Plato and the Platonic Dialogue
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THE LIFE OF PLATO
Plato was born about the year 428 B.C. By birth he belonged to a distinguished Athenian family. On his mother’s side he could trace his pedigree as far back as Athenian archons of the middle of the seventh century; and among the men of his own generation he was connected with Critias, who was prominent among the members of the oligarchical clique which ruled for a time in 404. It would be a mistake, however, to judge the politics of Plato’s family from the career of Critias, or to maintain that Plato inherited from his family a prejudice against Athenian democracy. The politics of his family were Whig rather than Tory: they were proud of their connexion with Solon; and it would be truer to ascribe to the influence of his family, if any such influence can be traced at all, a prejudice in favour of that mixed and moderate form of constitution which is advocated in the Laws.1 On occasion, and more especially in the Gorgias, Plato is a bitter critic of Periclean democracy; but he can also do justice to its better side even in the Republic; and in later dialogues like the Politicus and the Laws, in which Socratic influence is less present, he shows a real appreciation of its value.
He was perhaps never a disciple, in the strict sense, of the Socratic school, but from his earliest years he was a member of the Socratic circle. Originally he seems to have thought of embracing a political career at Athens; but the death of Socrates, by which he was profoundly influenced, changed all his plans, and he turned to the life of philosophy. Down to the date of his first visit to Sicily, in 387 B.C., he was largely occupied in the composition of his earlier dialogues. To this period belong the Apology, the Crito, the Gorgias, the Protagoras, and probably the greater part of the Republic. During the same period, which lies between his thirtieth and his fortieth year, travel may also have counted for much in the development of his mind. He is said to have visited Egypt, and here (if the story is true, as it very well may be) he may have learned to value that division of labour among a number of classes which he afterwards advocated in the Republic.1 In 387 he visited Italy and Sicily, the stronghold of the Pythagoreans. During his visit he came into contact with Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, and expounded to him so vividly the tenets of the Republic that, annoyed by his denunciation of injustice and condemnation of tyranny, Dionysius delivered him to a Spartan ambassador who sold him into slavery. Ransomed from slavery, he returned to Athens; and here, in 386 B.G., he opened the Academy, in which the remaining forty years of his life were passed.
A writer, and the apologist and exponent of Socrates’ teaching, down to 386, Plato now became a philosopher and the head of a philosophic school. Athens was by this time the University of Greece. She had lost the Empire which she had held in the preceding century; but in exchange she had gained what in that century she had never held, the position both of central market of Greek trade and of central focus of Greek thought. The schools of Plato and of Isocrates were both meant for Greece at large, and both drew on Greece at large. The curriculum of the Platonic school, as we may gather from the sixth and seventh books of the Republic, was largely mathematical. The approach to philosophy lay through geometry: the inscription over Plato’s door, we are told by a Byzantine grammarian, contained the words, ‘Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here’. The mathematical trend of the Platonic school which we may ascribe to Pythagorean influence, is in marked contrast with the biological studies of Aristotle and the Peripatetics; but Plato also directed his school to biological studies, and in the Critias he himself gives ‘an account of the geological history of Attica and its economic consequences which is almost on a level with the most modern discussions of the kind’.2 The lectures which he delivered in the Academy, both on mathematics and other branches of science, and on the final studies of logic and metaphysics, to which science was intended to serve as a propædeutic, must have engaged the bulk of Plato’s thought and leisure in the last forty years of his life. They are all lost to us. We have none of Plato’s lectures, just as we have none of Aristotle’s set writings. We have lost one side of Plato’s work, just as we have lost the other side of the work of Aristotle.1 Our loss is the more serious, as the real doctrine of Plato must have been communicated in his lectures. His dialogues discuss particular theses; but Platonism as a whole, Platonism as a general and sustained body of thought, must have been expounded in the lecture-room, and must have been couched in the same close-packed form as the doctrine of Aristotle.2
Whatever the emphasis laid by Plato on scientific studies, the ultimate purpose of his teaching and his school was none the less thoroughly and essentially an ethical purpose. Like all the philosophers of Greece, he sought to impart knowledge which should issue in action, and to teach a philosophy which should be a way and an inspiration of life. His philosophy, ‘in the first place, is the conversion of a soul, and in the second place … the service of mankind’.3 He believed that ‘conversion’ came not by any sudden gust, and not on any great wave of emotion, but by a gradual turning of the eye towards the light through a steady training in science. But if it came otherwise than we generally think of religious conversion as coming, it equally brought a new life, and it was equally an initiation and ordination into the service of men. The service to which the Platonic disciples were called was not a service of preaching, or a service which took the shape of what we should nowadays call social work, but a service in the world of politics, which took the form of guiding and, if it might be, governing States. Here Plato was at one with Isocrates. If, as we have seen, they diverged in their views of philosophy – if the one laid on science the stress which the other laid on culture, and if the one sought to give a scientific and the other a literary education – they had both, none the less, the same practical object, and they both sought to set right what was wrong in the political state of Greece. They both tended to monarchism; and both of them sought to find, and to inspire, a ruler who should fulfil their ideals – who should, so the one dreamed, unite Greece in the Great Crusade; who should, so the other hoped, unite all classes of the State in common service to the one true Good.
