Chapter 4. Plato And Socrates

________________________________________________
_ "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting a knot; for Plato speaks to us indirectly only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the Platonic Socrates, a figure most ambiguously compacted of the real Socrates and Plato himself; a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps have been fancied, or, so to speak, an idolon theatri--Plato's self, but presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a kind of stage disguise. So we might fancy but for certain independent information we possess about Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the Memorabilia of Xenophon.

The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world. From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master, Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a god within. By a mind, of the compass Plato himself supposes, two quite different impressions may well have been made on two typically different observers. The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy, vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult and extraordinary thoughts. In the absence, then, of a single written word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic Dialogues credit him. It is a problem about which probably no reader of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:--how much precisely he must deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of defining to himself the Socrates of fact.

In Plato's own writing about Socrates there is, however, a difference. The Apology, marked as being the single writing from Plato's hand not in dialogue form, we may naturally take for a sincere version of the actual words of Socrates; closer to them, we may think, than the Greek record of spoken words however important, the speeches in Thucydides, for instance, by the admission of Thucydides himself, was wont to be. And this assumption is supported by internal evidence. In that unadorned language, in those harsh grammatic (or rather quite ungrammatic) constructions we have surely the natural accent of one speaking under strong excitement. We might think, again, that the Phaedo, purporting to record his subsequent discourse, is really no more than such a record, but for a lurking suspicion, which hangs by the fact that Plato, noted as an assistant at the trial, is expressly stated by one of the speakers in the Dialogue to have been absent from the dying scene of Socrates. That speaker however was himself perhaps the veracious reporter of those last words and acts; for there are details in the Phaedo too pedestrian and common-place to be taken for things of mere literary invention: the rubbing of the legs, for instance, now released from the chain; the rather [78] uneasy determination to be indifferent; the somewhat harsh committal of the crudely lamenting wife and his child "to any one who will take the trouble"--details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared.

We shall be justified then, in the effort to give reality or truth to our mental picture of Socrates, if we follow the lead of his own supposed retrospect of his career in the Apology, as completed, and explained to wholly sympathetic spirits, by the more intimate discourses of the Phaedo.

He pleads to be excused if in making his defence he speaks after his accustomed manner: not merely in home-spun phrase, that is to say, very different from what is usually heard at least in those sophisticated law-courts of Athens, nor merely with certain lapsing into his familiar habit of dialogue, but with a tacit assumption, throughout his arguments, of that logical realism which suggested the first outline of Plato's doctrine of the "ideas." Everywhere, with what is like a physical passion for what is, what is true--as one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and meant us to know--he is driving earnestly, yet with method, at those universal conceptions or definitions which serve to establish [79] firmly the distinction, attained by so much intellectual labour, between what is absolute and abiding, of veritable import therefore to our reason, to the divine reason really resident in each one of us, resident in, yet separable from, these our houses of clay--between that, and what is only phenomenal and transitory, as being essentially implicate with them. He achieved this end, as we learn from Aristotle, this power, literally, of "a criticism of life," by induction (epagoge)+ by that careful process of enquiry into the facts of the matter concerned, one by one (facts most often of conscience, of moral action as conditioned by motive, and result, and the varying degrees of inward light upon it) for which the fitting method is informal though not unmethodical question and answer, face to face with average mankind, as in those famous Socratic conversations, which again are the first rough natural growth of Plato's so artistic written Dialogues. The exclusive preoccupation of Socrates with practical matter therein, his anxious fixing of the sense of such familiar terms as just and good, for instance, was part of that humble bearing of himself by which he was to authenticate a claim to superior wisdom, forced upon him by nothing less than divine authority, while there was something also in it of a natural reaction against the intellectual ambition of his youth. He had gone to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the [80] Phaedo, in his last discourse, to a physical philosopher, then of great repute, but to his own great disappointment.--

