(Timaeus, 22 B). At the same time he confesses that ‘there are poor things in Egypt’ (Laws, 654 B).The Theory of Education in the Laws
*
PROLEGOMENA TO THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
The enforcement of law, in the last resort, demands punishment, which acts on the mind, in Plato’s view, by the remedy of pain, and seeks by that remedy to counteract and evacuate those violent pleasures which are the incentives to crime. Punishment, as we have seen, is thus in a sense education; but it is the education of an unhealthy mind. It operates only through occasional shocks: it operates only on the worse elements of the mind: it operates only negatively, through the application of irritants. Education proper is constant: it is a training of the normal mind, and of every element in that mind: it operates positively, in the form of a guiding direction alike of pleasures and pains. There is indeed such a thing as a partial education: there is the technical education by which the young are trained to excellence in the special arts and crafts they will afterwards follow (643 B–C); but the only education which deserves the name is the general education of the young in the general art of citizenship. Here the object is civic excellence: the way is the way of instilling desire and love for a perfect citizenship: the product is the citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled in the way of justice (643 E). The ideal of such civic excellence is set forth in the laws. They are the rules by which magistrates govern and subjects render obedience. It is the aim of education, therefore, to initiate the young in the spirit of the laws (659 E); and it is its method so to train their affections, and so to form their habits, that they desire, through force of ingrained habit, what the law commands, and reject, with instinctive dislike, what the law forbids (653 B–C). Such habituation may be achieved directly or indirectly. It may be achieved directly, if the young are taught to respect and admire the actual law, and to acquire a perfect knowledge of all its rules (811 B): it may be achieved indirectly (and this is the only thorough way, and the only true education), if they are imbued with the inner spirit and tone of the law, and taught to acquire a habit of mind which we always issue in action according to the law.
The law is fixed; and therefore the substance and curriculum of education must be equally fixed. Egypt is Plato’s ideal.1 Long ago, literally 10,000 years ago, the Egyptians recognized that the types of music and education, which the young should draw into their habits and their very blood, must be fixed by a proper standard; and through all the ages the types once fixed have been rigorously observed (653 D–E). Plato would adopt the rule of Egypt, and extend it even to the games of childhood. When games, and the rules of games, are fixed; when children play, in the words of one of their immemorial rhymes, ‘as they have done before’, the State itself, and the rules it should follow in earnest, will undergo no change (797 A–B). It is the sovereign sanction of all laws that no man should remember, or even have heard, that they were ever otherwise than they are now; and if ever games are changed, this quiet temper of stability will change with them, and a new generation, practised in new games, will seek when it reaches maturity to change the laws as before it changed the games (798 B–C). Dance and song must accordingly be consecrated, as they are in Egypt: those who suggest any change are to be excluded from participation, and, if they persist, to be indicted for irreligion (799 A–B). This is a temper which is hardly favourable to artistic freedom; and in the Laws, as in the Republic, Plato establishes a thorough censorship of art. Rules are created, and types are prescribed, for literary composition: no poet is to compose any verses which offend the views of law and justice, of beauty and goodness, professed by the State, or to publish any composition until it has been seen and approved by the proper judges and the guardians of the law (801 C–D).2 Song and dance are regulated in the same way; a body of judges, over the age of fifty, are to select the best models of the past; they may take the advice of poets and musicians, but their paramount duty is to interpret and enforce the wishes of the legislator (802 B–C). The drama survives; but it survives in subjection. ‘Serious things cannot be understood apart from things ridiculous’; and comedy, therefore, may be permitted – provided that its performance is left to slaves and strangers hired for the purpose (816 D–E), and provided, too, that a citizen is never made the butt of its satire (935 E).1 Tragedy is treated even more drastically. No tragedy can be produced until it has been submitted to the magistrates, and unless, in their view, its teaching is the same as that of the laws, or even better than theirs (817 D). In all these regulations Plato shows the tendency, which literary thinkers on politics have often shown since, to join ‘the fastidious or pedantocratic school of government’.2 The curious feature of his pedantocracy is that it is most fastidious in that department, to which we naturally think of Plato himself as belonging – the department of literature. Plato would have rejected such a description of himself. He is a legislator rather than a man of letters; and as, in the tenth book of the Republic, he exalts the legislator above Homer, so, in the Laws, he enthrones the legislator and magistrate above the musician and poet. His zest for the righteousness of the law overpowers his own art, of which he was unconscious. A ‘converted poet’, he was ruthless to the class from which he came.