The aim of Plato was to train the philosophic ruler, who should rule by trained intelligence and not by the letter of law, or, if that aim were unattainable, to train the philosophic legislator, who should imbue even the letter of law with the spirit of wisdom and understanding. The former is the ideal of the Republic: the latter is the ideal of the Laws. These ideals were far from being dreams or visions; and the actual achievement of the Academy and its master was far from inconsiderable. The Academy was a school of political training from which statesmen and legislators issued. Plato sent out his disciples to set in order a number of States. Xenocrates, next successor but one to Plato as head of the Academy, gave to Alexander, at his request, counsels on monarchy, and, enjoying the confidence of the Athenians, played some part in the politics of their city.1 The influence of the Academy was widespread: in the East it touched Alexander, the champion of Greece against Persia, and in the West Dionysius 11, the defender of Greece against Carthage. In one sphere that influence was deep and permanent. The development of Greek laws owes no small debt to the work of the Academy. Plato himself, in his later years, attempted, somewhat in the spirit of Bentham,2 to codify and modify Greek law in the light of his principles; and it is possible that his Laws exercised a profounder influence on contemporary Greece than did his Republic. ‘His work’, it has been said, ‘is the foundation of Hellenistic law;’ and in so far as the Academy helped to shape Hellenistic law, its master exerted an influence on the development of the jus gentium of the Romans.3
Nor was this all. In Sicily, and when he was between sixty and seventy years of age, Plato made a direct attempt to achieve something of his highest political ideal, and to turn a tyrant into a philosophic ruler. From the Seventh of his Epistles,1 which is in the nature of an Apologia for the part which he played in Syracusan affairs, we may gather the motives of his action and the methods which he followed. As a young man, he writes, he had already turned his thoughts to a political career. He had been in friendly relations with some of the Thirty, who were then ruling Athens, and he had lively expectations that they would achieve a political reform which would make it possible for him to listen to their invitation to enter politics. Their treatment of Socrates spoiled his hopes; but their fall led to a gradual revival of his political ambitions (324 B–325 A). The shock of the trial and death of Socrates turned the current of his thoughts: he put aside political ambitions for political reflection, debating in his mind how a reformation of the whole constitution of the State might be carried into effect; and meanwhile he resolved to bide his time (325 E–326 A). Finally, he came to see that politics were so incurably out of joint that only a radical reformation would be of any avail, and he was compelled to declare that justice could triumph only through the reign of philosophy, in the day when either philosophers became kings or kings turned philosophers (326 B; cf. Rep., 473 D). He was in this frame of mind when, in 387, he visited Italy and Sicily, where he found confusion no less confounded than in Greece itself. But during his visit he met at Syracuse Dion, the brother-in-law of Dionysius I; and Dion became an eager convert to his views. Some twenty years after this visit Dionysius I died, and was succeeded by Dionysius II. Dion, remembering the effect on himself of his meeting with Plato, and hoping that Dionysius II would be affected in the same way if he came under the same influence, persuaded him to invite Plato to his court. With the invitation from Dionysius came a message from Dion, saying that the hour had now struck for the training of the philosopher-king (328 A). Plato was dubious of success. But he felt it his duty to put into practice his thoughts about proper laws and the right constitution; he was ashamed of being judged by himself as only a man of words if he failed to grasp at a chance of action; and he felt that philosophy would be condemned in his person if he did not seek to show that after all it was a real way of life (328 B–329 B). He accepted the invitation, and in 367, at the age of sixty, he came to Sicily.