In my youth he says I had a wonderful desire for the wisdom which people call natural science--peri physeos historian.+ It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every matter: how it comes to be; ceases to be; why it is. I lost my sight in this enquiry to the degree of un-learning what I had hitherto seemed to myself and others to know clearly enough. But having heard one reading from a book written, as he said, by Anaxagoras, which said that it is Reason that arranges and is the cause of all things, I was delighted with this cause; and thought to myself, if this be so, then it does with each what may be best for it. Thus considering, it was with joy I fancied I had found me a teacher about the cause--Anaxagoras: that he would show me for instance, first, whether the earth was round or flat; and then that it was best for it to be so: and if he made these points clear I was prepared to ask for no other sort of causes. Phaedo, 96.

Well! Socrates proceeds to the great natural philosopher, and is immensely discouraged to find him after all making very little use of Reason in his explanation why natural things are thus and not otherwise; explaining everything, rather, by secondary and mechanical causes. "It was as if," he concludes, "some one had undertaken to prove that Socrates does everything through Reason; and had gone on to show that it was because my body is constructed in a certain way, of certain bones and muscles, that Socrates is now sitting here in the prison, voluntarily awaiting death."

The disappointment of Socrates with the [81] spirit in which Anaxagoras actually handled and applied that so welcome sapiential proposition that Reason panta diakosmei, kai panton aitios estin +--arranges and is the cause of all things--is but an example of what often happens when men seek an a posteriori justification of their instinctive prepossessions. Once for all he turns from useless, perhaps impious, enquiries, into the material structure of the stars above him, or the earth beneath his feet, from all physical enquiry into material things, to the direct knowledge of man the cosmical order in man, as it may be found by any one who, in good faith with himself, and with devout attention, looks within. In this precise sense it was that, according to the old saying, Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. Montaigne, the great humanist, expands it.--"'Twas he who brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies. He has done human nature a great service," he adds, "in showing it how much it can do of itself." And a singular incident gave that piercing study, that relentless exposure, of himself, and of others, for the most part so unwelcome to them, a religious or mystic character. He has a "vocation" thus to proceed, has been literally "called," as he understands, by the central religious authority of Greece. His seemingly invidious testing of men's pretensions [82] to know, is a sacred service to the God of Delphi, which he dares not neglect. And his fidelity herein had in turn the effect of reinforcing for him, and bringing to a focus, all the other rays of religious light cast at random in the world about him, or in himself.

"You know Chaerephon," he says, "his eagerness about any matter he takes up. Well! once upon a time he went to Delphi, and ventured to ask of the oracle whether any man living was wiser than I; and, amazing as it seems, the Pythia answered that there was no one wiser than I." Socrates must go in order, then, to every class of persons pre-eminent for knowledge; to every one who seems to know more than he. He found them--the Athenian poets, for instance, the potters who made the vases we admire, undeniably in possession of much delightful knowledge unattained by him. But one and all they were ignorant of the limitations of their knowledge; and at last he concludes that the oracle had but meant to say: "He indeed is the wisest of all men who like Socrates is aware that he is really worth little or nothing in respect of knowledge." Such consciousness of ignorance was the proper wisdom of man.

That can scarcely be a fiction. His wholesome appeal then, everywhere, from what seems, to what really is, is a service to the Delphic god, the god of sanity. To prove that the oracle had [83] been right after all, improbable as it seemed, in the signal honour it had put upon him, would be henceforward his proper business. Committing him to a sort of ironical humility towards others, at times seemingly petty and prosaic, certainly very irritating, in regard to himself, in its source and motive, his business in life as he conceived it was nothing less than a divine possession. He becomes therefore literally an enthusiast for knowledge, for the knowledge of man; such knowledge as by a right method of questioning, of self-questioning (the master's questioning being after all only a kind of mid-wife's assistance, according to his own homely figure) may be brought to birth in every human soul, concerning itself and its experience; what is real, and stable, in its apprehensions of Piety, Beauty, Justice, and the like, what is of dynamic quality in them, as conveying force into what one does or creates, building character, generating virtue. Auto kath' hauto zetein ti pot' estin arete+--to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by itself--there's the task. And when we have found that, we shall know already, or easily get to know, everything else about and about it: "how we are to come by virtue," for instance.

