Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Gorgias by Plato Translated by Benjamin Jowett
INTRODUCTION In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts
have arisen among his interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them
is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe rules of
art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with one of the dramatis personae
in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular
of the dialogues there is also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning is not forgotten
at the end, and numerous allusions and references are interspersed, which form the loose connecting
links of the whole. We must not neglect this unity, but neither must we attempt to confine
the Platonic dialogue on the Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare Introduction to
the Phaedrus.) Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters
of Plato in this matter. First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one
another by the slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory
assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle of Schleiermacher has descended
upon his successors, who have applied his method with the most various results. The
value and use of the method has been hardly, if at all, examined either by him or them.
Secondly, they have extended almost indefinitely the scope of each separate dialogue; in this
way they think that they have escaped all difficulties, not seeing that what they have
gained in generality they have lost in truth and distinctness. Metaphysical conceptions
easily pass into one another; and the simpler notions of antiquity, which we can only realize
by an effort, imperceptibly blend with the more familiar theories of modern philosophers.
An eye for proportion is needed (his own art of measuring) in the study of Plato, as well
as of other great artists. We may hardly admit that the moral antithesis of good and pleasure,
or the intellectual antithesis of knowledge and opinion, being and appearance, are never
far off in a Platonic discussion. But because they are in the background, we should not
bring them into the foreground, or expect to discern them equally in all the dialogues.
There may be some advantage in drawing out a little the main outlines of the building;
but the use of this is limited, and may be easily exaggerated. We may give Plato too
much system, and alter the natural form and connection of his thoughts. Under the idea
that his dialogues are finished works of art, we may find a reason for everything, and lose
the highest characteristic of art, which is simplicity. Most great works receive a new
light from a new and original mind. But whether these new lights are true or only suggestive,
will depend on their agreement with the spirit of Plato, and the amount of direct evidence
which can be urged in support of them. When a theory is running away with us, criticism
does a friendly office in counselling moderation, and recalling us to the indications of the
text. Like the Phaedrus, the Gorgias has puzzled
students of Plato by the appearance of two or more subjects. Under the cover of rhetoric
higher themes are introduced; the argument expands into a general view of the good and
evil of man. After making an ineffectual attempt to obtain a sound definition of his art from
Gorgias, Socrates assumes the existence of a universal art of flattery or simulation
having several branches:—this is the genus of which rhetoric is only one, and not the
highest species. To flattery is opposed the true and noble art of life which he who possesses
seeks always to impart to others, and which at last triumphs, if not here, at any rate
in another world. These two aspects of life and knowledge appear to be the two leading
ideas of the dialogue. The true and the false in individuals and states, in the treatment
of the soul as well as of the body, are conceived under the forms of true and false art. In
the development of this opposition there arise various other questions, such as the two famous
paradoxes of Socrates (paradoxes as they are to the world in general, ideals as they may
be more worthily called): (1) that to do is worse than to suffer evil; and (2) that when
a man has done evil he had better be punished than unpunished; to which may be added (3)
a third Socratic paradox or ideal, that bad men do what they think best, but not what
they desire, for the desire of all is towards the good. That pleasure is to be distinguished
from good is proved by the simultaneousness of pleasure and pain, and by the possibility
of the bad having in certain cases pleasures as great as those of the good, or even greater.
Not merely rhetoricians, but poets, musicians, and other artists, the whole tribe of statesmen,
past as well as present, are included in the class of flatterers. The true and false finally
appear before the judgment-seat of the gods below.
The dialogue naturally falls into three divisions, to which the three characters of Gorgias,
Polus, and Callicles respectively correspond; and the form and manner change with the stages
of the argument. Socrates is deferential towards Gorgias, playful and yet cutting in dealing
with the youthful Polus, ironical and sarcastic in his encounter with Callicles. In the first
division the question is asked—What is rhetoric? To this there is no answer given, for Gorgias
is soon made to contradict himself by Socrates, and the argument is transferred to the hands
of his disciple Polus, who rushes to the defence of his master. The answer has at last to be
given by Socrates himself, but before he can even explain his meaning to Polus, he must
enlighten him upon the great subject of shams or flatteries. When Polus finds his favourite
art reduced to the level of cookery, he replies that at any rate rhetoricians, like despots,
have great power. Socrates denies that they have any real power, and hence arise the three
paradoxes already mentioned. Although they are strange to him, Polus is at last convinced
of their truth; at least, they seem to him to follow legitimately from the premises.
Thus the second act of the dialogue closes. Then Callicles appears on the scene, at first
maintaining that pleasure is good, and that might is right, and that law is nothing but
the combination of the many weak against the few strong. When he is confuted he withdraws
from the argument, and leaves Socrates to arrive at the conclusion by himself. The conclusion
is that there are two kinds of statesmanship, a higher and a lower—that which makes the
people better, and that which only flatters them, and he exhorts Callicles to choose the
higher. The dialogue terminates with a mythus of a final judgment, in which there will be
no more flattery or disguise, and no further use for the teaching of rhetoric.
The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts which are assigned
to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced in years, who goes from city
to city displaying his talents, and is celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in
the dialogues of Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain dignity, and is
treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is no match for him in dialectics.
Although he has been teaching rhetoric all his life, he is still incapable of defining
his own art. When his ideas begin to clear up, he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric
can be wholly separated from justice and injustice, and this lingering sentiment of morality,
or regard for public opinion, enables Socrates to detect him in a contradiction. Like Protagoras,
he is described as of a generous nature; he expresses his approbation of Socrates' manner
of approaching a question; he is quite 'one of Socrates' sort, ready to be refuted as
well as to refute,' and very eager that Callicles and Socrates should have the game out. He
knows by experience that rhetoric exercises great influence over other men, but he is
unable to explain the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know nothing.
Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes him, who wanted originally
to have taken the place of Gorgias under the pretext that the old man was tired, and now
avails himself of the earliest opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author
of a work on rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the inventor of balanced
or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.). At first he is violent and ill-mannered,
and is angry at seeing his master overthrown. But in the judicious hands of Socrates he
is soon restored to good-humour, and compelled to assent to the required conclusion. Like
Gorgias, he is overthrown because he compromises; he is unwilling to say that to do is fairer
or more honourable than to suffer injustice. Though he is fascinated by the power of rhetoric,
and dazzled by the splendour of success, he is not insensible to higher arguments. Plato
may have felt that there would be an incongruity in a youth maintaining the cause of injustice
against the world. He has never heard the other side of the question, and he listens
to the paradoxes, as they appear to him, of Socrates with evident astonishment. He can
hardly understand the meaning of Archelaus being miserable, or of rhetoric being only
useful in self-accusation. When the argument with him has fairly run out.
Callicles, in whose house they are assembled, is introduced on the stage: he is with difficulty
convinced that Socrates is in earnest; for if these things are true, then, as he says
with real emotion, the foundations of society are upside down. In him another type of character
is represented; he is neither sophist nor philosopher, but man of the world, and an
accomplished Athenian gentleman. He might be described in modern language as a cynic
or materialist, a lover of power and also of pleasure, and unscrupulous in his means
of attaining both. There is no desire on his part to offer any compromise in the interests
of morality; nor is any concession made by him. Like Thrasymachus in the Republic, though
he is not of the same weak and vulgar class, he consistently maintains that might is right.
His great motive of action is political ambition; in this he is characteristically Greek. Like
Anytus in the Meno, he is the enemy of the Sophists; but favours the new art of rhetoric,
which he regards as an excellent weapon of attack and defence. He is a despiser of mankind
as he is of philosophy, and sees in the laws of the state only a violation of the order
of nature, which intended that the stronger should govern the weaker (compare Republic).
Like other men of the world who are of a speculative turn of mind, he generalizes the bad side
of human nature, and has easily brought down his principles to his practice. Philosophy
and poetry alike supply him with distinctions suited to his view of human life. He has a
good will to Socrates, whose talents he evidently admires, while he censures the puerile use
which he makes of them. He expresses a keen intellectual interest in the argument. Like
Anytus, again, he has a sympathy with other men of the world; the Athenian statesmen of
a former generation, who showed no weakness and made no mistakes, such as Miltiades, Themistocles,
Pericles, are his favourites. His ideal of human character is a man of great passions
and great powers, which he has developed to the utmost, and which he uses in his own enjoyment
and in the government of others. Had Critias been the name instead of Callicles, about
whom we know nothing from other sources, the opinions of the man would have seemed to reflect
the history of his life. And now the combat deepens. In Callicles,
far more than in any sophist or rhetorician, is concentrated the spirit of evil against
which Socrates is contending, the spirit of the world, the spirit of the many contending
against the one wise man, of which the Sophists, as he describes them in the Republic, are
the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves carried away by the great tide
of public opinion. Socrates approaches his antagonist warily from a distance, with a
sort of irony which touches with a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion
to some scandal of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in
most profound earnest, as Chaerephon remarks. Callicles soon loses his temper, but the more
he is irritated, the more provoking and matter of fact does Socrates become. A repartee of
his which appears to have been really made to the 'omniscient' Hippias, according to
the testimony of Xenophon (Mem.), is introduced. He is called by Callicles a popular declaimer,
and certainly shows that he has the power, in the words of Gorgias, of being 'as long
as he pleases,' or 'as short as he pleases' (compare Protag.). Callicles exhibits great
ability in defending himself and attacking Socrates, whom he accuses of trifling and
word-splitting; he is scandalized that the legitimate consequences of his own argument
should be stated in plain terms; after the manner of men of the world, he wishes to preserve
the decencies of life. But he cannot consistently maintain the bad sense of words; and getting
confused between the abstract notions of better, superior, stronger, he is easily turned round
by Socrates, and only induced to continue the argument by the authority of Gorgias.
Once, when Socrates is describing the manner in which the ambitious citizen has to identify
himself with the people, he partially recognizes the truth of his words.
The Socrates of the Gorgias may be compared with the Socrates of the Protagoras and Meno.
As in other dialogues, he is the enemy of the Sophists and rhetoricians; and also of
the statesmen, whom he regards as another variety of the same species. His behaviour
is governed by that of his opponents; the least forwardness or egotism on their part
is met by a corresponding irony on the part of Socrates. He must speak, for philosophy
will not allow him to be silent. He is indeed more ironical and provoking than in any other
of Plato's writings: for he is 'fooled to the top of his bent' by the worldliness of
Callicles. But he is also more deeply in earnest. He rises higher than even in the Phaedo and
Crito: at first enveloping his moral convictions in a cloud of dust and dialectics, he ends
by losing his method, his life, himself, in them. As in the Protagoras and Phaedrus, throwing
aside the veil of irony, he makes a speech, but, true to his character, not until his
adversary has refused to answer any more questions. The presentiment of his own fate is hanging
over him. He is aware that Socrates, the single real teacher of politics, as he ventures to
call himself, cannot safely go to war with the whole world, and that in the courts of
earth he will be condemned. But he will be justified in the world below. Then the position
of Socrates and Callicles will be reversed; all those things 'unfit for ears polite' which
Callicles has prophesied as likely to happen to him in this life, the insulting language,
the box on the ears, will recoil upon his assailant. (Compare Republic, and the similar
reversal of the position of the lawyer and the philosopher in the Theaetetus).
There is an interesting allusion to his own behaviour at the trial of the generals after
the battle of Arginusae, which he ironically attributes to his ignorance of the manner
in which a vote of the assembly should be taken. This is said to have happened 'last
year' (B.C. 406), and therefore the assumed date of the dialogue has been fixed at 405
B.C., when Socrates would already have been an old man. The date is clearly marked, but
is scarcely reconcilable with another indication of time, viz. the 'recent' usurpation of Archelaus,
which occurred in the year 413; and still less with the 'recent' death of Pericles,
who really died twenty-four years previously (429 B.C.) and is afterwards reckoned among
the statesmen of a past age; or with the mention of Nicias, who died in 413, and is nevertheless
spoken of as a living witness. But we shall hereafter have reason to observe, that although
there is a general consistency of times and persons in the Dialogues of Plato, a precise
dramatic date is an invention of his commentators (Preface to Republic).