The situation to which he came had its difficulties, and it had its possibilities. Dionysius II was now about thirty years of age, and not quite so young, or so likely to be amenable to training, as Plato might have desired. On the other hand, he had been kept aloof from affairs by his father: he was impressionable; and he had, or professed to have, an enthusiasm for the study of philosophy. Plato himself had been for the last twenty years training men for action in the Academy; and though Dionysius could not come to the Academy, the Academy might, as it were, come to him, and much might be hoped from its coming. Plato had sent out pupils from the Academy to a life of statesmanship: if he went out himself, to train an hereditary ruler in statesmanship, he went out on a definitely practical errand, with a definite chance of success. The position of affairs in Sicily and Syracuse had large possibilities. In Syracuse itself a right constitution might be formed: in Sicily at large, the ruined Greek cities, devastated by war, might be restored as a bulwark against Carthage. Sicily, like Asia Minor, was a meeting-place of Hellene and now-Hellene; and Plato, who had Pan-Hellenic ideas, as the fifth book of the Republic and the Seventh Epistle (332 E–333 A) both prove, might hope to aid in the West the work of Hellenization which Isocrates preached, and Alexander afterwards achieved, in the East.
All went awry. Plato, to whom, as we have seen, mathematics was the avenue to truth, began by introducing Dionysius to mathematical studies;1 and Dionysius, who desired a speedier road, found his studies irksome. Worse still – and this is the point which Plato himself emphasizes in the Seventh Epistle – the court of Dionysius was full of dissension and intrigue; and, within four months of Plato’s coming, Dion, who was earnest to the verge of obstinacy (328 B),2 was banished from Syracuse. For some time Plato remained, but with no prospect of success; and eventually, in 366, he returned to Athens, visiting on his way the Pythagorean Archytas, who played a great part in the politics of Tarentum, and forming a friendship which afterwards stood him in good stead.
On the whole, he had failed to achieve any definite success. Syracuse had not been reformed: the Sicilian cities had not been restored: Plato had pressed Dionysius, who afterwards made this a matter of reproach against him, to perfect his education before he attempted political action.1 But there had been no open breach between Plato and Dionysius. When he left Syracuse, Dionysius had promised to send for him again, to recall Dion, and to set Syracuse in order with their aid; and within a year of his departure we find Plato in correspondence with Dionysius, addressing to him a curious letter (the Thirteenth of the Platonic Epistles) which shows the ‘philosopher in undress’ and displays a knowledge of money-matters which some have thought inconsistent and almost unbecoming. Five years, however, elapsed before Plato’s next visit to Syracuse. During these years he continued to teach in the Academy: Dion remained in exile; and Dionysius pursued his studies fitfully, even writing a treatise on metaphysics which professed to reveal ‘the secret of Plato’. At last, in 361, Dionysius sent for Plato, but without recalling Dion, who was asked to stay away from Syracuse for another year (338 B). Dion, who was spending the time of his exile in Greece, pressed Plato to go. At first he refused, feeling that Dionysius was not fulfilling the whole of the promise he had made five years before; but when Archytas wrote from Tarentum to urge him to come, and assured him of the good disposition and zeal for study of Dionysius, he finally consented. When he reached Syracuse he felt it necessary, remembering the facility with which Dionysius had professed to penetrate the secrets of metaphysics, to represent to him the difficulty of the study of philosophy, and the labour and time which it needed (340 B). Perhaps this beginning hardly conciliated the good will of Dionysius: at any rate, a breach soon arose between the two in regard to Dion, towards whom Plato felt that Dionysius was behaving unfairly in money matters. In the issue Plato found himself in a species of honourable captivity, from which he only escaped back to Greece through an appeal to the good offices of Archytas.1