Well! largely by knowing, says naturally the enthusiast for knowledge. There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend--Meden estin agathon ho ouk episteme periechei +--a strenuously [84] ascertained knowledge however, painfully adjusted to other forms of knowledge which may seem inconsistent with it, and impenetrably distinct from any kind of complaisant or only half-attentive conjecture. "One and the same species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic"*: it will be all this--the Virtue, for instance, which we must seek, as a hunter his sustenance, seek and find and never lose again, through a survey of all the many variable and merely relative virtues, which are but relative, that is to say, "to every several act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us"--kath' hekasten ton praxeon, kai ton helikion pros hekaston ergon, hekasto hemon --+ "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know what sort of a thing it is"--ho me oida ti esti, pos an hopoion ge ti eideien;+ what its poiotetes,+ its qualities, are? "Do you suppose that one who does not know Meno, for example, at all, who he is, can know whether he is fair and rich and well-born, or the reverse of all that?" Yes! already for Socrates, we might say, to know what justice or Piety or Beauty really is, will be like the knowledge of a person; only that, as Aristotle carefully notes, his scrupulous habit of search for universal, or catholic, definitions (kath' holou)+ was after all but [85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts. Strange! out of the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the mystic intellectualism of Plato--Platonism, with all its hazardous flights of soul.

A rich contributor to the philosophic consciousness of Plato, Socrates was perhaps of larger influence still on the religious soul in him. As Plato accepted from the masters of Elea the theoretic principles of all natural religion--the principles of a reasonable monotheism, so from Socrates he derived its indispensable morality. It was Socrates who first of pagans comprised in one clear consciousness the authentic rudiments of such natural religion, and gave them clear utterance. Through him, Parmenides had conveyed to Plato the notion of a "Perfect Being," to brace and satisfy the abstracting intellect; but it was from Socrates himself Plato had learned those correspondent practical pieties, which tranquillise and re-assure the soul, together with the genial hopes which cheer the great teacher on the day of his death.

Loyal to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religion of many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through it to one unmistakable person, of perfect intelligence, power and goodness, who takes note [86] of him. In the course of his seventy years he has adjusted that thought of the invisible to the general facts and to many of the subtler complexities of man's experience in the world of sight. Sitivit anima mea, the Athenian philosopher might say, in Deum, in Deum vivum, as he was known at Sion. He has at least measured devoutly the place, this way and that, which a religion of infallible authority must fill; has already by implication concurred in it; and in fact has his reward at this depressing hour, as the action of the poison mounts slowly to the centre of his material existence. He is more than ready to depart to what before one has really crossed their threshold must necessarily seem the cold and empty spaces of the world no bodily eye can ever look on.

But, he is asked, if the prospect be indeed so cheerful, at all events for the just, why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self-destruction?--Tois anthropois, me hosion einai, autous heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergeten.+ His consistent piety straightway suggests the solution of that paradox: we are the property, slaves, of the gods. Now no slave has any sort of right to destroy himself; to take a life that does not really belong to him. Comfort himself and his friends, however, as he may, it does tax all his resources of moral and physical courage to do what is at last required of him: and it was something quite new, unseen [87] before in Greece, inspiring a new note in literature--this attitude of Socrates in the condemned cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction, multitudes, of a wisdom and piety, after all, so different from his, have ever since assisted so admiringly, this anticipation of the Christian way of dying for an opinion, when, as Plato says simply, he consumed the poison in the prison--to pharmakon epien en to desmoterio.+ It was amid larger consolations, we must admit, that Christian heroes did that kind of thing. But bravery, you need hardly be reminded, was ever one of the specially characteristic virtues of the pagan world-- loyalty even unto death. It had been loyalty however hitherto to one's country, one's home in the world, one's visible companions; not to a wholly invisible claimant, in this way, upon one, upon one's self.

Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose, had been, as Alcibiades suggested, by natural constitution a twofold power, an embodied paradox. The infinitely significant Socrates of Plato, and the quite simple Socrates of Xenophon, may have been indeed the not incompatible oppositions of a nature, from the influence of which, as a matter of fact, there emerged on one hand the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic School, embodying respectively those opposed austerities and amenities of character, which, according to the temper of this or that disciple, had seemed to predominate in their common master. And so the courage which declined to act as almost [88] any one else would have acted in that matter of the legal appeal which might have mitigated the penalty of death, bringing to its appropriate end a life whose main power had been an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in Socrates, paradoxically, with a genuine diffidence about his own convictions which explains some peculiarities in his manner of teaching. The irony, the humour, for which he was famous--the unfailing humour which some have found in his very last words--were not merely spontaneous personal traits, or tricks of manner; but an essential part of the dialectical apparatus, as affording a means of escape from responsibility, convenient for one who has scruples about the fitness of his own thoughts for the reception of another, doubts as to the power of words to convey thoughts, such as he thinks cannot after all be properly conveyed to another, but only awakened, or brought to birth in him, out of himself,--who can tell with what distortions in that secret place? For we judge truth not by the intellect exclusively, and on reasons that can be adequately embodied in propositions; but with the whole complex man. Observant therefore of the capricious results of mere teaching, to the last he protests, dissemblingly, and with that irony which is really one phase of the Socratic humour, that in his peculiar function there have been in very deed neither teacher nor learners.

[89] The voice, the sign from heaven, that "new deity" he was accused of fabricating (his singularly profound sense of a mental phenomenon which is probably not uncommon) held perhaps of the same characteristic habit of mind. It was neither the playful pretence which some have supposed; nor yet an insoluble mystery; but only what happens naturally to a really diffident spirit in great and still more in small matters which at this or that taxing moment seem to usurp the determination of great issues. Such a spirit may find itself beset by an inexplicable reluctance to do what would be most natural in the given circumstances. And for a religious nature, apt to trace the divine assistance everywhere, it was as if, in those perilous moments--well! as if one's guardian angel held one back. A quite natural experience took the supernatural hue of religion; which, however, as being concerned now and then with some circumstance in itself trifling, might seem to lapse at times into superstition.

And as he was thus essentially twofold in character, so Socrates had to contend against two classes of enemies. "An offence" to the whole tribe of Sophists, he was hated also by those who hated them, by the good old men of Athens, whose conservatism finds its representative in Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic challenge of first principles, in that ceaseless testing of the origin and claims of what all [90] honest people might seem to take for granted, only a further development of the pernicious function of the Sophists themselves, by the most subtly influential of them all. If in the Apology he proves that the fathers of sons had no proper locus standi against him, still, in the actual conduct of his defence, as often in Plato's Dialogues, there is (the candid reader cannot but admit it) something of sophistry, of the casuist. Claiming to be but a simple argument, the Apology of Socrates moves sometimes circuitously, after the manner of one who really has to make the worse appear the better reason (ton hetto logon kreitto poiein)+ and must needs use a certain kind of artificial, or ingenious, or ad captandum arguments, such as would best have been learned in the sophistic school. Those young Athenians whom he was thought to have corrupted of set purpose, he had not only admired but really loved and understood; and as a consequence had longed to do them real good, chiefly by giving them that interest in themselves which is the first condition of any real power over others. To make Meno, Polus, Charmides, really interested in himself, to help him to the discovery of that wonderful new world here at home--in this effort, even more than in making them interested in other people and things, lay and still lies (it is no sophistical paradox!) the central business of education. Only, the very thoroughness of the sort of self-knowledge he [91] promoted had in it something sacramental, so to speak; if it did not do them good, must do them considerable harm; could not leave them just as they were. He had not been able in all cases to expand "the better self," as people say, in those he influenced. Some of them had really become very insolent questioners of others, as also of a wholly legitimate authority within themselves; and had but passed from bad to worse. That fatal necessity had been involved of coming to years of discretion. His claim to have been no teacher at all, to be irresponsible in regard to those who had in truth been his very willing disciples, was but humorous or ironical; and as a consequence there was after all a sort of historic justice in his death.