The conclusion of the Dialogue is remarkable, (1) for the truly characteristic declaration
of Socrates that he is ignorant of the true nature and bearing of these things, while
he affirms at the same time that no one can maintain any other view without being ridiculous.
The profession of ignorance reminds us of the earlier and more exclusively Socratic
Dialogues. But neither in them, nor in the Apology, nor in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,
does Socrates express any doubt of the fundamental truths of morality. He evidently regards this
'among the multitude of questions' which agitate human life 'as the principle which alone remains
unshaken.' He does not insist here, any more than in the Phaedo, on the literal truth of
the myth, but only on the soundness of the doctrine which is contained in it, that doing
wrong is worse than suffering, and that a man should be rather than seem; for the next
best thing to a man's being just is that he should be corrected and become just; also
that he should avoid all flattery, whether of himself or of others; and that rhetoric
should be employed for the maintenance of the right only. The revelation of another
life is a recapitulation of the argument in a figure.
(2) Socrates makes the singular remark, that he is himself the only true politician of
his age. In other passages, especially in the Apology, he disclaims being a politician
at all. There he is convinced that he or any other good man who attempted to resist the
popular will would be put to death before he had done any good to himself or others.
Here he anticipates such a fate for himself, from the fact that he is 'the only man of
the present day who performs his public duties at all.' The two points of view are not really
inconsistent, but the difference between them is worth noticing: Socrates is and is not
a public man. Not in the ordinary sense, like Alcibiades or Pericles, but in a higher one;
and this will sooner or later entail the same consequences on him. He cannot be a private
man if he would; neither can he separate morals from politics. Nor is he unwilling to be a
politician, although he foresees the dangers which await him; but he must first become
a better and wiser man, for he as well as Callicles is in a state of perplexity and
uncertainty. And yet there is an inconsistency: for should not Socrates too have taught the
citizens better than to put him to death? And now, as he himself says, we will 'resume
the argument from the beginning.' Socrates, who is attended by his inseparable
disciple, Chaerephon, meets Callicles in the streets of Athens. He is informed that he
has just missed an exhibition of Gorgias, which he regrets, because he was desirous,
not of hearing Gorgias display his rhetoric, but of interrogating him concerning the nature
of his art. Callicles proposes that they shall go with him to his own house, where Gorgias
is staying. There they find the great rhetorician and his younger friend and disciple Polus.
SOCRATES: Put the question to him, Chaerephon. CHAEREPHON: What question?
SOCRATES: Who is he?—such a question as would elicit from a man the answer, 'I am
a cobbler.' Polus suggests that Gorgias may be tired,
and desires to answer for him. 'Who is Gorgias?' asks Chaerephon, imitating the manner of his
master Socrates. 'One of the best of men, and a proficient in the best and noblest of
experimental arts,' etc., replies Polus, in rhetorical and balanced phrases. Socrates
is dissatisfied at the length and unmeaningness of the answer; he tells the disconcerted volunteer
that he has mistaken the quality for the nature of the art, and remarks to Gorgias, that Polus
has learnt how to make a speech, but not how to answer a question. He wishes that Gorgias
would answer him. Gorgias is willing enough, and replies to the question asked by Chaerephon,—that
he is a rhetorician, and in Homeric language, 'boasts himself to be a good one.' At the
request of Socrates he promises to be brief; for 'he can be as long as he pleases, and
as short as he pleases.' Socrates would have him bestow his length on others, and proceeds
to ask him a number of questions, which are answered by him to his own great satisfaction,
and with a brevity which excites the admiration of Socrates. The result of the discussion
may be summed up as follows:— Rhetoric treats of discourse; but music and
medicine, and other particular arts, are also concerned with discourse; in what way then
does rhetoric differ from them? Gorgias draws a distinction between the arts which deal
with words, and the arts which have to do with external actions. Socrates extends this
distinction further, and divides all productive arts into two classes: (1) arts which may
be carried on in silence; and (2) arts which have to do with words, or in which words are
coextensive with action, such as arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric. But still Gorgias could
hardly have meant to say that arithmetic was the same as rhetoric. Even in the arts which
are concerned with words there are differences. What then distinguishes rhetoric from the
other arts which have to do with words? 'The words which rhetoric uses relate to the best
and greatest of human things.' But tell me, Gorgias, what are the best? 'Health first,
beauty next, wealth third,' in the words of the old song, or how would you rank them?
The arts will come to you in a body, each claiming precedence and saying that her own
good is superior to that of the rest—How will you choose between them? 'I should say,
Socrates, that the art of persuasion, which gives freedom to all men, and to individuals
power in the state, is the greatest good.' But what is the exact nature of this persuasion?—is
the persevering retort: You could not describe Zeuxis as a painter, or even as a painter
of figures, if there were other painters of figures; neither can you define rhetoric simply
as an art of persuasion, because there are other arts which persuade, such as arithmetic,
which is an art of persuasion about odd and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the necessity
of a further limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art of persuading in the law
courts, and in the assembly, about the just and unjust. But still there are two sorts
of persuasion: one which gives knowledge, and another which gives belief without knowledge;
and knowledge is always true, but belief may be either true or false,—there is therefore
a further question: which of the two sorts of persuasion does rhetoric effect in courts
of law and assemblies? Plainly that which gives belief and not that which gives knowledge;
for no one can impart a real knowledge of such matters to a crowd of persons in a few
minutes. And there is another point to be considered:—when the assembly meets to advise
about walls or docks or military expeditions, the rhetorician is not taken into counsel,
but the architect, or the general. How would Gorgias explain this phenomenon? All who intend
to become disciples, of whom there are several in the company, and not Socrates only, are
eagerly asking:—About what then will rhetoric teach us to persuade or advise the state?
Gorgias illustrates the nature of rhetoric by adducing the example of Themistocles, who
persuaded the Athenians to build their docks and walls, and of Pericles, whom Socrates
himself has heard speaking about the middle wall of the Piraeus. He adds that he has exercised
a similar power over the patients of his brother Herodicus. He could be chosen a physician
by the assembly if he pleased, for no physician could compete with a rhetorician in popularity
and influence. He could persuade the multitude of anything by the power of his rhetoric;
not that the rhetorician ought to abuse this power any more than a boxer should abuse the
art of self-defence. Rhetoric is a good thing, but, like all good things, may be unlawfully
used. Neither is the teacher of the art to be deemed unjust because his pupils are unjust
and make a bad use of the lessons which they have learned from him.
Socrates would like to know before he replies, whether Gorgias will quarrel with him if he
points out a slight inconsistency into which he has fallen, or whether he, like himself,
is one who loves to be refuted. Gorgias declares that he is quite one of his sort, but fears
that the argument may be tedious to the company. The company cheer, and Chaerephon and Callicles
exhort them to proceed. Socrates gently points out the supposed inconsistency into which
Gorgias appears to have fallen, and which he is inclined to think may arise out of a
misapprehension of his own. The rhetorician has been declared by Gorgias to be more persuasive
to the ignorant than the physician, or any other expert. And he is said to be ignorant,
and this ignorance of his is regarded by Gorgias as a happy condition, for he has escaped the
trouble of learning. But is he as ignorant of just and unjust as he is of medicine or
building? Gorgias is compelled to admit that if he did not know them previously he must
learn them from his teacher as a part of the art of rhetoric. But he who has learned carpentry
is a carpenter, and he who has learned music is a musician, and he who has learned justice
is just. The rhetorician then must be a just man, and rhetoric is a just thing. But Gorgias
has already admitted the opposite of this, viz. that rhetoric may be abused, and that
the rhetorician may act unjustly. How is the inconsistency to be explained?
The fallacy of this argument is twofold; for in the first place, a man may know justice
and not be just—here is the old confusion of the arts and the virtues;—nor can any
teacher be expected to counteract wholly the bent of natural character; and secondly, a
man may have a degree of justice, but not sufficient to prevent him from ever doing
wrong. Polus is naturally exasperated at the sophism, which he is unable to detect; of
course, he says, the rhetorician, like every one else, will admit that he knows justice
(how can he do otherwise when pressed by the interrogations of Socrates?), but he thinks
that great want of manners is shown in bringing the argument to such a pass. Socrates ironically
replies, that when old men trip, the young set them on their legs again; and he is quite
willing to retract, if he can be shown to be in error, but upon one condition, which
is that Polus studies brevity. Polus is in great indignation at not being allowed to
use as many words as he pleases in the free state of Athens. Socrates retorts, that yet
harder will be his own case, if he is compelled to stay and listen to them. After some altercation
they agree (compare Protag.), that Polus shall ask and Socrates answer.
'What is the art of Rhetoric?' says Polus. Not an art at all, replies Socrates, but a
thing which in your book you affirm to have created art. Polus asks, 'What thing?' and
Socrates answers, An experience or routine of making a sort of delight or gratification.
'But is not rhetoric a fine thing?' I have not yet told you what rhetoric is. Will you
ask me another question—What is cookery? 'What is cookery?' An experience or routine
of making a sort of delight or gratification. Then they are the same, or rather fall under
the same class, and rhetoric has still to be distinguished from cookery. 'What is rhetoric?'
asks Polus once more. A part of a not very creditable whole, which may be termed flattery,
is the reply. 'But what part?' A shadow of a part of politics. This, as might be expected,
is wholly unintelligible, both to Gorgias and Polus; and, in order to explain his meaning
to them, Socrates draws a distinction between shadows or appearances and realities; e.g.
there is real health of body or soul, and the appearance of them; real arts and sciences,
and the simulations of them. Now the soul and body have two arts waiting upon them,
first the art of politics, which attends on the soul, having a legislative part and a
judicial part; and another art attending on the body, which has no generic name, but may
also be described as having two divisions, one of which is medicine and the other gymnastic.
Corresponding with these four arts or sciences there are four shams or simulations of them,
mere experiences, as they may be termed, because they give no reason of their own existence.
The art of dressing up is the sham or simulation of gymnastic, the art of cookery, of medicine;
rhetoric is the simulation of justice, and sophistic of legislation. They may be summed
up in an arithmetical formula:— Tiring: gymnastic:: cookery: medicine:: sophistic:
legislation. And,
Cookery: medicine:: rhetoric: the art of justice. And this is the true scheme of them, but when
measured only by the gratification which they procure, they become jumbled together and
return to their aboriginal chaos. Socrates apologizes for the length of his speech, which
was necessary to the explanation of the subject, and begs Polus not unnecessarily to retaliate
on him. 'Do you mean to say that the rhetoricians
are esteemed flatterers?' They are not esteemed at all. 'Why, have they not great power, and
can they not do whatever they desire?' They have no power, and they only do what they
think best, and never what they desire; for they never attain the true object of desire,
which is the good. 'As if you, Socrates, would not envy the possessor of despotic power,
who can imprison, exile, kill any one whom he pleases.' But Socrates replies that he
has no wish to put any one to death; he who kills another, even justly, is not to be envied,
and he who kills him unjustly is to be pitied; it is better to suffer than to do injustice.
He does not consider that going about with a dagger and putting men out of the way, or
setting a house on fire, is real power. To this Polus assents, on the ground that such
acts would be punished, but he is still of opinion that evil-doers, if they are unpunished,
may be happy enough. He instances Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, the usurper of Macedonia.
