the author did not always
succeed in concealing his identity. Demosthenes had his share of this
experience; he wrote for various customers speeches on various
subjects; one concerns a dowry dispute, another a claim for
compensation for damage caused by a water-course, another deals with
an adoption, another was written for a wealthy banker. Assault and
battery, ship-scuttling, undue influence of attractive females on the
weaker sex, maritime trickery of all kinds, citizen rights, are all
treated in the so-called private speeches, of which some are of
considerable value as illustrating legal or mercantile or social
etiquette.

Public suits were of the same nature; the speeches were composed by
one person and delivered by another. Such are the speech against
_Androtion_ for illegal practices, against _Timocrates_ for
embezzlement and the important speech against _Aristocrates_, in which
for the first time Demosthenes seems to have become aware of the real
designs of Macedonia. The speech against the law of _Leptines_,
delivered in 354 by Demosthenes himself, is of value as displaying the
gradual development of his characteristic style; in it we have the
voice and the words of the same man, who is talking with a sense of
responsibility about a constitutional anomaly.

But for us the real Demosthenes is he who spoke on questions of State
policy. This subject alone can call out the best qualities in an
orator as distinct from a rhetorician; the tricks and bad arguments
which are so often employed to secure condemnation or acquittal in a
law court are inapplicable or undignified in a matter of vital
national import. But before the great enemy arose to threaten Greek
liberty, it happened that Fortune was kind enough to afford
Demosthenes excellent practice in a parliamentary discussion of two if
not three questions of importance.

In 354 there was much talk of a possible war with Persia. Demosthenes
first addresses the sword-rattlers. "To the braggarts and jingoes I
say that it is not difficult--not even when we need sound advice--to
win a reputation for courage and to appear a clever speaker when
danger is very near. The really difficult duty is to show courage in
danger and in the council-chamber to give sounder advice than anybody
else." His belief was that war was not a certainty, but it would be
better to revise the whole naval system. A detailed scheme to assure
the requisite number of ships in fighting-trim follows, so sensible
that it commands immediate respect. The speaker estimates the wealth
of Attica, maps it out into divisions, each able to bear the expense
of the warships assigned to it. To a possible objection that it would
be better to raise the money by increased taxation he answers with the
grim irony natural to him (he seems to be utterly devoid of humour).

"What you could raise at present is more ridiculous than if you
raised nothing at all. A hundred and twenty talents? What are they
to the twelve hundred camels which they say carry Persia's revenues?"

He refuses to believe that a Greek mercenary army would fight against
its country, while the Thebans, who notoriously sided with Persia in
480, would give much for an opportunity of redeeming this old sin
against Greece.

"The rest of the Greeks, as long as they considered the Persian
their common enemy, had numerous blessings; but when they began to
regard him as their friend they experienced such woes as no man could
have invented for them even in his curses. Whom then Providence and
Destiny have shown useless as a friend and most advantageous as a foe,
shall we fear? Rather let us commit no injustice for our own sakes and
save the rest from commotion and strife."

Such is the outline of the speech on the _Navy-boards_. Two years
later he displayed qualities of no mean order. Sparta and Thebes were
quarrelling for the leadership. Arcadia had revolted from Sparta, the
centre of the disaffection being _Megalopolis_; ambassadors from the
latter city and from Sparta begged Athenian aid. In the heat of the
excitement men's judgments were not to be trusted. "The difficulty of
giving sound advice is well known," says the orator.

"If a man tries to take a middle course and you have not the
patience to hear, he will win the approval of neither party but
will be maligned by both. If such a fate awaits me, I would rather
appear to be talking nonsense than allow any party to deceive you
into what I know is not your wisest policy."

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