This was the end of any direct action by Plato himself in Syracusan affairs. But for the next ten years he continued to show an interest, as a spectator rather than as a participator, in the distracted politics of the city. In 360 he met Dion at the Olympic Games, and was besought by him to aid with his friends in the expedition against Dionysius which he was already contemplating. He refused to take any personal part (350 C), pleading that he was bound by the hospitality of Dionysius;2 and soon afterwards, about 358, we find him once more in correspondence with Dionysius, and writing to him the Third of the Epistles to defend himself from the charge of having dissuaded him from the restoration of the ruined Greek cities in Sicily. Dion proceeded with his expedition, in which he was joined by some of Plato’s friends, including Speusippus, his nephew, and afterwards his successor as the head of the Academy. The expedition proved successful, and in 357 Dionysius was expelled. With Dion, the friend and disciple of Plato, in sole control, Syracuse might seem destined to become the model philosophic State. But trouble arose once more. Sicily, as Plato says of his own experiences there, seemed cursed by an evil fate (350 D). Dion was stiff-necked: factions sprang into life; and the Fourth of the Platonic Epistles, addressed to Dion at this time, and urging him to adopt a policy of conciliation, proved of no avail. Dion failed to show himself a heaven-born legislator after the manner of Lycurgus and Cyrus, as Plato would have had him be (320 D); and in the issue he was assassinated in 353 by Callippus, an Athenian who had once been a member of the Academy. It was at this juncture that Plato wrote to ‘the friends of Dion’, at their request, the Seventh Epistle, which in part, as we have seen, is an Apologia pro vita sua, and in part an offer of advice for the future conduct of Sicilian affairs. The friends of Dion, he urges, must seek to inaugurate the rule of law, and to this end they must empower a commission of fifty members to draft a code. This, he adds, is not indeed the ideal: it is second to what he and Dion had hoped and sought to realize in earlier days (the rule, that is to say, of a philosopher-king); but it is, at any rate, the best available (337 B–D). In the same sense he wrote, a little later, about 351, the Eighth Epistle, in which, addressing himself once more to the friends of Dion, he reiterates, on broader lines, his previous advice. Once more he advocates, first and foremost, the institution of the reign of law (355 B–C); and along with that he proposes something of a mixed constitution, which may reconcile the interests of different factions. A triumvirate should be formed, in which the expelled Dionysius should be joined with the son of Dion and a younger son of Dionysius I; and by its side should stand a body of thirty-five Guardians of the Law, with an Assembly and Council, to decide on questions of war and peace (356 A–D). This, and the restoration of the ruined Greek cities, are the two things which Dion would have done if he had lived. On the latter point Plato lays especial emphasis. All Hellenes must seek, with all their hearts, to find a remedy to meet the danger which threatens Hellenism in Sicily at the hands both of the Carthaginians and of Italian invaders; and the one remedy is a strong bulwark of restored Greek cities (353 E).
Such was the part which Plato played in the actual politics of his day and generation. It was not visionary: it was not impracticable. If he had succeeded, Syracuse would have gained a model constitution, and the Hellenic cause in the West would have been established beyond any danger of overthrow from Carthage and possibly even from Rome. That he failed was not entirely, or mainly, his own fault. He may be accused of want of tact in handling Dionysius; but it needs to be proved that other measures would have had any other result. The obstinacy of Dion was more to blame than the tactlessness of Plato; and more responsible, far more responsible, than either was the social condition of Sicily, which Plato himself knew well (326 B–D), and which, he tells us, nowhere and in no wise pleased him. Luxury was rife: faction was rampant: Sicily was a hot-bed and forcing-house of rapid growths, which could not stand rough weather. Some results flowed from the Sicilian experiences of Plato; but those results are chiefly to be traced in the development of his own doctrine. He had gone to Sicily in 367 with high hopes of founding the city of his dreams, and of training a king to become a philosopher wise enough to regulate human affairs by that living play of Reason, which he held to transcend so greatly the dead letter of the Law. He had begun by believing in the supremacy of Reason and in monarchy; he ended by believing in the rule of Law and the mixed constitution – not indeed as ideals, but as things practicable; not as the Best of which thought was capable, but as that second best which may sometimes be better than the Best. The transition was gradual. The first sign may perhaps be traced in the Third Epistle (315 E–316 A), in which he speaks of having worked with Dionysius, probably on his second visit, in 361, in constructing preambles for laws. The suggestion of persuasive preambles to be prefixed to each law is one which Plato elaborates in detail in the Laws. It is his attempt to reconcile the rule of living intelligence with the rule of Law. The preamble, which states the principles on which such