Does not Socrates think him happy?—Socrates would like to know more about him; he cannot
pronounce even the great king to be happy, unless he knows his mental and moral condition.
Polus explains that Archelaus was a slave, being the son of a woman who was the slave
of Alcetas, brother of Perdiccas king of Macedon—and he, by every species of crime, first murdering
his uncle and then his cousin and half-brother, obtained the kingdom. This was very wicked,
and yet all the world, including Socrates, would like to have his place. Socrates dismisses
the appeal to numbers; Polus, if he will, may summon all the rich men of Athens, Nicias
and his brothers, Aristocrates, the house of Pericles, or any other great family—this
is the kind of evidence which is adduced in courts of justice, where truth depends upon
numbers. But Socrates employs proof of another sort; his appeal is to one witness only,—that
is to say, the person with whom he is speaking; him he will convict out of his own mouth.
And he is prepared to show, after his manner, that Archelaus cannot be a wicked man and
yet happy. The evil-doer is deemed happy if he escapes,
and miserable if he suffers punishment; but Socrates thinks him less miserable if he suffers
than if he escapes. Polus is of opinion that such a paradox as this hardly deserves refutation,
and is at any rate sufficiently refuted by the fact. Socrates has only to compare the
lot of the successful tyrant who is the envy of the world, and of the wretch who, having
been detected in a criminal attempt against the state, is crucified or burnt to death.
Socrates replies, that if they are both criminal they are both miserable, but that the unpunished
is the more miserable of the two. At this Polus laughs outright, which leads Socrates
to remark that laughter is a new species of refutation. Polus replies, that he is already
refuted; for if he will take the votes of the company, he will find that no one agrees
with him. To this Socrates rejoins, that he is not a public man, and (referring to his
own conduct at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae) is unable to take
the suffrages of any company, as he had shown on a recent occasion; he can only deal with
one witness at a time, and that is the person with whom he is arguing. But he is certain
that in the opinion of any man to do is worse than to suffer evil.
Polus, though he will not admit this, is ready to acknowledge that to do evil is considered
the more foul or dishonourable of the two. But what is fair and what is foul; whether
the terms are applied to bodies, colours, figures, laws, habits, studies, must they
not be defined with reference to pleasure and utility? Polus assents to this latter
doctrine, and is easily persuaded that the fouler of two things must exceed either in
pain or in hurt. But the doing cannot exceed the suffering of evil in pain, and therefore
must exceed in hurt. Thus doing is proved by the testimony of Polus himself to be worse
or more hurtful than suffering. There remains the other question: Is a guilty
man better off when he is punished or when he is unpunished? Socrates replies, that what
is done justly is suffered justly: if the act is just, the effect is just; if to punish
is just, to be punished is just, and therefore fair, and therefore beneficent; and the benefit
is that the soul is improved. There are three evils from which a man may suffer, and which
affect him in estate, body, and soul;—these are, poverty, disease, injustice; and the
foulest of these is injustice, the evil of the soul, because that brings the greatest
hurt. And there are three arts which heal these evils—trading, medicine, justice—and
the fairest of these is justice. Happy is he who has never committed injustice, and
happy in the second degree he who has been healed by punishment. And therefore the criminal
should himself go to the judge as he would to the physician, and purge away his crime.
Rhetoric will enable him to display his guilt in proper colours, and to sustain himself
and others in enduring the necessary penalty. And similarly if a man has an enemy, he will
desire not to punish him, but that he shall go unpunished and become worse and worse,
taking care only that he does no injury to himself. These are at least conceivable uses
of the art, and no others have been discovered by us.
Here Callicles, who has been listening in silent amazement, asks Chaerephon whether
Socrates is in earnest, and on receiving the assurance that he is, proceeds to ask the
same question of Socrates himself. For if such doctrines are true, life must have been
turned upside down, and all of us are doing the opposite of what we ought to be doing.
Socrates replies in a style of playful irony, that before men can understand one another
they must have some common feeling. And such a community of feeling exists between himself
and Callicles, for both of them are lovers, and they have both a pair of loves; the beloved
of Callicles are the Athenian Demos and Demos the son of Pyrilampes; the beloved of Socrates
are Alcibiades and philosophy. The peculiarity of Callicles is that he can never contradict
his loves; he changes as his Demos changes in all his opinions; he watches the countenance
of both his loves, and repeats their sentiments, and if any one is surprised at his sayings
and doings, the explanation of them is, that he is not a free agent, but must always be
imitating his two loves. And this is the explanation of Socrates' peculiarities also. He is always
repeating what his mistress, Philosophy, is saying to him, who unlike his other love,
Alcibiades, is ever the same, ever true. Callicles must refute her, or he will never be at unity
with himself; and discord in life is far worse than the discord of musical sounds.
Callicles answers, that Gorgias was overthrown because, as Polus said, in compliance with
popular prejudice he had admitted that if his pupil did not know justice the rhetorician
must teach him; and Polus has been similarly entangled, because his modesty led him to
admit that to suffer is more honourable than to do injustice. By custom 'yes,' but not
by nature, says Callicles. And Socrates is always playing between the two points of view,
and putting one in the place of the other. In this very argument, what Polus only meant
in a conventional sense has been affirmed by him to be a law of nature. For convention
says that 'injustice is dishonourable,' but nature says that 'might is right.' And we
are always taming down the nobler spirits among us to the conventional level. But sometimes
a great man will rise up and reassert his original rights, trampling under foot all
our formularies, and then the light of natural justice shines forth. Pindar says, 'Law, the
king of all, does violence with high hand;' as is indeed proved by the example of Heracles,
who drove off the oxen of Geryon and never paid for them.
This is the truth, Socrates, as you will be convinced, if you leave philosophy and pass
on to the real business of life. A little philosophy is an excellent thing; too much
is the ruin of a man. He who has not 'passed his metaphysics' before he has grown up to
manhood will never know the world. Philosophers are ridiculous when they take to politics,
and I dare say that politicians are equally ridiculous when they take to philosophy: 'Every
man,' as Euripides says, 'is fondest of that in which he is best.' Philosophy is graceful
in youth, like the lisp of infancy, and should be cultivated as a part of education; but
when a grown-up man lisps or studies philosophy, I should like to beat him. None of those over-refined
natures ever come to any good; they avoid the busy haunts of men, and skulk in corners,
whispering to a few admiring youths, and never giving utterance to any noble sentiments.
For you, Socrates, I have a regard, and therefore I say to you, as Zethus says to Amphion in
the play, that you have 'a noble soul disguised in a puerile exterior.' And I would have you
consider the danger which you and other philosophers incur. For you would not know how to defend
yourself if any one accused you in a law-court,—there you would stand, with gaping mouth and dizzy
brain, and might be murdered, robbed, boxed on the ears with impunity. Take my advice,
then, and get a little common sense; leave to others these frivolities; walk in the ways
of the wealthy and be wise. Socrates professes to have found in Callicles
the philosopher's touchstone; and he is certain that any opinion in which they both agree
must be the very truth. Callicles has all the three qualities which are needed in a
critic—knowledge, good-will, frankness; Gorgias and Polus, although learned men, were
too modest, and their modesty made them contradict themselves. But Callicles is well-educated;
and he is not too modest to speak out (of this he has already given proof), and his
good-will is shown both by his own profession and by his giving the same caution against
philosophy to Socrates, which Socrates remembers hearing him give long ago to his own clique
of friends. He will pledge himself to retract any error into which he may have fallen, and
which Callicles may point out. But he would like to know first of all what he and Pindar
mean by natural justice. Do they suppose that the rule of justice is the rule of the stronger
or of the better?' 'There is no difference.' Then are not the many superior to the one,
and the opinions of the many better? And their opinion is that justice is equality, and that
to do is more dishonourable than to suffer wrong. And as they are the superior or stronger,
this opinion of theirs must be in accordance with natural as well as conventional justice.
'Why will you continue splitting words? Have I not told you that the superior is the better?'
But what do you mean by the better? Tell me that, and please to be a little milder in
your language, if you do not wish to drive me away. 'I mean the worthier, the wiser.'
You mean to say that one man of sense ought to rule over ten thousand fools? 'Yes, that
is my meaning.' Ought the physician then to have a larger share of meats and drinks? or
the weaver to have more coats, or the cobbler larger shoes, or the farmer more seed? 'You
are always saying the same things, Socrates.' Yes, and on the same subjects too; but you
are never saying the same things. For, first, you defined the superior to be the stronger,
and then the wiser, and now something else;—what DO you mean? 'I mean men of political ability,
who ought to govern and to have more than the governed.' Than themselves? 'What do you
mean?' I mean to say that every man is his own governor. 'I see that you mean those dolts,
the temperate. But my doctrine is, that a man should let his desires grow, and take
the means of satisfying them. To the many this is impossible, and therefore they combine
to prevent him. But if he is a king, and has power, how base would he be in submitting
to them! To invite the common herd to be lord over him, when he might have the enjoyment
of all things! For the truth is, Socrates, that luxury and self-indulgence are virtue
and happiness; all the rest is mere talk.' Socrates compliments Callicles on his frankness
in saying what other men only think. According to his view, those who want nothing are not
happy. 'Why,' says Callicles, 'if they were, stones and the dead would be happy.' Socrates
in reply is led into a half-serious, half-comic vein of reflection. 'Who knows,' as Euripides
says, 'whether life may not be death, and death life?' Nay, there are philosophers who
maintain that even in life we are dead, and that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of
the soul. And some ingenious Sicilian has made an allegory, in which he represents fools
as the uninitiated, who are supposed to be carrying water to a vessel, which is full
of holes, in a similarly holey sieve, and this sieve is their own soul. The idea is
fanciful, but nevertheless is a figure of a truth which I want to make you acknowledge,
viz. that the life of contentment is better than the life of indulgence. Are you disposed
to admit that? 'Far otherwise.' Then hear another parable. The life of self-contentment
and self-indulgence may be represented respectively by two men, who are filling jars with streams
of wine, honey, milk,—the jars of the one are sound, and the jars of the other leaky;
the first fils his jars, and has no more trouble with them; the second is always filling them,
and would suffer extreme misery if he desisted. Are you of the same opinion still? 'Yes, Socrates,
and the figure expresses what I mean. For true pleasure is a perpetual stream, flowing
in and flowing out. To be hungry and always eating, to be thirsty and always drinking,
and to have all the other desires and to satisfy them, that, as I admit, is my idea of happiness.'
And to be itching and always scratching? 'I do not deny that there may be happiness even
in that.' And to indulge unnatural desires, if they are abundantly satisfied? Callicles
is indignant at the introduction of such topics. But he is reminded by Socrates that they are
introduced, not by him, but by the maintainer of the identity of pleasure and good. Will
Callicles still maintain this? 'Yes, for the sake of consistency, he will.' The answer
does not satisfy Socrates, who fears that he is losing his touchstone. A profession
of seriousness on the part of Callicles reassures him, and they proceed with the argument. Pleasure
and good are the same, but knowledge and courage are not the same either with pleasure or good,
or with one another. Socrates disproves the first of these statements by showing that
two opposites cannot coexist, but must alternate with one another—to be well and ill together
is impossible. But pleasure and pain are simultaneous, and the cessation of them is simultaneous;
e.g. in the case of drinking and thirsting, whereas good and evil are not simultaneous,
and do not cease simultaneously, and therefore pleasure cannot be the same as good.