It would seem, from what has been said, that Plato condemns the youth of his State – so far, at any rate, as their studies lay in ‘music’ – to a desiccated curriculum. Nor is it unfair to accuse him, in his eagerness for stability and his anxiety to remove from the way of youth whatever might possibly offend or corrupt, of draining too dry those springs of initiative, and curtailing too narrowly that freedom of choice, which an educational system should guide but never wither. Perhaps it matters less in what we are educated, than what sort of mental energy we develop in the process; and the enthusiasm of youth for new modes, new authors, and new music is after all the generous enthusiasm of a growing mind. We, who are middle-aged or old, know that ‘among old poems there are many that are old and good’ (802 A); but each must find out the good for himself, and every young man will wish to make his own peculiar discovery. Life must be stable, but it must also grow; and it can only grow by breaking the old founts and cutting new types. Art may be a mode of social service, but it will cease to be art if it is scheduled too exactly to run in the obvious channels of social economy. Dance and song and music – poetry, drama, art – are no channeled waters; they arise, like Arethusa, from Acroceraunian mountains, and they make their own channels as they flow. There is, it is true, a luxurious, and exotic art of the coterie, an art which may be decadent and corrupting; but if it is evil it will be killed by the general taste – in which Plato disbelieved, and for which he sought to substitute State regulations – and it may be left to die.
THE STATE CONTROL OF EDUCATION
Plato made his choice, and his choice fell on State regulation. With many of his regulations we of this generation instinctively diagree;1 yet his general theory of education remains not only far in advance of the practice of his own times, but also, in some respects, ahead of our own. He assigns a higher place to education, and a greater position to its minister, than most modern States have succeeded in doing. The minister of education in his State is to be a man of fifty years of age, married, and a father of children, who is to be chosen from among the guardians of the law by an electoral body composed of all the magistrates. His office, as we have seen, is to be accounted the greatest of all offices; and the minister of education is to be the ‘prime minister’ of the State. This has a double reason. In the first place, he has charge of the children; and ‘the first shoot of everything in nature, if it makes a good start on the path towards its natural excellence, has most to do with the attainment of a proper consummation’ (765 E). In the second place, he has charge of education; and ’while man, if he enjoys a right education and a happy endowment, becomes most divine and civilized of all living things, he is the most savage of all the products of the earth if he is inadequately or improperly trained’ (766 A).
The functions of the minister of education are to direct administration and education in gymnasia and schools, to regulate attendance, and to supervise buildings (764 D). Directly under him come the judges, or, as we should say, examiners and inspectors (ảθλοθέται), who control competitive contests and award prizes, both in gymnastics and in music. The musical examiners, two in number, are to be elected in the general assembly by those interested in music, who are compelled to attend under the penalty of a fine; and they must possess some special knowledge of music. The three examiners in gymnastics, which all men are supposed to be able to judge, are chosen by a meeting of the general assembly, which members of the first three classes are compelled to attend, from the members of the second and third classes (765 A–C). While he thus takes pains to secure a proper minister of education and proper examiners and inspectors, Plato, in a way characteristically Greek, dismisses the teachers themselves in a single phrase. They are to be resident aliens; and they are to be paid (804 C–D). The citizen cannot be expected to do paid work, which would be degrading; nor can he, in any case, be expected to do such work as elementary teaching, which general Greek opinion placed in a still lower category, if that be possible, than general English opinion today. The status of the schoolmaster was apparently lower at Athens than that of the craftsman;1 but Plato’s attitude, if it is easily explained by contemporary facts, is not altogether worthy of Plato. It is one of the defects in Greek educational theory that it shows no appreciation of the function and importance of the teacher; it is one of the main differences in modern educational theory that it allows for the force of personal ‘suggestion’ in determining the growth of character, emphasizes the influence which the personality of the teacher can exercise, and recognizes the need for raising his status and improving his training.2
If his treatment of the teacher shows Plato limited by the prejudices of his age, he rises above contemporary prejudices in other ways. Athenian parents sent their children to different teachers for different subjects: Plato advocates a single school, in which teachers are provided for all subjects of instruction (804 D). He has little to say about the proposal; and yet it is one of profound importance. The single school, in which all subjects were taught together by a single staff, would vitalize teaching, correlate and systematize curricula, and bring its members under the influence of a common tone and tradition. Here, it has been said, Plato outlines in advance the grammar school of the Middle Ages:1 we may add that he prophesies from afar the public school of today – for his schools are to be linked with gymnasia and playing-fields. Another innovation which he suggests is no less important. Athenian parents were free to send their children to school, or to keep them from school, as they would: Plato advocates a system of universal compulsory education; ‘children belong to the State even more than to their parents’ (804 E). Again (and this is the most drastic of innovations), he would have girls educated equally with boys – not kept indoors, as they were at Athens, and trained into hot-house plants, but brought into the open air and the common life of the State. He does not, indeed, advocate coeducation; but he definitely advocates the training of both sexes on parallel lines alike in gymnastics and music.