an intelligence acts, and on which the law is based, is as it were a bridge between the two. It is also a bridge between the first and the second phase of Plato’s political theory. The Politicus, which may have been written about 360, shows the definite beginning of the second phase. The rule of Law, we are told, is rightest and best as the second course (297 E); and indeed, since the ideal ruler cannot be found, we must have recourse to prescriptions set down in writing (301 D–E). In the Seventh and Eighth Epistles the emphasis on the rule of Law is strong; and here there emerges also the suggestion of Guardians of the Law, which is repeated in the Laws (753 D), and the doctrine of the mixed constitution,1 which is perhaps the cardinal doctrine of this last of Plato’s dialogues. The Laws represents the culmination of this gradual development. Plato still upholds the ideal as an ideal; but he condescends to the practicable, and abandoning the State of pure Justice with its ‘perfect Guardians’, he advocates the law-state with its Guardians of the Law. He still believes that one of the most effective ways of setting in motion such a State is the co-operation of a tyrant with a young philosopher, but the normal constitution which he advocates, when once the State has been set in motion, is a mixture of monarchy and democracy. We shall hardly go wrong in thinking that the constant dissensions of Syracuse, and his own experience of the living intelligence of an actual ruler, had burned into Plato’s mind a strong belief in the value of the sovereignty of an impartial and impersonal law. The doctrine of the Laws was slowly formed in the crucible of experience. When in extreme old age, in a spirit of kindly tolerance and half-humorous sadness (as when he speaks of men as ‘merely playthings of the gods’), he wrote the last of his dialogues, he was seeking to fuse into a system both the lessons he had learned from his own Sicilian experiences in 367 and 361, and the morals which he drew from the political vicissitudes of Sicily – vicissitudes in which he had himself been intimately concerned – in the stormy years between 357 and 351.
But Plato was a philosopher, and it was philosophic problems which, even during these years, engaged his attention most closely. There was always, one feels, a struggle in his mind between the philosophic impulse towards abstract thought, and a feeling (such as every man who has embraced the student’s life can understand) that he ought to come into contact with ‘realities’, and to do something in the world of action. Of the two the philosophic impulse was always the deeper, and it was only a feeling of duty which dragged him into affairs.1 Through the troubled years of his later life he was writing critical dialogues on points of metaphysics, in which Socratic influence seems to disappear, and in which problems of the critique of pure reason occupy him more than problems of practical reason. Yet he never abandoned the belief that he had found a way of life; and he never ceased to train men to follow it, or to dream of that divine, if far-off, city, in whose institutions and system of education it should be permanently established as a common possession of men.
THE METHOD OF PLATO’S DIALOGUES
The form of Plato’s writings is from first to last that of the dialogue. The purpose which leads him to prefer that form is the purpose which animated Socrates. Socrates had never attempted to instil knowledge: on the contrary, he had always disclaimed in possession. He desired to awaken thought. He was the gadfly who stung men into a sense of truth; he gave the shock of the torpedo-fish; he practised the art of midwifery, and brought thought to birth. He appealed to what was in man’s own mind, and trusted it to respond to the appeal: he called to the intelligence of man, believing that it would reply to the call. And so it was with Plato. He desired to show thought at work, and to avoid the mere exposition of its finished product. He was a lecturer and a teacher as well as a writer; and when he set pen to paper, he naturally fell into the vein of writing which discussions with his class in the Academy suggested. Like every genuine teacher, he wished to make men think by his teaching; and, as a writer, he felt that thought would best be awakened in his readers, if they were made to follow the process of the author’s own mind. A subject is discussed inside the individual mind in much the same way as it is disputed in a circle of talkers. One view is set up only to be demolished by another, until some final residuum of truth is attained. ‘One shrewd thought devours another’, and finally truth alone remains on the field as a victor. The dialogue is this process of the individual mind made concrete, with its stages translated into persons. It is a higher and more artistic expression of the same tendency, which appears even in the concise lecture-notes of Aristotle.