Callicles has already lost his temper, and can only be persuaded to go on by the interposition
of Gorgias. Socrates, having already guarded against objections by distinguishing courage
and knowledge from pleasure and good, proceeds:—The good are good by the presence of good, and
the bad are bad by the presence of evil. And the brave and wise are good, and the cowardly
and foolish are bad. And he who feels pleasure is good, and he who feels pain is bad, and
both feel pleasure and pain in nearly the same degree, and sometimes the bad man or
coward in a greater degree. Therefore the bad man or coward is as good as the brave
or may be even better. Callicles endeavours now to avert the inevitable
absurdity by affirming that he and all mankind admitted some pleasures to be good and others
bad. The good are the beneficial, and the bad are the hurtful, and we should choose
the one and avoid the other. But this, as Socrates observes, is a return to the old
doctrine of himself and Polus, that all things should be done for the sake of the good.
Callicles assents to this, and Socrates, finding that they are agreed in distinguishing pleasure
from good, returns to his old division of empirical habits, or shams, or flatteries,
which study pleasure only, and the arts which are concerned with the higher interests of
soul and body. Does Callicles agree to this division? Callicles will agree to anything,
in order that he may get through the argument. Which of the arts then are flatteries? Flute-playing,
harp-playing, choral exhibitions, the dithyrambics of Cinesias are all equally condemned on the
ground that they give pleasure only; and Meles the harp-player, who was the father of Cinesias,
failed even in that. The stately muse of Tragedy is bent upon pleasure, and not upon improvement.
Poetry in general is only a rhetorical address to a mixed audience of men, women, and children.
And the orators are very far from speaking with a view to what is best; their way is
to humour the assembly as if they were children. Callicles replies, that this is only true
of some of them; others have a real regard for their fellow-citizens. Granted; then there
are two species of oratory; the one a flattery, another which has a real regard for the citizens.
But where are the orators among whom you find the latter? Callicles admits that there are
none remaining, but there were such in the days when Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades,
and the great Pericles were still alive. Socrates replies that none of these were true artists,
setting before themselves the duty of bringing order out of disorder. The good man and true
orator has a settled design, running through his life, to which he conforms all his words
and actions; he desires to implant justice and eradicate injustice, to implant all virtue
and eradicate all vice in the minds of his citizens. He is the physician who will not
allow the sick man to indulge his appetites with a variety of meats and drinks, but insists
on his exercising self-restraint. And this is good for the soul, and better than the
unrestrained indulgence which Callicles was recently approving.
Here Callicles, who had been with difficulty brought to this point, turns restive, and
suggests that Socrates shall answer his own questions. 'Then,' says Socrates, 'one man
must do for two;' and though he had hoped to have given Callicles an 'Amphion' in return
for his 'Zethus,' he is willing to proceed; at the same time, he hopes that Callicles
will correct him, if he falls into error. He recapitulates the advantages which he has
already won:— The pleasant is not the same as the good—Callicles
and I are agreed about that,—but pleasure is to be pursued for the sake of the good,
and the good is that of which the presence makes us good; we and all things good have
acquired some virtue or other. And virtue, whether of body or soul, of things or persons,
is not attained by accident, but is due to order and harmonious arrangement. And the
soul which has order is better than the soul which is without order, and is therefore temperate
and is therefore good, and the intemperate is bad. And he who is temperate is also just
and brave and pious, and has attained the perfection of goodness and therefore of happiness,
and the intemperate whom you approve is the opposite of all this and is wretched. He therefore
who would be happy must pursue temperance and avoid intemperance, and if possible escape
the necessity of punishment, but if he have done wrong he must endure punishment. In this
way states and individuals should seek to attain harmony, which, as the wise tell us,
is the bond of heaven and earth, of gods and men. Callicles has never discovered the power
of geometrical proportion in both worlds; he would have men aim at disproportion and
excess. But if he be wrong in this, and if self-control is the true secret of happiness,
then the paradox is true that the only use of rhetoric is in self-accusation, and Polus
was right in saying that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong, and Gorgias was right
in saying that the rhetorician must be a just man. And you were wrong in taunting me with
my defenceless condition, and in saying that I might be accused or put to death or boxed
on the ears with impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to
be stricken—to do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds.
I myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can deny my
words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong
is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the last must be a ruler, or the friend of
a ruler; and to be the friend he must be the equal of the ruler, and must also resemble
him. Under his protection he will suffer no evil, but will he also do no evil? Nay, will
he not rather do all the evil which he can and escape? And in this way the greatest of
all evils will befall him. 'But this imitator of the tyrant,' rejoins Callicles, 'will kill
any one who does not similarly imitate him.' Socrates replies that he is not deaf, and
that he has heard that repeated many times, and can only reply, that a bad man will kill
a good one. 'Yes, and that is the provoking thing.' Not provoking to a man of sense who
is not studying the arts which will preserve him from danger; and this, as you say, is
the use of rhetoric in courts of justice. But how many other arts are there which also
save men from death, and are yet quite humble in their pretensions—such as the art of
swimming, or the art of the pilot? Does not the pilot do men at least as much service
as the rhetorician, and yet for the voyage from Aegina to Athens he does not charge more
than two obols, and when he disembarks is quite unassuming in his demeanour? The reason
is that he is not certain whether he has done his passengers any good in saving them from
death, if one of them is diseased in body, and still more if he is diseased in mind—who
can say? The engineer too will often save whole cities, and yet you despise him, and
would not allow your son to marry his daughter, or his son to marry yours. But what reason
is there in this? For if virtue only means the saving of life, whether your own or another's,
you have no right to despise him or any practiser of saving arts. But is not virtue something
different from saving and being saved? I would have you rather consider whether you ought
not to disregard length of life, and think only how you can live best, leaving all besides
to the will of Heaven. For you must not expect to have influence either with the Athenian
Demos or with Demos the son of Pyrilampes, unless you become like them. What do you say
to this? 'There is some truth in what you are saying,
but I do not entirely believe you.' That is because you are in love with Demos.
But let us have a little more conversation. You remember the two processes—one which
was directed to pleasure, the other which was directed to making men as good as possible.
And those who have the care of the city should make the citizens as good as possible. But
who would undertake a public building, if he had never had a teacher of the art of building,
and had never constructed a building before? or who would undertake the duty of state-physician,
if he had never cured either himself or any one else? Should we not examine him before
we entrusted him with the office? And as Callicles is about to enter public life, should we not
examine him? Whom has he made better? For we have already admitted that this is the
statesman's proper business. And we must ask the same question about Pericles, and Cimon,
and Miltiades, and Themistocles. Whom did they make better? Nay, did not Pericles make
the citizens worse? For he gave them pay, and at first he was very popular with them,
but at last they condemned him to death. Yet surely he would be a bad tamer of animals
who, having received them gentle, taught them to kick and butt, and man is an animal; and
Pericles who had the charge of man only made him wilder, and more savage and unjust, and
therefore he could not have been a good statesman. The same tale might be repeated about Cimon,
Themistocles, Miltiades. But the charioteer who keeps his seat at first is not thrown
out when he gains greater experience and skill. The inference is, that the statesman of a
past age were no better than those of our own. They may have been cleverer constructors
of docks and harbours, but they did not improve the character of the citizens. I have told
you again and again (and I purposely use the same images) that the soul, like the body,
may be treated in two ways—there is the meaner and the higher art. You seemed to understand
what I said at the time, but when I ask you who were the really good statesmen, you answer—as
if I asked you who were the good trainers, and you answered, Thearion, the baker, Mithoecus,
the author of the Sicilian cookery-book, Sarambus, the vintner. And you would be affronted if
I told you that these are a parcel of cooks who make men fat only to make them thin. And
those whom they have fattened applaud them, instead of finding fault with them, and lay
the blame of their subsequent disorders on their physicians. In this respect, Callicles,
you are like them; you applaud the statesmen of old, who pandered to the vices of the citizens,
and filled the city with docks and harbours, but neglected virtue and justice. And when
the fit of illness comes, the citizens who in like manner applauded Themistocles, Pericles,
and others, will lay hold of you and my friend Alcibiades, and you will suffer for the misdeeds
of your predecessors. The old story is always being repeated—'after all his services,
the ungrateful city banished him, or condemned him to death.' As if the statesman should
not have taught the city better! He surely cannot blame the state for having unjustly
used him, any more than the sophist or teacher can find fault with his pupils if they cheat
him. And the sophist and orator are in the same case; although you admire rhetoric and
despise sophistic, whereas sophistic is really the higher of the two. The teacher of the
arts takes money, but the teacher of virtue or politics takes no money, because this is
the only kind of service which makes the disciple desirous of requiting his teacher.
Socrates concludes by finally asking, to which of the two modes of serving the state Callicles
invites him:—'to the inferior and ministerial one,' is the ingenuous reply. That is the
only way of avoiding death, replies Socrates; and he has heard often enough, and would rather
not hear again, that the bad man will kill the good. But he thinks that such a fate is
very likely reserved for him, because he remarks that he is the only person who teaches the
true art of politics. And very probably, as in the case which he described to Polus, he
may be the physician who is tried by a jury of children. He cannot say that he has procured
the citizens any pleasure, and if any one charges him with perplexing them, or with
reviling their elders, he will not be able to make them understand that he has only been
actuated by a desire for their good. And therefore there is no saying what his fate may be. 'And
do you think that a man who is unable to help himself is in a good condition?' Yes, Callicles,
if he have the true self-help, which is never to have said or done any wrong to himself
or others. If I had not this kind of self-help, I should be ashamed; but if I die for want
of your flattering rhetoric, I shall die in peace. For death is no evil, but to go to
the world below laden with offences is the worst of evils. In proof of which I will tell
you a tale:— Under the rule of Cronos, men were judged
on the day of their death, and when judgment had been given upon them they departed—the
good to the islands of the blest, the bad to the house of vengeance. But as they were
still living, and had their clothes on at the time when they were being judged, there
was favouritism, and Zeus, when he came to the throne, was obliged to alter the mode
of procedure, and try them after death, having first sent down Prometheus to take away from
them the foreknowledge of death. Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus were appointed to be the judges;
Rhadamanthus for Asia, Aeacus for Europe, and Minos was to hold the court of appeal.
Now death is the separation of soul and body, but after death soul and body alike retain
their characteristics; the fat man, the dandy, the branded slave, are all distinguishable.
Some prince or potentate, perhaps even the great king himself, appears before Rhadamanthus,
and he instantly detects him, though he knows not who he is; he sees the scars of perjury
and iniquity, and sends him away to the house of torment.
For there are two classes of souls who undergo punishment—the curable and the incurable.
The curable are those who are benefited by their punishment; the incurable are such as
Archelaus, who benefit others by becoming a warning to them. The latter class are generally
kings and potentates; meaner persons, happily for themselves, have not the same power of
doing injustice. Sisyphus and Tityus, not Thersites, are supposed by Homer to be undergoing
everlasting punishment. Not that there is anything to prevent a great man from being
a good one, as is shown by the famous example of Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But
to Rhadamanthus the souls are only known as good or bad; they are stripped of their dignities
and preferments; he despatches the bad to Tartarus, labelled either as curable or incurable,
and looks with love and admiration on the soul of some just one, whom he sends to the
islands of the blest. Similar is the practice of Aeacus; and Minos overlooks them, holding
a golden sceptre, as Odysseus in Homer saw him
'Wielding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.'
My wish for myself and my fellow-men is, that we may present our souls undefiled to the
judge in that day; my desire in life is to be able to meet death. And I exhort you, and
retort upon you the reproach which you cast upon me,—that you will stand before the
judge, gaping, and with dizzy brain, and any one may box you on the ear, and do you all
manner of evil. Perhaps you think that this is an old wives'
fable. But you, who are the three wisest men in Hellas, have nothing better to say, and
no one will ever show that to do is better than to suffer evil. A man should study to
be, and not merely to seem. If he is bad, he should become good, and avoid all flattery,
whether of the many or of the few. Follow me, then; and if you are looked down
upon, that will do you no harm. And when we have practised virtue, we will betake ourselves
to politics, but not until we are delivered from the shameful state of ignorance and uncertainty
in which we are at present. Let us follow in the way of virtue and justice, and not
in the way to which you, Callicles, invite us; for that way is nothing worth.