The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that super- ficial sense of the word according to which every misfortune is called 'tragic.' In the latter sense, one might say of Socrates that because he was condemned to death unjustly his fate was tragic. But in truth innocent suffering of that sort is merely pathetic, not tragic; inasmuch as it is not within the sphere of reason. Now suffering--misfortune--comes within the sphere of reason, only if it is brought about by the free- will of the subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable; as must be also the power against which that subject proceeds. This power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of a tyrant; because it is only in such case that the man is himself, so to speak, guilty of his misfortune. In genuine tragedy, then, they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which, from this side and from that, come into collision; and such was the fate of Socrates. His fate therefore is not merely personal, and as it were part of the romance of an individual: [92] it is the general fate, in all its tragedy--the tragedy of Athens, of Greece, which is therein carried out. Two opposed Rights come forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the one towards the other: not as if this were right; that other wrong. On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious moral habit: the other principle, over against it, is the equally religious claim--the claim of the consciousness, of the reason, creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The latter remains the common principle of philosophy for all time to come. And these are the two principles which come forth over against each other, in the life and in the philosophy of Socrates. Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.

"I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander," says Montaigne, again, "but Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot"; and we may take that as typical of the immense credit of Socrates, even with a vast number of people who have not really known much about him. "For the sake of no long period of years," says Socrates himself, now condemned to death--the few years for which a man of seventy is likely to remain here--

You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to reproach from those who desire to malign the city of Athens--that ye put Socrates to death, a wise man. For in very truth they will declare me to have been wise--those who wish to discredit you-- even though I be not. Now had you waited a little while this thing would have happened for you in the course of nature. For ye see my estate: that it is now far onward on the road of life, hard by death. Apology, 38.

Plato, though present at the trial, was absent when Socrates "consumed the poison in the [93] prison." Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells us in the Phaedo, Plato would however almost certainly have heard from him, or from some other of that band of disciples who assisted at the last utterances of their master, the sincerest possible account of all that was then said and done. Socrates had used the brief space which elapsed before the officers removed him to the place, "whither he must go, to die" (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ to discourse with those who still lingered in the court precisely on what are called "The four last things." Arrived at the prison a further delay awaited him, in consequence (it was so characteristic of the Athenian people!) of a religious scruple. The ship of sacred annual embassy to Apollo at Delos was not yet returned to Athens; and the consequent interval of time might not be profaned by the death of a criminal. Socrates himself certainly occupies it religiously enough by a continuation of his accustomed discourses, touched now with the deepening solemnity of the moment.

The Phaedo of Plato has impressed most readers as a veritable record of those last discourses of Socrates; while in the details of what then happened, the somewhat prosaic account there given of the way in which the work of death was done, we find what there would have been no literary satisfaction in inventing; his indifferent treatment, for instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in violent [94] distress--treatment in marked contrast, it must be observed again, with the dignified tenderness of a later scene, as recorded in the Gospels.

An inventor, with mere literary effect in view, at this and other points would have invented differently. "The prison," says Cebes, the chief disciple in the Phaedo, "was not far from the court-house; and there we were used to wait every day till we might be admitted to our master. One morning we were assembled earlier than usual; for on the evening before we heard that the ship was returned from Delos. The porter coming out bade us tarry till he should call us. For, he said, the Eleven are now freeing Socrates from his bonds, announcing to him that he must die to-day."