PRIMARY EDUCATION IN THE LAWS
The scheme of primary education proposed in the Laws begins with the cradle. Children should be carried in arms by nurses until they are three years old. They will not grow straight if they are compelled to walk too soon; and unless they are carried about, and moved up and down (‘as if they were always at sea’), they will neither thrive in body, and be able to digest their food (789 D), nor acquire that quiet disposition of temper, and freedom from fits and starts of fear, which soothing motion gives (791 A). It is a mark of the growing child to shout and to jump: the shouting and jumping should be gradually trained, by the use of time and tune, into singing and dancing (664 E–665 A). Meanwhile, during these first three years, children should be neither indulged nor ‘hardened’: the right condition is the middle state, where neither everything is done to please the child, nor unnecessary rigours are used (792 C–D). After the age of three, self-will shows itself, and punishment may begin: games, too, are necessary, but children of this age have a natural way of amusing themselves, and they find games for themselves wherever they congregate (793 E–794 A).1 At this age children should be taken by their nurses to the village temples: the nurses should keep them in order while they play, and official matrons should keep the nurses in order, and maintain the proprieties generally.2 At the age of six the sexes are separated: henceforth boys are to associate with boys, and girls with girls (794 C). Studies are now begun, but only in the shape of physical drill. Boys are to be taught riding, archery, and the use of the sling: girls are to learn the same exercises. Plato emphasizes the military object of these exercises, and of gymnastics in general: ‘games’ are not to be pursued as an end in themselves, as but the means for the making of a better soldier and citizen.3 This is one reason why girls are to be trained as much as boys: women, in Plato’s State, as well as men, will one day fight for their country.
SECONDARY EDUCATION IN THE LAWS
The period of physical drill and development lasts till the age of ten. Whether it is to be accompanied by any training in music Plato does not explain; but it is reasonable to suppose that singing and dancing would be joined with the other physical exercises which he mentions. At the age of ten begins what may perhaps be called the secondary stage of education.4 Here the scene shifts from the child to the schoolboy – that ‘most unmanageable of all animals, who, just because he possesses (what other animals do not possess) a spring of thought, still turbid and unsettled, is full of wiles, full of sharpness, and very full of impertinence’ (808 D). He needs firm bits and bridles – a tutor, or παιδαγωγός, to escort him to school and watch his behaviour; teachers and studies to chasten him, ‘as freemen are chastened’; and Plato would even assign to any citizen the right to correct him (and his tutor and teacher too), ‘as men correct slaves’. He must be up and away to school by daybreak (most of us sleep too long, writes Plato, perhaps finding sleep less necessary in his old age): life is short, and a perfect, or even a satisfactory, education is a very long matter. This may seem strenuous, and likely to be unpopular with the ‘most unmanageable of all animals’; but Plato’s demands on the schoolboy are in practice not very heavy. He must study literature, and therefore learn to read and write: he must acquire some knowledge of the lyre: he must master ‘calculations’, which include the elements of arithmetic and geometry, so far as they are required for war and in household management and civic affairs, and the rudiments of astronomy, so far as they are needed for the understanding of the calendar (809 D).