We will now consider in order some of the principal points of the dialogue. Having regard
(1) to the age of Plato and the ironical character of his writings, we may compare him with himself,
and with other great teachers, and we may note in passing the objections of his critics.
And then (2) casting one eye upon him, we may cast another upon ourselves, and endeavour
to draw out the great lessons which he teaches for all time, stripped of the accidental form
in which they are enveloped. (1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other
dialogues of Plato, we are made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The
old difficulty of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the arts and the virtues
also continues. The ambiguity of several words, such as nature, custom, the honourable, the
good, is not cleared up. The Sophists are still floundering about the distinction of
the real and seeming. Figures of speech are made the basis of arguments. The possibility
of conceiving a universal art or science, which admits of application to a particular
subject-matter, is a difficulty which remains unsolved, and has not altogether ceased to
haunt the world at the present day (compare Charmides). The defect of clearness is also
apparent in Socrates himself, unless we suppose him to be practising on the simplicity of
his opponent, or rather perhaps trying an experiment in dialectics. Nothing can be more
fallacious than the contradiction which he pretends to have discovered in the answers
of Gorgias (see above). The advantages which he gains over Polus are also due to a false
antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an erroneous assertion that an agent and a patient
may be described by similar predicates;—a mistake which Aristotle partly shares and
partly corrects in the Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a 'robust sophistry' are likewise
discernible in his argument with Callicles. (2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced
by reason only, yet the argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he
conducts himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may sometimes wish
that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists, or pointed out to them the rocks
which lay concealed under the ambiguous terms good, pleasure, and the like. But it would
be as useless to examine his arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to criticise
this ideal from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say that the ideal is generally
regarded as unattainable, and that mankind will by no means agree in thinking that the
criminal is happier when punished than when unpunished, any more than they would agree
to the stoical paradox that a man may be happy on the rack, Plato has already admitted that
the world is against him. Neither does he mean to say that Archelaus is tormented by
the stings of conscience; or that the sensations of the impaled criminal are more agreeable
than those of the tyrant drowned in luxurious enjoyment. Neither is he speaking, as in the
Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of pleasure, an opinion which he afterwards repudiates
in the Phaedo. What then is his meaning? His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best
by parallel notions, which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always existed among
mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself implies that he will be understood
or appreciated by very few. He is speaking not of the consciousness of
happiness, but of the idea of happiness. When a martyr dies in a good cause, when a soldier
falls in battle, we do not suppose that death or wounds are without pain, or that their
physical suffering is always compensated by a mental satisfaction. Still we regard them
as happy, and we would a thousand times rather have their death than a shameful life. Nor
is this only because we believe that they will obtain an immortality of fame, or that
they will have crowns of glory in another world, when their enemies and persecutors
will be proportionably tormented. Men are found in a few instances to do what is right,
without reference to public opinion or to consequences. And we regard them as happy
on this ground only, much as Socrates' friends in the opening of the Phaedo are described
as regarding him; or as was said of another, 'they looked upon his face as upon the face
of an angel.' We are not concerned to justify this idealism by the standard of utility or
public opinion, but merely to point out the existence of such a sentiment in the better
part of human nature. The idealism of Plato is founded upon this
sentiment. He would maintain that in some sense or other truth and right are alone to
be sought, and that all other goods are only desirable as means towards these. He is thought
to have erred in 'considering the agent only, and making no reference to the happiness of
others, as affected by him.' But the happiness of others or of mankind, if regarded as an
end, is really quite as ideal and almost as paradoxical to the common understanding as
Plato's conception of happiness. For the greatest happiness of the greatest number may mean
also the greatest pain of the individual which will procure the greatest pleasure of the
greatest number. Ideas of utility, like those of duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant
consequences. Nor can Plato in the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering
that Socrates expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to
others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is by the ancients
merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the Stoics, the social principle,
though taking another form, is really far more prominent than in most modern treatises
on ethics. The idealizing of suffering is one of the
conceptions which have exercised the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological
import of this, or into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may have given
rise, we need not now enter. All will agree that the ideal of the Divine Sufferer, whose
words the world would not receive, the man of sorrows of whom the Hebrew prophets spoke,
has sunk deep into the heart of the human race. It is a similar picture of suffering
goodness which Plato desires to pourtray, not without an allusion to the fate of his
master Socrates. He is convinced that, somehow or other, such an one must be happy in life
or after death. In the Republic, he endeavours to show that his happiness would be assured
here in a well-ordered state. But in the actual condition of human things the wise and good
are weak and miserable; such an one is like a man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to
every sort of wrong and obloquy. Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led
on to the conclusion, that if 'the ways of God' to man are to be 'justified,' the hopes
of another life must be included. If the question could have been put to him, whether a man
dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests in the Apology, 'death be only
a long sleep,' we can hardly tell what would have been his answer. There have been a few,
who, quite independently of rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation, or any other
influence of public opinion, have been willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of others.
It is difficult to say how far in such cases an unconscious hope of a future life, or a
general faith in the victory of good in the world, may have supported the sufferers. But
this extreme idealism is not in accordance with the spirit of Plato. He supposes a day
of retribution, in which the good are to be rewarded and the wicked punished. Though,
as he says in the Phaedo, no man of sense will maintain that the details of the stories
about another world are true, he will insist that something of the kind is true, and will
frame his life with a view to this unknown future. Even in the Republic he introduces
a future life as an afterthought, when the superior happiness of the just has been established
on what is thought to be an immutable foundation. At the same time he makes a point of determining
his main thesis independently of remoter consequences. (3) Plato's theory of punishment is partly
vindictive, partly corrective. In the Gorgias, as well as in the Phaedo and Republic, a few
great criminals, chiefly tyrants, are reserved as examples. But most men have never had the
opportunity of attaining this pre-eminence of evil. They are not incurable, and their
punishment is intended for their improvement. They are to suffer because they have sinned;
like sick men, they must go to the physician and be healed. On this representation of Plato's
the criticism has been made, that the analogy of disease and injustice is partial only,
and that suffering, instead of improving men, may have just the opposite effect.
Like the general analogy of the arts and the virtues, the analogy of disease and injustice,
or of medicine and justice, is certainly imperfect. But ideas must be given through something;
the nature of the mind which is unseen can only be represented under figures derived
from visible objects. If these figures are suggestive of some new aspect under which
the mind may be considered, we cannot find fault with them for not exactly coinciding
with the ideas represented. They partake of the imperfect nature of language, and must
not be construed in too strict a manner. That Plato sometimes reasons from them as if they
were not figures but realities, is due to the defective logical analysis of his age.
Nor does he distinguish between the suffering which improves and the suffering which only
punishes and deters. He applies to the sphere of ethics a conception of punishment which
is really derived from criminal law. He does not see that such punishment is only negative,
and supplies no principle of moral growth or development. He is not far off the higher
notion of an education of man to be begun in this world, and to be continued in other
stages of existence, which is further developed in the Republic. And Christian thinkers, who
have ventured out of the beaten track in their meditations on the 'last things,' have found
a ray of light in his writings. But he has not explained how or in what way punishment
is to contribute to the improvement of mankind. He has not followed out the principle which
he affirms in the Republic, that 'God is the author of evil only with a view to good,'
and that 'they were the better for being punished.' Still his doctrine of a future state of rewards
and punishments may be compared favourably with that perversion of Christian doctrine
which makes the everlasting punishment of human beings depend on a brief moment of time,
or even on the accident of an accident. And he has escaped the difficulty which has often
beset divines, respecting the future destiny of the meaner sort of men (Thersites and the
like), who are neither very good nor very bad, by not counting them worthy of eternal
damnation. We do Plato violence in pressing his figures
of speech or chains of argument; and not less so in asking questions which were beyond the
horizon of his vision, or did not come within the scope of his design. The main purpose
of the Gorgias is not to answer questions about a future world, but to place in antagonism
the true and false life, and to contrast the judgments and opinions of men with judgment
according to the truth. Plato may be accused of representing a superhuman or transcendental
virtue in the description of the just man in the Gorgias, or in the companion portrait
of the philosopher in the Theaetetus; and at the same time may be thought to be condemning
a state of the world which always has existed and always will exist among men. But such
ideals act powerfully on the imagination of mankind. And such condemnations are not mere
paradoxes of philosophers, but the natural rebellion of the higher sense of right in
man against the ordinary conditions of human life. The greatest statesmen have fallen very
far short of the political ideal, and are therefore justly involved in the general condemnation.
Subordinate to the main purpose of the dialogue are some other questions, which may be briefly
considered:— a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which
as in other dialogues is supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared
with the transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge and
sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and pleasure, the real and the apparent,
the infinite and finite, harmony or beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry,
are so many pairs of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are seldom
kept perfectly distinct. And we must not forget that Plato's conception of pleasure is the
Heracleitean flux transferred to the sphere of human conduct. There is some degree of
unfairness in opposing the principle of good, which is objective, to the principle of pleasure,
which is subjective. For the assertion of the permanence of good is only based on the
assumption of its objective character. Had Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature
of good, but on the subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to
be as transient and precarious as pleasure. b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without
any view to truth, or the improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all
alike dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived. To Plato the
whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on self-interest. To this is opposed the one
wise man hardly professing to have found truth, yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous
life is the only good, whether regarded with reference to this world or to another. Statesmen,
Sophists, rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up for judgment. They are the parodies of
wise men, and their arts are the parodies of true arts and sciences. All that they call
science is merely the result of that study of the tempers of the Great Beast, which he
describes in the Republic. c. Various other points of contact naturally
suggest themselves between the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic,
the Philebus, and the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit and language
in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal similarity tending to show that
they were written at the same period of Plato's life. For the Republic supplies that education
and training of which the Gorgias suggests the necessity. The theory of the many weak
combining against the few strong in the formation of society (which is indeed a partial truth),
is similar in both of them, and is expressed in nearly the same language. The sufferings
and fate of the just man, the powerlessness of evil, and the reversal of the situation
in another life, are also points of similarity. The poets, like the rhetoricians, are condemned
because they aim at pleasure only, as in the Republic they are expelled the State, because
they are imitators, and minister to the weaker side of human nature. That poetry is akin
to rhetoric may be compared with the analogous notion, which occurs in the Protagoras, that
the ancient poets were the Sophists of their day. In some other respects the Protagoras
rather offers a contrast than a parallel. The character of Protagoras may be compared
with that of Gorgias, but the conception of happiness is different in the two dialogues;
being described in the former, according to the old Socratic notion, as deferred or accumulated
pleasure, while in the Gorgias, and in the Phaedo, pleasure and good are distinctly opposed.
This opposition is carried out from a speculative point of view in the Philebus. There neither
pleasure nor wisdom are allowed to be the chief good, but pleasure and good are not
so completely opposed as in the Gorgias. For innocent pleasures, and such as have no antecedent
pains, are allowed to rank in the class of goods. The allusion to Gorgias' definition
of rhetoric (Philebus; compare Gorg.), as the art of persuasion, of all arts the best,
for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will—marks a close
and perhaps designed connection between the two dialogues. In both the ideas of measure,
order, harmony, are the connecting links between the beautiful and the good.