They were very young men, we are told, who were with Socrates, and how sweetly, kindly, approvingly, he listened to their so youthfully sanguine discussion on the immortality of the soul. For their sakes rather than his own he is ready to treat further, by way of a posteriori arguments, a belief which in himself is matter of invincible natural prepossession. In the court he had pleaded at the most for suspended judgment on that question:--"If I claimed on any point to be wiser than any one else it would be in this, that having no adequate knowledge of things in Hades so I do not fancy I know." But, in the privacy of these last hours, he is confident in his utterance on the [95] subject which is so much in the minds of the youths around him; his arguments like theirs being in fact very much of the nature of the things poets write (poiemata)+ or almost like those medicinable fictions (pseude en pharmakou eidei)+ such as are of legitimate use by the expert. That the soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought!) is a harmony; that there are reasons why this particular harmony should not cease, like that of the lyre or the harp, with the destruction of the instrument which produced it; why this sort of flame should not go out with the upsetting of the lamp:--such are the arguments, sometimes little better than verbal ones, which pass this way and that around the death-bed of Socrates, as they still occur to men's minds. For himself, whichever way they tend, they come and go harmlessly, about an immovable personal conviction, which, as he says, "came to me apart from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness": (Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeos, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias).+ The formula of probability could not have been more aptly put. It is one of those convictions which await, it may be, stronger, better, arguments than are forthcoming; but will wait for them with unfailing patience.--"The soul therefore Cebes," since such provisional arguments must be allowed to pass, "is something sturdy and strong (ischuron ti estin)+ imperishable by accident or wear; and we shall really exist in Hades." Indulging a little [96] further the "poetry turned logic" of those youthful assistants, Socrates too, even Socrates, who had always turned away so persistently from what he thought the vanity of the eye, just before the bodily eye finally closes, and his last moment being now at hand, ascends to, or declines upon, the fancy of a quite visible paradise awaiting him.--

It is said that the world, if one gaze down on it from above, is to look on like those leathern balls of twelve pieces, variegated in divers colours, of which the colours here--those our painters use--are as it were samples. There, the whole world is formed of such, and far brighter and purer than they; part sea-purple of a wonderful beauty; a part like gold; a part whiter than alabaster or snow; aye, composed thus of other colours also of like quality, of greater loveliness than ours-- colours we have never seen. For even those hollows in it, being filled with air and water, present a certain species of colour gleaming amid the diversity of the others; so that it presents one continuous aspect of varied hues. Thus it is: and conform- ably tree and flower and fruit are put forth and grow. The mountains again and the rocks, after the same manner, have a smoothness and transparency and colours lovelier than here. The tiny precious stones we prize so greatly are but morsels of them--sards and jasper and emerald and the rest. No baser kind of thing is to be found in that world, but finer rather. The cause of which is that the rocks there are pure, not gnawed away and corrupted like ours by rot and brine, through the moistures which drain together here, bringing disease and deformity to rocks and earth as well as to living things. There are many living creatures in the land besides men and women, some abiding inland, and some on the coasts of the air, as we by the sea, others in the islands amidst its waves; for, in a word, what the water of the sea is to us for our uses, that the air is to them. The blending of the seasons there is such that they have no sickness and come to years more numerous far than ours: while [97] for sight and scent and hearing and the like they stand as far from us, as air from water, in respect of purity, and the aether from air. There are thrones moreover and temples of the gods among them, wherein in very deed the gods abide; voices and oracles and sensible apprehensions of them; and occasions of intercourse with their very selves. The sun, the moon and the stars they see as they really are; and are blessed in all other matters agreeably thereto. Phaedo, 110.

The great assertor of the abstract, the impalpable, the unseen, at any cost, shows there a mastery of visual expression equal to that of his greatest disciple.--Ah, good master! was the eye so contemptible an organ of knowledge after all?