This stage of education thus embraces three subjects – literature; music; and elementary mathematics. The study of literature is to last for the three years from ten to thirteen: the study of music is to begin at thirteen and to last till sixteen: Plato does not explain the age at which the study of elementary mathematics is to begin, but it ends, like the study of music, at the age of sixteen. The study of literature includes learning to read and write – the latter need not, however, be pushed to any painful reach of perfection – and the getting by heart of the classics of Greek literature. Here, we are told, educational practice varies: some would set boys to learn by heart whole poets: others, again, select a chrestomathy (810 E–811 A). Plato inclines to the latter practice: the poets (as has already been urged in the Rapublic) have not said all things well, and if this is the case, much study of poetry is a danger to the young. But besides poetry there is also prose. This is a difficult matter. There are many dangerous writings in prose – the writings, one may guess, of the scientists and the Sophists: historians are never mentioned by Plato. Ever prepared to exalt the legislator, Plato finds a ready remedy for the difficulty. The discourses contained in the Laws are of an admirable tendency: no better pattern could be set before the minister of education; and it will be well, therefore, if teachers are required to learn and approve these discourses, and any of a similar character, before they are admitted to the jus docendi, and if pupils, again, are required to learn them from their teachers (811 D–E). They will thus be trained in the laws themselves, as well as in the spirit of the Laws; and the way to that civic excellence which is the end of education will be patent and easy to tread.1
Music, so far as it enters into song and dance, has already been studied before the age of ten. At the age of thirteen begins the study of what may be called instrumental music. Plato does not explain whether boys (and girls) should be taught to play on the lyre, or only to learn its different notes, to tune it, and to follow the playing of others (812 D–E); but he is clear that the music they study should he simple, and should involve no complications, ‘when the strings give one set of notes, and the composer of the melody another’. What he is most concerned to urge, whether he is dealing with songs or with instrumental music, is that all musical compositions shall be morally suitable (812 C). Musical compositions are imitations (ὁμοιώματα), and what they imitate is the states or affections (παθήματα) of the soul. Now any musical imitation of an affection of the soul acts in turn on the soul of the hearer, and suggests to, or ‘charms into’, his soul a similar affection. If it be the copy of a noble affection of the soul, it challenges and invites the hearer to become like its own original, following, under the influence of the copy, to the acquisition of a true nobility (812 B).2 Music has a special efficacy in inducing such a sympathetic affection of the soul, because it is the finest of all the imitative arts – because the copies it produces are nearest to the original, and present the original with the most living truth; and because, again, it gives the greatest pleasure, and associating pleasure most closely with the original it copies disposes us most to like and to copy that original. There is no greater organ of habituation than music: there is no influence more potent in attuning men’s feelings of the spirit of the laws (659 D–E). But if it thus is the most live of all the currents of suggestion, it is most important that it should be controlled and made to convey the right suggestion. It must not be appraised by its asthetic quality – that is to say, by the pleasure which it gives; for pleasure is only an incident or concomitant of its action – it must be judged by the moral value of the original it copies and the moral effects which it therefore exercises. That is why the music to be taught in the State of the Laws must be such as a sound moral judgement approves (659 A); and it is for this reason that Plato would institute a body of judges over the age of fifty to judge the value of musical compositions, and would fix their types for ever according to the manner of Egypt.