In general spirit and character, that is, in irony and antagonism to public opinion,
the Gorgias most nearly resembles the Apology, Crito, and portions of the Republic, and like
the Philebus, though from another point of view, may be thought to stand in the same
relation to Plato's theory of morals which the Theaetetus bears to his theory of knowledge.
d. A few minor points still remain to be summed up: (1) The extravagant irony in the reason
which is assigned for the pilot's modest charge; and in the proposed use of rhetoric as an
instrument of self-condemnation; and in the mighty power of geometrical equality in both
worlds. (2) The reference of the mythus to the previous discussion should not be overlooked:
the fate reserved for incurable criminals such as Archelaus; the retaliation of the
box on the ears; the nakedness of the souls and of the judges who are stript of the clothes
or disguises which rhetoric and public opinion have hitherto provided for them (compare Swift's
notion that the universe is a suit of clothes, Tale of a Tub). The fiction seems to have
involved Plato in the necessity of supposing that the soul retained a sort of corporeal
likeness after death. (3) The appeal of the authority of Homer, who says that Odysseus
saw Minos in his court 'holding a golden sceptre,' which gives verisimilitude to the tale.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing 'both sides of the game,' and that
in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus, we are not passing any judgment on
historical individuals, but only attempting to analyze the 'dramatis personae' as they
were conceived by him. Neither is it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato
is a dramatic writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which
he puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have the best
of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as well as a philosopher;
or to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern standard, but interpreted with reference
to his place in the history of thought and the opinion of his time.
It has been said that the most characteristic feature of the Gorgias is the assertion of
the right of dissent, or private judgment. But this mode of stating the question is really
opposed both to the spirit of Plato and of ancient philosophy generally. For Plato is
not asserting any abstract right or duty of toleration, or advantage to be derived from
freedom of thought; indeed, in some other parts of his writings (e.g. Laws), he has
fairly laid himself open to the charge of intolerance. No speculations had as yet arisen
respecting the 'liberty of prophesying;' and Plato is not affirming any abstract right
of this nature: but he is asserting the duty and right of the one wise and true man to
dissent from the folly and falsehood of the many. At the same time he acknowledges the
natural result, which he hardly seeks to avert, that he who speaks the truth to a multitude,
regardless of consequences, will probably share the fate of Socrates.
***** The irony of Plato sometimes veils from us
the height of idealism to which he soars. When declaring truths which the many will
not receive, he puts on an armour which cannot be pierced by them. The weapons of ridicule
are taken out of their hands and the laugh is turned against themselves. The disguises
which Socrates assumes are like the parables of the New Testament, or the oracles of the
Delphian God; they half conceal, half reveal, his meaning. The more he is in earnest, the
more ironical he becomes; and he is never more in earnest or more ironical than in the
Gorgias. He hardly troubles himself to answer seriously the objections of Gorgias and Polus,
and therefore he sometimes appears to be careless of the ordinary requirements of logic. Yet
in the highest sense he is always logical and consistent with himself. The form of the
argument may be paradoxical; the substance is an appeal to the higher reason. He is uttering
truths before they can be understood, as in all ages the words of philosophers, when they
are first uttered, have found the world unprepared for them. A further misunderstanding arises
out of the wildness of his humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but by the rest of
mankind, to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At length he makes even Polus in
earnest. Finally, he drops the argument, and heedless any longer of the forms of dialectic,
he loses himself in a sort of triumph, while at the same time he retaliates upon his adversaries.
From this confusion of jest and earnest, we may now return to the ideal truth, and draw
out in a simple form the main theses of the dialogue.
First Thesis:— It is a greater evil to do than to suffer
injustice. Compare the New Testament—
'It is better to suffer for well doing than for evil doing.'—1 Pet.
And the Sermon on the Mount— 'Blessed are they that are persecuted for
righteousness' sake.'—Matt. The words of Socrates are more abstract than
the words of Christ, but they equally imply that the only real evil is moral evil. The
righteous may suffer or die, but they have their reward; and even if they had no reward,
would be happier than the wicked. The world, represented by Polus, is ready, when they
are asked, to acknowledge that injustice is dishonourable, and for their own sakes men
are willing to punish the offender (compare Republic). But they are not equally willing
to acknowledge that injustice, even if successful, is essentially evil, and has the nature of
disease and death. Especially when crimes are committed on the great scale—the crimes
of tyrants, ancient or modern—after a while, seeing that they cannot be undone, and have
become a part of history, mankind are disposed to forgive them, not from any magnanimity
or charity, but because their feelings are blunted by time, and 'to forgive is convenient
to them.' The tangle of good and evil can no longer be unravelled; and although they
know that the end cannot justify the means, they feel also that good has often come out
of evil. But Socrates would have us pass the same judgment on the tyrant now and always;
though he is surrounded by his satellites, and has the applauses of Europe and Asia ringing
in his ears; though he is the civilizer or liberator of half a continent, he is, and
always will be, the most miserable of men. The greatest consequences for good or for
evil cannot alter a hair's breadth the morality of actions which are right or wrong in themselves.
This is the standard which Socrates holds up to us. Because politics, and perhaps human
life generally, are of a mixed nature we must not allow our principles to sink to the level
of our practice. And so of private individuals—to them, too,
the world occasionally speaks of the consequences of their actions:—if they are lovers of
pleasure, they will ruin their health; if they are false or dishonest, they will lose
their character. But Socrates would speak to them, not of what will be, but of what
is—of the present consequence of lowering and degrading the soul. And all higher natures,
or perhaps all men everywhere, if they were not tempted by interest or passion, would
agree with him—they would rather be the victims than the perpetrators of an act of
treachery or of tyranny. Reason tells them that death comes sooner or later to all, and
is not so great an evil as an unworthy life, or rather, if rightly regarded, not an evil
at all, but to a good man the greatest good. For in all of us there are slumbering ideals
of truth and right, which may at any time awaken and develop a new life in us.
Second Thesis:— It is better to suffer for wrong doing than
not to suffer. There might have been a condition of human
life in which the penalty followed at once, and was proportioned to the offence. Moral
evil would then be scarcely distinguishable from physical; mankind would avoid vice as
they avoid pain or death. But nature, with a view of deepening and enlarging our characters,
has for the most part hidden from us the consequences of our actions, and we can only foresee them
by an effort of reflection. To awaken in us this habit of reflection is the business of
early education, which is continued in maturer years by observation and experience. The spoilt
child is in later life said to be unfortunate—he had better have suffered when he was young,
and been saved from suffering afterwards. But is not the sovereign equally unfortunate
whose education and manner of life are always concealing from him the consequences of his
own actions, until at length they are revealed to him in some terrible downfall, which may,
perhaps, have been caused not by his own fault? Another illustration is afforded by the pauper
and criminal classes, who scarcely reflect at all, except on the means by which they
can compass their immediate ends. We pity them, and make allowances for them; but we
do not consider that the same principle applies to human actions generally. Not to have been
found out in some dishonesty or folly, regarded from a moral or religious point of view, is
the greatest of misfortunes. The success of our evil doings is a proof that the gods have
ceased to strive with us, and have given us over to ourselves. There is nothing to remind
us of our sins, and therefore nothing to correct them. Like our sorrows, they are healed by
time;
'While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.' The 'accustomed irony' of Socrates adds a
corollary to the argument:—'Would you punish your enemy, you should allow him to escape
unpunished'—this is the true retaliation. (Compare the obscure verse of Proverbs, 'Therefore
if thine enemy hunger, feed him,' etc., quoted in Romans.)
Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own lives: they do
not easily see themselves as others see them. They are very kind and very blind to their
own faults; the rhetoric of self-love is always pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting
a similar figure of speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence but
in accusation of themselves. As they are guided by feeling rather than by reason, to their
feelings the appeal must be made. They must speak to themselves; they must argue with
themselves; they must paint in eloquent words the character of their own evil deeds. To
any suffering which they have deserved, they must persuade themselves to submit. Under
the figure there lurks a real thought, which, expressed in another form, admits of an easy
application to ourselves. For do not we too accuse as well as excuse ourselves? And we
call to our aid the rhetoric of prayer and preaching, which the mind silently employs
while the struggle between the better and the worse is going on within us. And sometimes
we are too hard upon ourselves, because we want to restore the balance which self-love
has overthrown or disturbed; and then again we may hear a voice as of a parent consoling
us. In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the consciences of men 'accusing
or else excusing them.' For all our life long we are talking with ourselves:—What is thought
but speech? What is feeling but rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we
shall be always in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at first
sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.
Third Thesis:— We do not what we will, but what we wish.
Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learn—that good intentions,
and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by wisdom, are of no value. We
believe something to be for our good which we afterwards find out not to be for our good.
The consequences may be inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may
often be the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase pauperism by almsgiving;
when we tie up property without regard to changes of circumstances; when we say hastily
what we deliberately disapprove; when we do in a moment of passion what upon reflection
we regret; when from any want of self-control we give another an advantage over us—we
are doing not what we will, but what we wish. All actions of which the consequences are
not weighed and foreseen, are of this impotent and paralytic sort; and the author of them
has 'the least possible power' while seeming to have the greatest. For he is actually bringing
about the reverse of what he intended. And yet the book of nature is open to him, in
which he who runs may read if he will exercise ordinary attention; every day offers him experiences
of his own and of other men's characters, and he passes them unheeded by. The contemplation
of the consequences of actions, and the ignorance of men in regard to them, seems to have led
Socrates to his famous thesis:—'Virtue is knowledge;' which is not so much an error
or paradox as a half truth, seen first in the twilight of ethical philosophy, but also
the half of the truth which is especially needed in the present age. For as the world
has grown older men have been too apt to imagine a right and wrong apart from consequences;
while a few, on the other hand, have sought to resolve them wholly into their consequences.
But Socrates, or Plato for him, neither divides nor identifies them; though the time has not
yet arrived either for utilitarian or transcendental systems of moral philosophy, he recognizes
the two elements which seem to lie at the basis of morality. (Compare the following:
'Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenize and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraized
too much and have overvalued doing. But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism
remain for our race an eternal possession. And as humanity is constituted, one must never
assign the second rank to-day without being ready to restore them to the first to-morrow.'
Sir William W. Hunter, Preface to Orissa.) Fourth Thesis:—
To be and not to seem is the end of life. The Greek in the age of Plato admitted praise
to be one of the chief incentives to moral virtue, and to most men the opinion of their
fellows is a leading principle of action. Hence a certain element of seeming enters
into all things; all or almost all desire to appear better than they are, that they
may win the esteem or admiration of others. A man of ability can easily feign the language
of piety or virtue; and there is an unconscious as well as a conscious hypocrisy which, according
to Socrates, is the worst of the two. Again, there is the sophistry of classes and professions.
There are the different opinions about themselves and one another which prevail in different
ranks of society. There is the bias given to the mind by the study of one department
of human knowledge to the exclusion of the rest; and stronger far the prejudice engendered
by a pecuniary or party interest in certain tenets. There is the sophistry of law, the
sophistry of medicine, the sophistry of politics, the sophistry of theology. All of these disguises
wear the appearance of the truth; some of them are very ancient, and we do not easily
disengage ourselves from them; for we have inherited them, and they have become a part
of us. The sophistry of an ancient Greek sophist is nothing compared with the sophistry of
a religious order, or of a church in which during many ages falsehood has been accumulating,
and everything has been said on one side, and nothing on the other. The conventions
and customs which we observe in conversation, and the opposition of our interests when we
have dealings with one another ('the buyer saith, it is nought—it is nought,' etc.),
are always obscuring our sense of truth and right. The sophistry of human nature is far
more subtle than the deceit of any one man. Few persons speak freely from their own natures,
and scarcely any one dares to think for himself: most of us imperceptibly fall into the opinions
of those around us, which we partly help to make. A man who would shake himself loose
from them, requires great force of mind; he hardly knows where to begin in the search
after truth. On every side he is met by the world, which is not an abstraction of theologians,
but the most real of all things, being another name for ourselves when regarded collectively
and subjected to the influences of society. Then comes Socrates, impressed as no other
man ever was, with the unreality and untruthfulness of popular opinion, and tells mankind that
they must be and not seem. How are they to be? At any rate they must have the spirit
and desire to be. If they are ignorant, they must acknowledge their ignorance to themselves;
if they are conscious of doing evil, they must learn to do well; if they are weak, and
have nothing in them which they can call themselves, they must acquire firmness and consistency;
if they are indifferent, they must begin to take an interest in the great questions which
surround them. They must try to be what they would fain appear in the eyes of their fellow-men.