Dealing with moral problems, Plato naturally started from the prima facie views of ordinary opinion. Some character, who with dramatic truth is presented as being in himself, and by his temper and experience, the natural embodiment of one of these views, appears on the stage and gives it utterance. Often such a prima facie view will represent one of those lurking principles, which we do not allow to show themselves in our words or in our actions (as we fancy), but to which none the less we pay an unspoken but ready allegiance. ‘After all – if I dared think it out, which I must not – pleasure is everything’: or ‘after all – if things were as they ought to be, which they are not – I ought to have what I am strong enough to get’. Brought to the light, and pushed to their conclusions, these lurking principles are shown to involve results which their holder cannot accept: when they are thought out, they are impossible. And in their place are installed those principles of moral life, to which we pay a spoken but reluctant homage, and which nevertheless are shown to command the assent of our whole being, when once they are put before us in their full meaning and bearing. Seen in this light, each of the Platonic dialogues is an education of men away from the false if cherished views of the ‘first blush’ back again, but on a higher level, to the faith by which they act. But it is not always that popular opinion is presented only to be rejected. Opinion is more than a mere inclination to error. By a right instinct it also reaches the truth, though it does not really see the truth which it reaches. A popular opinion may serve as a basis of inquiry, and by gradual stages be developed and refined, until it is made into a perception of the genuine truth. It is, for instance, a true opinion, and worthy of consideration, that the character of a State is determined by the character of its citizens; and from this opinion the Republic (after correcting the false opinion that might is right) ultimately takes its start. But the opinion is extended far and wide. Brought into contact with philosophic principles, it is developed and deepened until there results a division of the State corresponding to a division of the human soul which is one of the preconceived principles of Plato’s philosophy.
A particular feature of Plato’s method is his use of analogy. We have already seen that the use of analogies drawn from the physical world was a characteristic of the transition from the old philosophy of Nature to the new philosophy of man. In the method of Socrates analogies drawn from the arts were regular: he was perpetually enforcing the need of knowledge and of education by the example of the pilot or the doctor. In Plato analogies of both kinds are frequent. His analogies from Nature are chiefly analogies drawn from the animal world. In the Republic the analogy of the dog is more than once made the basis of important arguments. By considering the temper of the watch-dog, Plato arrives at the principle which should dictate the choice of guardians; by a comparison of the male watch-dog with the female, he is able to decide that women ought to be guardians as well as men; and it is by an argument from the breeding of animals that he comes upon his peculiar theory of marriage. The same use of analogies from Nature characterizes at least one passage in the Politics of Aristotle. It is from the analogy of Nature, and the example of the relation of animals to men, that Aristotle attempts to justify slavery as a natural institution, and to prove the propriety of the slave’s relation to his master.
But it is the Socratic use of analogies drawn from the arts which appears most prominently in Plato. The conception of politics as an art, on which the Sophists had acted when they had professed to make politics, like medicine, a subject of teaching, and which Socrates had made into the basis of his demand for knowledge, penetrates almost everything which Plato has to say on this subject. Conceiving politics as an art, he demanded that in this art, as in others, there should be knowledge. This is perhaps the most prominent feature in the whole of his political thought; and the demand that, on the analogy of all other ‘artists’, the statesman should know what he practises, lies at the root of the Republic. The same conception of politics led Plato still further. Because the artist ought to be unfettered in the practice of his art by a body of rules, he holds that the statesman should ideally be free from the restraint of law, and he advocates a theory of absolute government. Finally, in the strength of this conception he can prove that every ruler is set to rule propter commune bonum, since every artist must necessarily work, if he be a true artist, for the betterment of his art’s object.