When he begins to treat of mathematical studies in detail (817 E–822 B), Plato premises that they need not be rigorously pursued, except by a few – the young associates, as one may conjecture, of the nocturnal council. They must be pursued ‘so far as is necessary’; and this would appear, from what has been said before, to mean that they must be pursued so far as they are practically useful in war or for household management and civic affairs. But Plato – teacher of mathematics in the Academy, and prophet of number and its properties – could hardly be satisfied long with such a limitation. Egypt, he soon complains, puts Greece to shame. Egyptian children begin to learn mathematics as soon as they learn their ABC: they play ‘in numbers’, and carry mathematics into their games: their teachers free them early from that ignorance of geometry, which seems to be a natural property of the human mind, but is as ridiculous as it is disgraceful. Compared with the Egyptians, the Greeks hardly deserve the name of men: they have the stupidity of pigs (819 D). In geometry, for instance, they make the mistake of thinking that the three dimensions are always commensurable; they have no inkling of the problem of incommensurability. Here Plato seems to demand a degree of geometrical knowledge transcending the canon of practical utility; and he leaves that canon still further behind when he comes to treat of astronomy. He accuses the Greeks of libelling, in their ignorance, the great deities of Sun and Moon. They speak of them, and of other heavenly bodies, as planets or irregular wanderers: they fail to see that in spite of all their apparent irregularities they move in regular circular orbits (821 B, 822 A). TO Plato, who believed that the regular orbits of the heavenly bodies proclaimed the existence of a directing mind and proved the being of God, this was more than error, and more even than libel: it was blasphemy. True religion demands a study of true astronomy; and that study must be carried to the point where the student begins to see the ‘being and the operation of God’. ‘If it is true that the heavenly bodies really move in circular orbits, and this can be proved, astronomy must be learned so far as is necessary to the understanding of this truth’ (822 C). Thus in the issue Plato requires not only the knowledge of astronomy necessary for following the calendar, but also the knowledge necessary for grasping the basic truth of his religious creed.1
During the period in which the studies of literature, music, and mathematics are being pursued, we must presume that the gymnastic training, which began at the age of six and occupied, along with singing and dancing, the years between six and ten, is being steadily continued. Boys and girls are serving, during the years of secondary education, in what we may almost call an officers training corps: they are learning archery and slinging: they are taught the drill both of light and of heavy infantry: they are practised in manmuvres, marches, and camps (813 D–E). All this, we are told, may be classified as gymnastics; and since gymnastics is an essential part of education, we may say that military training is an essential part of Plato’s educational scheme. At the age of sixteen, except for those few who pursue the study of higher mathematics, education would seem to be completed: there is no indication, at any rate, of any further training. Yet it is not till the age of twenty-five that a young man may marry (772 E); and twenty-five is the earliest age at which a young man may begin to serve as an associate of the inspectors of the country in their peregrinations (760 C). Plato leaves a gap between the age of sixteen and that of twenty-five; and it is difficult to fill this gap, even if we assume that much of the system of military training may belong to this interval. It is particularly difficult to see why Plato fixes the age of the young associates of the rural inspectors as high as twenty-five. At Athens young men came of age (to the extent, at any rate, of being recognized as owners of property) at the age of eighteen; and for the next two years, under the name of Ephebi, they were put through a course of military training. We are dependent, for our knowledge of this training, on inscriptions and literary evidence belonging to the latter half of the fourth century, and posterior, therefore, to the age of Plato. We learn from this evidence that the Ephebi of each tribe, under the control of a disciplinary officer (σωϕρονιτής), served for their first year on garrison duty in the neighbourhood of Athens, and acted during their second year, under the name of Peripoli, as a moving patrol in Attica and along the frontiers of Attica. During the two years’ course the Ephebi of each tribe messed together: the disciplinary officer of each company received an allowance for each man under his command, and provided the necessary rations.1 There are obvious analogies between this system and the system of peregrinations of the rural inspectors and their associates which Plato suggests in the Laws (760 B–763 C). On Plato’s system each of the twelve tribes supplies a body of sixty young men as associates of the five rural inspectors to each tribe: the inspectors and their associates make a double patrol of the country in two successive years, staying for a month in each year in each of the tribal districts: they mess together, and wait on one another. The associates are under military discipline: leave of absence is difficult to obtain: absence without leave is a serious offence. The functions of the patrol are partly military, and partly civilian: they are to protect the frontiers by trenches and fortifications; to keep the roads in order, with a view to military requirements; to control the flow of water, and to devise proper methods of irrigation. The whole system is intended both to give the members of the patrol some knowledge of field service and of the military geography of their country, and to improve the face of the country itself by proper civil and military engineering. Its analogies with the Athenian system admit of different explanations. If the Athenian system, in the form which has been described, already existed in the days of Plato, he was copying that system in the Laws. If, on the other hand, that form only came into existence after his time, and if it represents an Anthenian revival some time after the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.), Athens was copying the system advocated by Plato, and one of his suggestions was realized in his own city within a few years of his death.1
The Athenian Ephebate passed ultimately into the University of Athens; but it would be difficult to describe the parallel institution in Plato’s Laws as a system of university education. The Laws describes primary and secondary education: it stops short of the final stage. It is true that at the end of the Laws, as we have already had reason to notice, Plato speaks of the subject of education as ‘raised afresh by the argument’. He has invented the nocturnal council: he has spoken of the studies which its members will need: it remains to give some account of those higher or university studies which will correspond to the programme of advanced studies set forth in the seventh book of the Republic. But the Laws was never finished, and that account was never given. We can compare the two dialogues only so far as they cover common ground, and so far as they are both concerned with the earlier stages of education. The Laws is much more detailed, and in many respects much more practical, than the Republic. Plato moves less in the domain of first principles: he has nothing to say of the Idea of the Good: he has much to say of the actual child. He is interested in its physiology and its psychology: he traces its growth from the infant to the schoolboy, and from the schoolboy to the young man. He goes deeply into the essence of music: he is interested in mathematics not as a propædeutic to Ideas, but in its practical application and its bearing on human life: he expounds a detailed system of regular military training. He pays good heed to the administration of education; and nothing in the Laws is more striking, or perhaps more valuable, than his advocacy of the organized school, his belief in compulsory education, and his plea for the education of girls.