A single individual cannot easily change public opinion; but he can be true and innocent,
simple and independent; he can know what he does, and what he does not know; and though
not without an effort, he can form a judgment of his own, at least in common matters. In
his most secret actions he can show the same high principle (compare Republic) which he
shows when supported and watched by public opinion. And on some fitting occasion, on
some question of humanity or truth or right, even an ordinary man, from the natural rectitude
of his disposition, may be found to take up arms against a whole tribe of politicians
and lawyers, and be too much for them. Who is the true and who the false statesman?—
The true statesman is he who brings order out of disorder; who first organizes and then
administers the government of his own country; and having made a nation, seeks to reconcile
the national interests with those of Europe and of mankind. He is not a mere theorist,
nor yet a dealer in expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his mind; while
the head is conceiving, the hand is executing. Although obliged to descend to the world,
he is not of the world. His thoughts are fixed not on power or riches or extension of territory,
but on an ideal state, in which all the citizens have an equal chance of health and life, and
the highest education is within the reach of all, and the moral and intellectual qualities
of every individual are freely developed, and 'the idea of good' is the animating principle
of the whole. Not the attainment of freedom alone, or of order alone, but how to unite
freedom with order is the problem which he has to solve.
The statesman who places before himself these lofty aims has undertaken a task which will
call forth all his powers. He must control himself before he can control others; he must
know mankind before he can manage them. He has no private likes or dislikes; he does
not conceal personal enmity under the disguise of moral or political principle: such meannesses,
into which men too often fall unintentionally, are absorbed in the consciousness of his mission,
and in his love for his country and for mankind. He will sometimes ask himself what the next
generation will say of him; not because he is careful of posthumous fame, but because
he knows that the result of his life as a whole will then be more fairly judged. He
will take time for the execution of his plans; not hurrying them on when the mind of a nation
is unprepared for them; but like the Ruler of the Universe Himself, working in the appointed
time, for he knows that human life, 'if not long in comparison with eternity' (Republic),
is sufficient for the fulfilment of many great purposes. He knows, too, that the work will
be still going on when he is no longer here; and he will sometimes, especially when his
powers are failing, think of that other 'city of which the pattern is in heaven' (Republic).
The false politician is the serving-man of the state. In order to govern men he becomes
like them; their 'minds are married in conjunction;' they 'bear themselves' like vulgar and tyrannical
masters, and he is their obedient servant. The true politician, if he would rule men,
must make them like himself; he must 'educate his party' until they cease to be a party;
he must breathe into them the spirit which will hereafter give form to their institutions.
Politics with him are not a mechanism for seeming what he is not, or for carrying out
the will of the majority. Himself a representative man, he is the representative not of the lower
but of the higher elements of the nation. There is a better (as well as a worse) public
opinion of which he seeks to lay hold; as there is also a deeper current of human affairs
in which he is borne up when the waves nearer the shore are threatening him. He acknowledges
that he cannot take the world by force—two or three moves on the political chess board
are all that he can fore see—two or three weeks moves on the political chessboard are
all that he can foresee—two or three weeks or months are granted to him in which he can
provide against a coming struggle. But he knows also that there are permanent principles
of politics which are always tending to the well-being of states—better administration,
better education, the reconciliation of conflicting elements, increased security against external
enemies. These are not 'of to-day or yesterday,' but are the same in all times, and under all
forms of government. Then when the storm descends and the winds blow, though he knows not beforehand
the hour of danger, the pilot, not like Plato's captain in the Republic, half-blind and deaf,
but with penetrating eye and quick ear, is ready to take command of the ship and guide
her into port. The false politician asks not what is true,
but what is the opinion of the world—not what is right, but what is expedient. The
only measures of which he approves are the measures which will pass. He has no intention
of fighting an uphill battle; he keeps the roadway of politics. He is unwilling to incur
the persecution and enmity which political convictions would entail upon him. He begins
with popularity, and in fair weather sails gallantly along. But unpopularity soon follows
him. For men expect their leaders to be better and wiser than themselves: to be their guides
in danger, their saviours in extremity; they do not really desire them to obey all the
ignorant impulses of the popular mind; and if they fail them in a crisis they are disappointed.
Then, as Socrates says, the cry of ingratitude is heard, which is most unreasonable; for
the people, who have been taught no better, have done what might be expected of them,
and their statesmen have received justice at their hands.
The true statesman is aware that he must adapt himself to times and circumstances. He must
have allies if he is to fight against the world; he must enlighten public opinion; he
must accustom his followers to act together. Although he is not the mere executor of the
will of the majority, he must win over the majority to himself. He is their leader and
not their follower, but in order to lead he must also follow. He will neither exaggerate
nor undervalue the power of a statesman, neither adopting the 'laissez faire' nor the 'paternal
government' principle; but he will, whether he is dealing with children in politics, or
with full-grown men, seek to do for the people what the government can do for them, and what,
from imperfect education or deficient powers of combination, they cannot do for themselves.
He knows that if he does too much for them they will do nothing; and that if he does
nothing for them they will in some states of society be utterly helpless. For the many
cannot exist without the few, if the material force of a country is from below, wisdom and
experience are from above. It is not a small part of human evils which kings and governments
make or cure. The statesman is well aware that a great purpose carried out consistently
during many years will at last be executed. He is playing for a stake which may be partly
determined by some accident, and therefore he will allow largely for the unknown element
of politics. But the game being one in which chance and skill are combined, if he plays
long enough he is certain of victory. He will not be always consistent, for the world is
changing; and though he depends upon the support of a party, he will remember that he is the
minister of the whole. He lives not for the present, but for the future, and he is not
at all sure that he will be appreciated either now or then. For he may have the existing
order of society against him, and may not be remembered by a distant posterity.
There are always discontented idealists in politics who, like Socrates in the Gorgias,
find fault with all statesmen past as well as present, not excepting the greatest names
of history. Mankind have an uneasy feeling that they ought to be better governed than
they are. Just as the actual philosopher falls short of the one wise man, so does the actual
statesman fall short of the ideal. And so partly from vanity and egotism, but partly
also from a true sense of the faults of eminent men, a temper of dissatisfaction and criticism
springs up among those who are ready enough to acknowledge the inferiority of their own
powers. No matter whether a statesman makes high professions or none at all—they are
reduced sooner or later to the same level. And sometimes the more unscrupulous man is
better esteemed than the more conscientious, because he has not equally deceived expectations.
Such sentiments may be unjust, but they are widely spread; we constantly find them recurring
in reviews and newspapers, and still oftener in private conversation.
We may further observe that the art of government, while in some respects tending to improve,
has in others a tendency to degenerate, as institutions become more popular. Governing
for the people cannot easily be combined with governing by the people: the interests of
classes are too strong for the ideas of the statesman who takes a comprehensive view of
the whole. According to Socrates the true governor will find ruin or death staring him
in the face, and will only be induced to govern from the fear of being governed by a worse
man than himself (Republic). And in modern times, though the world has grown milder,
and the terrible consequences which Plato foretells no longer await an English statesman,
any one who is not actuated by a blind ambition will only undertake from a sense of duty a
work in which he is most likely to fail; and even if he succeed, will rarely be rewarded
by the gratitude of his own generation. Socrates, who is not a politician at all,
tells us that he is the only real politician of his time. Let us illustrate the meaning
of his words by applying them to the history of our own country. He would have said that
not Pitt or Fox, or Canning or Sir R. Peel, are the real politicians of their time, but
Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Ricardo. These during the greater part of their lives
occupied an inconsiderable space in the eyes of the public. They were private persons;
nevertheless they sowed in the minds of men seeds which in the next generation have become
an irresistible power. 'Herein is that saying true, One soweth and another reapeth.' We
may imagine with Plato an ideal statesman in whom practice and speculation are perfectly
harmonized; for there is no necessary opposition between them. But experience shows that they
are commonly divorced—the ordinary politician is the interpreter or executor of the thoughts
of others, and hardly ever brings to the birth a new political conception. One or two only
in modern times, like the Italian statesman Cavour, have created the world in which they
moved. The philosopher is naturally unfitted for political life; his great ideas are not
understood by the many; he is a thousand miles away from the questions of the day. Yet perhaps
the lives of thinkers, as they are stiller and deeper, are also happier than the lives
of those who are more in the public eye. They have the promise of the future, though they
are regarded as dreamers and visionaries by their own contemporaries. And when they are
no longer here, those who would have been ashamed of them during their lives claim kindred
with them, and are proud to be called by their names. (Compare Thucyd.)
Who is the true poet? Plato expels the poets from his Republic because
they are allied to sense; because they stimulate the emotions; because they are thrice removed
from the ideal truth. And in a similar spirit he declares in the Gorgias that the stately
muse of tragedy is a votary of pleasure and not of truth. In modern times we almost ridicule
the idea of poetry admitting of a moral. The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in primitive
antiquity are one and the same; but in later ages they seem to fall apart. The great art
of novel writing, that peculiar creation of our own and the last century, which, together
with the sister art of review writing, threatens to absorb all literature, has even less of
seriousness in her composition. Do we not often hear the novel writer censured for attempting
to convey a lesson to the minds of his readers? Yet the true office of a poet or writer of
fiction is not merely to give amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind,
good or bad, or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There have been poets in
modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have not forgotten their high vocation
of teachers; and the two greatest of the Greek dramatists owe their sublimity to their ethical
character. The noblest truths, sung of in the purest and sweetest language, are still
the proper material of poetry. The poet clothes them with beauty, and has a power of making
them enter into the hearts and memories of men. He has not only to speak of themes above
the level of ordinary life, but to speak of them in a deeper and tenderer way than they
are ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of them in others. The old he makes young
again; the familiar principle he invests with a new dignity; he finds a noble expression
for the common-places of morality and politics. He uses the things of sense so as to indicate
what is beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. He expresses what the better part
of us would fain say, and the half-conscious feeling is strengthened by the expression.
He is his own critic, for the spirit of poetry and of criticism are not divided in him. His
mission is not to disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to them their own nature, and
make them better acquainted with the world around them. True poetry is the remembrance
of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the happiest and holiest moments of life,
of the noblest thoughts of man, of the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future
may return to his greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may
not be effected for the human race by a better use of the poetical and imaginative faculty.
The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with truth, may still be possible. Neither
is the element of pleasure to be excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for
a lower we raise men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make an ideal,
or rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand sermons? Plato, like the Puritans,
is too much afraid of poetic and artistic influences. But he is not without a true sense
of the noble purposes to which art may be applied (Republic).
Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato's language, a flattery, a sophistry,
or sham, in which, without any serious purpose, the poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits
his gifts of language and metre. Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers;
he has the 'savoir faire,' or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit of poetry.
He has no conception that true art should bring order out of disorder; that it should
make provision for the soul's highest interest; that it should be pursued only with a view
to 'the improvement of the citizens.' He ministers to the weaker side of human nature (Republic);
he idealizes the sensual; he sings the strain of love in the latest fashion; instead of
raising men above themselves he brings them back to the 'tyranny of the many masters,'
from which all his life long a good man has been praying to be delivered. And often, forgetful
of measure and order, he will express not that which is truest, but that which is strongest.