The use of analogy is difficult, and false analogies are easy. It can hardly be denied that Plato did not always surmount the difficulty, or that he sometimes fell into pitfalls. The analogies from the animal world which he employs can hardly be accepted. Such analogies may be used to establish anything – including that doctrine of the right of might which Plato himself explodes in the Gorgias – and yet in reality they establish nothing. Man is a spirit; and no valid rules can be drawn for the life of the spirit from the world of brute creation. Nor is the use of analogies drawn from the arts free from criticism. The politician, after all, is not as the physician; and if the one should do his work without the shackles of a text-book, it does not follow that the other should act without the regulation of law. The treatment of the soul involves considerations other than those which guide the treatment of the body, and in many respects, as for instance in his theory of punishment, Plato is not sufficiently alive to their presence. But while we may doubt the validity of a discussion of political questions according to analogies drawn from the arts, we must not forget the cardinal position of Plato. To him politics is not like the arts: it is an art. There is identity rather than analogy.
1 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, pp. 209–10. The family pride in the connexion with Solon (cf. also the Charmides, 157 E–158 A) appears in the Timaeus (cf. 23 A), where the whole story of Atlantis is recorded as a family tradition derived from Solon. The Critias who tells that story, and gives his name to the Critias, is not the oligarchical leader of 404, but his grandfather, who was also Plato’s great grandfather (Burnet, op. cit. p. 338).
1 Plato refers to the Egyptian system of classes in the Timaeus (24 A).
2 Burnet, op. cit., p. 223.
1 Burnet, op. cit., 214–15. Hence, as Burnet remarks, ‘the difficulty we feel in passing from Plato to Aristotle … we are … comparing two quite different things’.
2 In an interesting passage in the Seventh Epistle (341 C) Plato writes, ‘There is no writing of mine, nor ever will be’ on certain subjects, by which he apparently means the nature of the Ideas. These things cannot be explained like other subjects of study: they need constant association and intercourse (in other words, years of constant lectures and classes), before the fire of understanding can be kindled into a sudden flame.
3 Burnet, op. cit., p. 218.
1 Plutarch, Adv. Col., 1126 c (quoted in Burnet, op. cit., p. 303 n. 1); Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, IV. 5–7. There is a story that Epaminondas of Thebes asked Plato to legislate for his new city of Megalopolis (Diog. Laert., III. 23).
2 Bentham, zealous as he was for legislation in the light of a principle, and successful as he was in imbuing with his tenets a number of disciples who exercised an influence on the course of English legislation, is in some respects a parallel to Plato, though very far from being a Platonist; cf. infra, p. 355, and cf. also supra, p. 10 note.
3 The jus gentium, administered as it was for foreigners, must from the first have been influenced by the Greek law of South Italy and Sicily, and afterwards, as the Romans came in contact with the East, it must have been still further influenced by the Hellenistic law common throughout the East; cf. Burnet, op. cit., p. 304, and infra, p. 411.
1 I have gone on the assumption that this Epistle is genuine, and I have also used the Third and the Eighth. There is also some reason for thinking that the Fourth and the Thirteenth are also Platonic; cf. Hackforth, The Authorship of the Platonic Epistles.
1 Plutarch, Life of Dion, c. 13.
2 In later yean (Epistle IV, 321 B–C) Plato warns Dion that he is considered less courteous than he should be; and he bids him remember, that success in action comes through winning men over, and that obstinacy is the stable-companion of solitude.
1 In the Third Epistle, written to Dionysius II about 358, Plato defends himself against this reproach (cf. especially 319 C). In the Seventh Epistle, which was written about 352, Plato speaks of himself as having intended to press Dionysius to restore the ruined cities, when once he had made him wise and prudent (332 E).
1 Plato’s relations to Archytas, the philosopher-ruler of Tarentum, are interesting; but we know very little of them. One of the Platonic Epistles (the Ninth), which may or may not be genuine, is written to encourage Archytas to continue to take part in public affairs.
2 In the Fourth Epistle, written to Dion after his expedition had proved successful, Plato speaks of his zeal and enthusiasm for its success (320 A). The two passages are not incompatible: Plato may have been eager for the success of his friend’s expedition, even though he felt that it would not be right for him to take any personal part in it.
1 In speaking of the triumvirate mentioned above, Plato suggests that it is a via media (μέσον τέμνει: 355 D). We are told by Plutarch, in his life of Dion, that Dion planned a mixed constitution composed of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements.
1 Cf. Epistle VII, 328 C–D, and the well-known passage in the sixth book of the Republic.