The treatment of education in the Laws illustrates – what indeed the treatment of many other subjects in the Laws also shows – the fund of practical wisdom, the knowledge of actual life, and the command of detail, which Plato in his old age possessed. The study of the Laws is generally neglected in our English Universities. From a literary point of view the neglect is natural. The argument wanders: the exposition is diffuse: the Greek is often obscure. Yet if we look to the substance, we find a mellow wisdom, which often goes beyond the glowing ardours of the Republic; and among all the sands there are constant oases. Passage upon passage of profound insight alternates with aridity – none, perhaps, more sublime than those which occur in the tenth book; and in some of them, if not in all, there is beauty as well as power.1 Even the desert tracts are full of practical hints and suggestions; and those who have studied the Laws have seldom gone away empty-handed. Aristotle drew from it much of the substance of his Politics, and, most of all, the sketch of an ideal State and the theory of education contained in its last two books. The Utopia of More is based on the Laws as well as on the Republic. Many of the lessons which Rousseau essays to teach in the Contrat Social find their parallel, and probably their origin, in Plato’s Laws.2
NOTE
The Debt of Aristotle to the Laws
The general debt which the writer of the Politics owes to the writer of the Laws must strike every reader of both. Aristotle, who was born about 384 B.C., and came to Athens as a student about 367, must have come under Plato’s influence at the time of the composition of the Laws. The parallels between the Politics and the Laws are numerous. (1) Aristotle repeats Plato’s conception of the sovereignty of law, and his description of rulers as ‘guardians of the law’ and its ‘servants’ (Politics, III. 16, 5 4: 1287, a 21). (2) The famous passage in the Politics (I. 2, 8 14–16: 1253, a 25–39), in which Aristotle asserts that man without a State and its law is either a god or a beast, is singularly like a fine passage in the Laws (874 E–875 D: cf. 766 A), not only in thought but also in expression. It almost looks as if Aristotle was writing with the passage in the Laws before him. (3) In his description of the development of the State from the family, and of the patriarchal character of early States (Politics, I. 2, § 6–8: 1252, b 16–27), Aristotle follows the same line as Plato in Book III of the Laws (680 B–E); and he makes the same quotation from Homer about the Cyclopes as Plato. (4) He repeats Phto’s argument that war is for the sake of peace, and not (as it was made at Sparta) an end in itself (cf, Politics, VII. 2–3 with Laws, I. 626 A–630 C). (5) The emphasis laid by Aristotle on habituation, both in the Ethics and in the chapters of Book VII of the Politics which treat of education, finds its parallel in the second book of the Laws (653). (6) The theory of the mixed constitution, and the references to Sparta as a type of that constitution, are common to the Politics and the Laws. (7) Aristotle’s views about the importance of agriculture, and about retail trade and interest, in the first book of the Politics, are almost identical with those enunciated by Plato at the end of Book VIII and the beginning of Book XI of the Laws. Similarly a suggestion made in the Laws, that, with a view to the prevention of utduis, the rich should voluntarily share with the poor (v. 736 D–E), recurs in the Politics (VI. 5, § 10, 1320, b 7–11). (8) Finally, the parallels between Books VII and VIII of the Politics, in which Aristotle constructs his ideal State, and the corresponding passages of the Laws, are too numerous to be mentioned. It is curious, and suggestive, that when Aristotle depicts his best he should copy Plato’s second best. I have collected over a dozen instances, which include the following: (a) the discussion of the question whether the ideal State should be near the sea (VII. 6) is based upon the parallel passage in the Laws, at the beginning of the fourth book; (b) the provision that every citizen should have two lots, one near the city and one near the frontier (Laws, 745), while