Plato was then about twenty-eight years old; a rich young man, rich also in intellectual gifts; and what he saw and heard from and about Socrates afforded the correction his opulent genius needed, and made him the most serious of writers. In many things he was as unlike as possible to the teacher--rude and rough as some failure of his own old sculptor's workshop--who might seem in his own person to have broken up the harmonious grace of the Greek type, and carried people one step into a world already in reaction against the easy Attic temper, a world in which it might be necessary to go far below the surface for the beauty of which those homely lips had discoursed so much. Perhaps he acted all the more surely as a corrective force on Plato, henceforward an opponent of the [98] obviously successful mental habits of the day, with an unworldliness which, a personal trait in Plato himself there acquired, will ever be of the very essence of Platonism.--"Many are called, but few chosen": Narthekophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi.+ He will have, as readers of The Republic know, a hundred precepts of self-repression for others--the self-repression of every really tuneable member of a chorus; and he begins by almost effacing himself. All that is best and largest in his own matured genius he identifies with his master; and when we speak of Plato generally what we are really thinking of is the Platonic Socrates.

 

NOTES

79. +Transliteration: epagoge. Liddell and Scott definition: "a bringing on, to, or in . . . argument from induction."

80. +Transliteration: peri physeos historian. E-text editor's translation: "inquiry into nature." Plato, Phaedo 96a.

81. +Transliteration: panta diakosmei, kai panton aitios estin. Pater's translation: "arranges and is the cause of all things." Plato, Phaedo 97c, offers a close paraphrase of Anaxagoras' saying.

83. +Transliteration: Auto kath' hauto zetein ti pot' estin arete. Pater's translation: "to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by itself." Plato, Meno 100b.

83. +Transliteration: Meden estin agathon ho ouk episteme periechei. Pater's translation: "There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend." Plato, Meno 87d.

84. *Tauton pantachou eidos--holon kai hygies--hen kata panton, dia panton, epi pasi-kath' holou. Pater's translation: "One and the same species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic." Perhaps Pater is combining phrases here; only the first phrase was locatable. Plato, Meno 72d.

84. +Transliteration: kath' hekasten ton praxeon, kai ton helikion pros hekaston ergon, hekasto hemon. Pater's translation: "to every several act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us." Plato, Meno 72a.

84. +Transliteration: ho me oida ti esti, pos an hopoion ge ti eideien. Pater's translation: "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know what sort of a thing it is." Plato, Meno 71b.

84. +Transliteration: poiotetes. Pater's translation: "qualities."

84. +Transliteration: kath' holou. Pater's translation: "universal, or catholic, definitions;" the phrase might be translated, "in accordance with the whole."

86. +Transliteration: Tois anthropois, me hosion einai, autous heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergeten. Pater's translation: "why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self- destruction." Plato, Phaedo 62a.

87. +Transliteration: to pharmakon epien en to desmoterio. Pater's translation: "he consumed the poison in the prison." Plato, Phaedo 57a.

90. +Transliteration: ton hetto logon kreitto poiein. Pater's translation: "to make the worse appear the better reason." Plato, Apology 23d.

93. +Transliteration: hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai. Pater's translation: "whither he must go, to die." The pronoun should be first person--"whither I must go." Plato, Apology 39e.

95. +Transliteration: poiemata. Liddell and Scott definition: "anything made or done . . . a poetical work."

95. +Transliteration: pseude en pharmakou eidei. Pater's translation: "medicinable fictions." Plato, Republic 389b contains a similar phrase.

95. +Transliteration: Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeos, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias. Pater's translation: "came to me apart from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness." Plato, Phaedo 92c.

95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin. Pater's translation: "is something sturdy and strong." Plato, Phaedo 95c.

98. +Transliteration: Narthekophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi. Pater's translation: "Many are called, but few chosen." Plato, Phaedo, 69c. _

Read next: Chapter 5. Plato And The Sophists

Read previous: Chapter 3. Plato And The Doctrine Of Number

Table of content of Plato and Platonism


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book