it is criticized in Book II of the Politics (10, § 15: 1265, b 24–6), is adopted in Book VII (10, § 11: 1330, a 14–18); (c) the description of the buildings and aspect of the city (VII. 12, § 2–3: 1330, a 24–30) tallies with the Laws (778); but Aristotle mentions (VII. 11, § 8–11: 1330, b 32–1331, a IO), and rejects, Plato’s proposal to dispense with any walls (Laws, 778–9); (d) in speaking of the country Aristotle reproduces (VII. 12, § 8, 1331, b 15–16) Plato’s proposal of ‘inspectors of the country’ (ảγρόνομοι) with guard-houses and common tables (Laws, 760–2); (e) the scheme of education in Book VII of the Politics is propounded with constant reference to the Laws; and just as Plato defends compulsory education on the ground that children belong to the State rather than to their parents (804 D), so Aristotle argues for common public education on the ground that no citizen belongs to himself, for all belong to the State (VIII. I, § 3–4; 1337, a 21–29); (f) finally – a striking instance – just as Plato (934–935) proceeds, after legislating against abusive language (κακηγορία), to discuss the advisability of admitting comedy into his State, so Aristotle, after making provisions against αἰσχρολογία, proceeds to treat of comedy (VII. 17, § 8–11: 1330, b 2–23).
The conclusion which follows is that while Aristotle, in the beginning of Book II of the Politics, criticizes both the Republic and the Laws (the former in greater, the latter in less detail), he was really much more interested in the Laws; and while he was largely indebted to the Laws for his general theory of politics, he was under the greatest debt to the Laws in his picture of an ideal State. If Aristotle wrote the Politics, and arranged the content under the categories and in the scheme of his own philosophy, Plato supplied a great part of the content. There is as little absolutely new in the Politics as there is in (let us say) Magna Carta. Neither is meant to be new: both are meant to codify previous development.
1 References to Egypt, especially in Plato’s later works, are constant; and they suggest that the tradition of his travels in Egypt is probably true. He admires Egyptian study of mathematics – the Greeks in comparison are swinish creatures: he admires Egyptian antiquity – (Timaeus, 22 B). At the same time he confesses that ‘there are poor things in Egypt’ (Laws, 654 B).
2 In 829 C–D Plato suggests a further restriction. He suggests that odes on famous men (such, for instance, as Tennyson’s Ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington) should only be composed (1) by men over the age of fifty, and (2) by those who have themselves done good and noble actions. Yet an ode by – let us say – Palmerston on the death of the Great Duke would not only have been worse poetry, but also less of a moral force, than Tennyson’s Ode. Plato forgets, and being a poet himself can afford to forget, the poet’s gift of sympathetic imagination.
1 The comic poet, or the satirist, who ridicules a citizen, incurs the penalty of exile. This would have excluded Aristophanes from Athens. (Plato allows, how ever, a fine of three minae as an alternative to exile. This might have reduced Aristophanes to beggary.)
2 Plato, with the Platonic quality of the man of letters, seeks to import into social and artistic life the beauty of order and the charm of regulation. Yet men of letters do not always regulate themselves, and they seldom love to be regulated by others.
1 One generation easily criticizes another; and Plato’s generation is twenty-three centuries removed from our own. By the end of this century our grandchildren may be living in a socialistic republic, and they may think very differently from us about Plato, and about all the past. In any case we must always remember that Plato wrote for his generation, and not for ours. The great State of today, where everything is in the mass, tends of its own weight to routine and uniformity. The small States of the Greek world might be readily upset by one eccentric citizen or one small innovation – the fifth book of Aristotle’s Politics is full of instances – and besides, they were the home of mercurial Greeks, ‘loving always some new thing’.
1 Freeman, Schools of Hellos, p. 81, quotes two passages – one from the De Corona (5 315)’ in which Demosthenes seeks to insult Aeschines by the taunt, ‘You taught reading and writing: I went to school’; and another from Lucian (Menippus vel Necyorn., § 17), who speaks of ‘beggars compelled by poverty either to sell kippers, or else to teach the elements of reading and writing’.
2 The only requirement which Plato makes of the teacher is that he should learn and approve the discourses contained in the Laws (811 D).
1 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, p. 311. Plato suggests three sets of schools and gymnasia in the centre of the city (parallel, one may imagine, to one another) and three sets of gymnasia and playing-fields suitable for riding and archery outside the city (804 B).
1 The regulation of games which Plato proposes is apparently for children of an older growth.
2 One may compare with this provision for the social intercourse of children Plato’s suggestion of regular meeting-places for young men and maidens (supra, pp. 380–1). In its way, again, it is the equivalent of the modern kindergarten.
3 If Plato emphasizes the military purpose of physical training that is not be cause he is a militarist (cf. supra, pp. 347–8). He is anxious that gymnastics should have a purpose, and be limited and controlled by that purpose, instead of being pursued (as it tended to be in Greece) to an excessive degree for itself.
4 The first stage, from six to ten, may be called primary, succeeding as it does to the kindergarten stage between the age of three and that of six. But though it may be called primary, we must remember that it does not include the three R’s. Plato, like Aristotle afterwards, protracts the period of simple physical training much longer than we do. In the same way we have to remember that the secondary stage, from ten to sixteen, in some ways corresponds to our primary stage; it includes the three R’s, with the addition of geometry, some astronomy, and music.
1 Freeman (Schools of Hellar, pp. 109, 212) notes that possibly the music-masters of Athens taught ‘the metrical version, set to music, of the Athenian laws, which was ascribed to Solon’, and quotes from Plato’s Protagoras (326 D) the statement that ‘when boys leave school, the city compels them to learn the laws’. Plato is perhaps thinking of the preambles rather than the laws themselves; and some of these are noble writing.
2 There are thus three stages or factors: (1) the original πάθημα: (2) the musical ὁμοίωμα; (3) the sympathetic πάθημα which this induces. The argument on music and its ethical character is expounded in Book II of the Laws (the ‘book of music’, as Book X is the ‘book of theology’), especially in 667–8. The Protagoras (and, of course, the Republic) expresses a similar view of the effects of music (326 A–B). It may be added that Plato’s theory of music, like much of his general theory of education, is adopted and adapted by Aristotle in the Politics (Book VIII).
1 This passage in the Laws (821 B–822 C) raised the interesting and vexed question whether Plato was a Copernican before Copernicus, and believed that the earth moved in a regular orbit round the sun. We are probably justified in holding that Plato believed in the motion of the earth: it is difficult to say whether he also believed that it moved round the sun. Aristarchus of Samos, in the next century, certainly held that view (cf. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, pp. 347–8; and Ritter’s Commentary, pp. 228–50).
1 The institution of the Ephebi is described by Bury, History of Greece, pp. 826–8, and by Freeman, Schools of Hellas, c. VII. It is worth remarking that of Plato, in the Republic, first sketched the curriculum of a university, it is the Athenian Ephebate, and not the Platonic Academy, which actually ‘gives birth to the first University’, when it passes from a military system into a system of university education (Freeman, op. cit., p. 220).
1 This is the view of Wilamowitz, Staat und Gesellschaft, p. 127: ‘After the disaster of Chaeronea, with an obvious reference to Plato’s Laws, Athens attempted to bring its youth under discipline by a strict course of two years’ military service’ (cf. also Aristoteles und Athen, I., 191 sqq.). Bury adopts the same view. It is only fair to add that so far as Plato’s own references go, they are to Sparta and not to Athens. He describes the rural inspectors and their associates as κρνπτοί (though, he adds, the name hardly matters – 763 B); and this suggests the Spartan κρνπτοί who between the age of eighteen and twenty policed the country of Sparta and kept watch over the Helots (cf. Laws, 633 C).
1 A chrestomathy of Plato would include many of these passages – e.g. 875 (on law): 889–90 (on law and nature): 903–5 (‘All the world’s a scheme’).
2 The debt of More and of Rousseau to the Laws is discussed in the Appendix.