Instead of a great and nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy of a heated
brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is not the master of his words, but his
words—perhaps borrowed from another—the faded reflection of some French or German
or Italian writer, have the better of him. Though we are not going to banish the poets,
how can we suppose that such utterances have any healing or life-giving influence on the
minds of men? 'Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:'
Art then must be true, and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true and
not a seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought out of disorder, truth out
of error and falsehood. This is what we mean by the greatest improvement of man. And so,
having considered in what way 'we can best spend the appointed time, we leave the result
with God.' Plato does not say that God will order all things for the best (compare Phaedo),
but he indirectly implies that the evils of this life will be corrected in another. And
as we are very far from the best imaginable world at present, Plato here, as in the Phaedo
and Republic, supposes a purgatory or place of education for mankind in general, and for
a very few a Tartarus or hell. The myth which terminates the dialogue is not the revelation,
but rather, like all similar descriptions, whether in the Bible or Plato, the veil of
another life. For no visible thing can reveal the invisible. Of this Plato, unlike some
commentators on Scripture, is fully aware. Neither will he dogmatize about the manner
in which we are 'born again' (Republic). Only he is prepared to maintain the ultimate triumph
of truth and right, and declares that no one, not even the wisest of the Greeks, can affirm
any other doctrine without being ridiculous. There is a further paradox of ethics, in which
pleasure and pain are held to be indifferent, and virtue at the time of action and without
regard to consequences is happiness. From this elevation or exaggeration of feeling
Plato seems to shrink: he leaves it to the Stoics in a later generation to maintain that
when impaled or on the rack the philosopher may be happy (compare Republic). It is observable
that in the Republic he raises this question, but it is not really discussed; the veil of
the ideal state, the shadow of another life, are allowed to descend upon it and it passes
out of sight. The martyr or sufferer in the cause of right or truth is often supposed
to die in raptures, having his eye fixed on a city which is in heaven. But if there were
no future, might he not still be happy in the performance of an action which was attended
only by a painful death? He himself may be ready to thank God that he was thought worthy
to do Him the least service, without looking for a reward; the joys of another life may
not have been present to his mind at all. Do we suppose that the mediaeval saint, St.
Bernard, St. Francis, St. Catharine of Sienna, or the Catholic priest who lately devoted
himself to death by a lingering disease that he might solace and help others, was thinking
of the 'sweets' of heaven? No; the work was already heaven to him and enough. Much less
will the dying patriot be dreaming of the praises of man or of an immortality of fame:
the sense of duty, of right, and trust in God will be sufficient, and as far as the
mind can reach, in that hour. If he were certain that there were no life to come, he would
not have wished to speak or act otherwise than he did in the cause of truth or of humanity.
Neither, on the other hand, will he suppose that God has forsaken him or that the future
is to be a mere blank to him. The greatest act of faith, the only faith which cannot
pass away, is his who has not known, but yet has believed. A very few among the sons of
men have made themselves independent of circumstances, past, present, or to come. He who has attained
to such a temper of mind has already present with him eternal life; he needs no arguments
to convince him of immortality; he has in him already a principle stronger than death.
He who serves man without the thought of reward is deemed to be a more faithful servant than
he who works for hire. May not the service of God, which is the more disinterested, be
in like manner the higher? And although only a very few in the course of the world's history—Christ
himself being one of them—have attained to such a noble conception of God and of the
human soul, yet the ideal of them may be present to us, and the remembrance of them be an example
to us, and their lives may shed a light on many dark places both of philosophy and theology.
THE MYTHS OF PLATO. The myths of Plato are a phenomenon unique
in literature. There are four longer ones: these occur in the Phaedrus, Phaedo, Gorgias,
and Republic. That in the Republic is the most elaborate and finished of them. Three
of these greater myths, namely those contained in the Phaedo, the Gorgias and the Republic,
relate to the destiny of human souls in a future life. The magnificent myth in the Phaedrus
treats of the immortality, or rather the eternity of the soul, in which is included a former
as well as a future state of existence. To these may be added, (1) the myth, or rather
fable, occurring in the Statesman, in which the life of innocence is contrasted with the
ordinary life of man and the consciousness of evil: (2) the legend of the Island of Atlantis,
an imaginary history, which is a fragment only, commenced in the Timaeus and continued
in the Critias: (3) the much less artistic fiction of the foundation of the Cretan colony
which is introduced in the preface to the Laws, but soon falls into the background:
(4) the beautiful but rather artificial tale of Prometheus and Epimetheus narrated in his
rhetorical manner by Protagoras in the dialogue called after him: (5) the speech at the beginning
of the Phaedrus, which is a parody of the orator Lysias; the rival speech of Socrates
and the recantation of it. To these may be added (6) the tale of the grasshoppers, and
(7) the tale of Thamus and of Theuth, both in the Phaedrus: (8) the parable of the Cave
(Republic), in which the previous argument is recapitulated, and the nature and degrees
of knowledge having been previously set forth in the abstract are represented in a picture:
(9) the fiction of the earth-born men (Republic; compare Laws), in which by the adaptation
of an old tradition Plato makes a new beginning for his society: (10) the myth of Aristophanes
respecting the division of the sexes, Sym.: (11) the parable of the noble captain, the
pilot, and the mutinous sailors (Republic), in which is represented the relation of the
better part of the world, and of the philosopher, to the mob of politicians: (12) the ironical
tale of the pilot who plies between Athens and Aegina charging only a small payment for
saving men from death, the reason being that he is uncertain whether to live or die is
better for them (Gor.): (13) the treatment of freemen and citizens by physicians and
of slaves by their apprentices,—a somewhat laboured figure of speech intended to illustrate
the two different ways in which the laws speak to men (Laws). There also occur in Plato continuous
images; some of them extend over several pages, appearing and reappearing at intervals: such
as the bees stinging and stingless (paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic,
who are generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which is to the visible
world what the idea of good is to the intellectual, in the Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite
animal, having the form of a man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a many-headed
monster (Republic): the great beast, i.e. the populace: and the wild beast within us,
meaning the passions which are always liable to break out: the animated comparisons of
the degradation of philosophy by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant
to the parricide, who 'beats his father, having first taken away his arms': the dog, who is
your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument wandering about
without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved, from the Gorgias: the argument
personified as veiling her face (Republic), as engaged in a chase, as breaking upon us
in a first, second and third wave:—on these figures of speech the changes are rung many
times over. It is observable that nearly all these parables or continuous images are found
in the Republic; that which occurs in the Theaetetus, of the midwifery of Socrates,
is perhaps the only exception. To make the list complete, the mathematical figure of
the number of the state (Republic), or the numerical interval which separates king from
tyrant, should not be forgotten. The myth in the Gorgias is one of those descriptions
of another life which, like the Sixth Aeneid of Virgil, appear to contain reminiscences
of the mysteries. It is a vision of the rewards and punishments which await good and bad men
after death. It supposes the body to continue and to be in another world what it has become
in this. It includes a Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno, like the sister myths of the
Phaedo and the Republic. The Inferno is reserved for great criminals only. The argument of
the dialogue is frequently referred to, and the meaning breaks through so as rather to
destroy the liveliness and consistency of the picture. The structure of the fiction
is very slight, the chief point or moral being that in the judgments of another world there
is no possibility of concealment: Zeus has taken from men the power of foreseeing death,
and brings together the souls both of them and their judges naked and undisguised at
the judgment-seat. Both are exposed to view, stripped of the veils and clothes which might
prevent them from seeing into or being seen by one another.
The myth of the Phaedo is of the same type, but it is more cosmological, and also more
poetical. The beautiful and ingenious fancy occurs to Plato that the upper atmosphere
is an earth and heaven in one, a glorified earth, fairer and purer than that in which
we dwell. As the fishes live in the ocean, mankind are living in a lower sphere, out
of which they put their heads for a moment or two and behold a world beyond. The earth
which we inhabit is a sediment of the coarser particles which drop from the world above,
and is to that heavenly earth what the desert and the shores of the ocean are to us. A part
of the myth consists of description of the interior of the earth, which gives the opportunity
of introducing several mythological names and of providing places of torment for the
wicked. There is no clear distinction of soul and body; the spirits beneath the earth are
spoken of as souls only, yet they retain a sort of shadowy form when they cry for mercy
on the shores of the lake; and the philosopher alone is said to have got rid of the body.
All the three myths in Plato which relate to the world below have a place for repentant
sinners, as well as other homes or places for the very good and very bad. It is a natural
reflection which is made by Plato elsewhere, that the two extremes of human character are
rarely met with, and that the generality of mankind are between them. Hence a place must
be found for them. In the myth of the Phaedo they are carried down the river Acheron to
the Acherusian lake, where they dwell, and are purified of their evil deeds, and receive
the rewards of their good. There are also incurable sinners, who are cast into Tartarus,
there to remain as the penalty of atrocious crimes; these suffer everlastingly. And there
is another class of hardly-curable sinners who are allowed from time to time to approach
the shores of the Acherusian lake, where they cry to their victims for mercy; which if they
obtain they come out into the lake and cease from their torments.
Neither this, nor any of the three greater myths of Plato, nor perhaps any allegory or
parable relating to the unseen world, is consistent with itself. The language of philosophy mingles
with that of mythology; abstract ideas are transformed into persons, figures of speech
into realities. These myths may be compared with the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan, in
which discussions of theology are mixed up with the incidents of travel, and mythological
personages are associated with human beings: they are also garnished with names and phrases
taken out of Homer, and with other fragments of Greek tradition.
The myth of the Republic is more subtle and also more consistent than either of the two
others. It has a greater verisimilitude than they have, and is full of touches which recall
the experiences of human life. It will be noticed by an attentive reader that the twelve
days during which Er lay in a trance after he was slain coincide with the time passed
by the spirits in their pilgrimage. It is a curious observation, not often made, that
good men who have lived in a well-governed city (shall we say in a religious and respectable
society?) are more likely to make mistakes in their choice of life than those who have
had more experience of the world and of evil. It is a more familiar remark that we constantly
blame others when we have only ourselves to blame; and the philosopher must acknowledge,
however reluctantly, that there is an element of chance in human life with which it is sometimes
impossible for man to cope. That men drink more of the waters of forgetfulness than is
good for them is a poetical description of a familiar truth. We have many of us known
men who, like Odysseus, have wearied of ambition and have only desired rest. We should like
to know what became of the infants 'dying almost as soon as they were born,' but Plato
only raises, without satisfying, our curiosity. The two companies of souls, ascending and
descending at either chasm of heaven and earth, and conversing when they come out into the
meadow, the majestic figures of the judges sitting in heaven, the voice heard by Ardiaeus,
are features of the great allegory which have an indescribable grandeur and power. The remark
already made respecting the inconsistency of the two other myths must be extended also
to this: it is at once an orrery, or model of the heavens, and a picture of the Day of
Judgment. The three myths are unlike anything else in
Plato. There is an Oriental, or rather an Egyptian element in them, and they have an
affinity to the mysteries and to the Orphic modes of worship. To a certain extent they
are un-Greek; at any rate there is hardly anything like them in other Greek writings
which have a serious purpose; in spirit they are mediaeval. They are akin to what may be
termed the underground religion in all ages and countries. They are presented in the most
lively and graphic manner, but they are never insisted on as true; it is only affirmed that
nothing better can be said about a future life. Plato seems to make use of them when
he has reached the limits of human knowledge; or, to borrow an expression of his own, when
he is standing on the outside of the intellectual world. They are very simple in style; a few
touches bring the picture home to the mind, and make it present to us. They have also
a kind of authority gained by the employment of sacred and familiar names, just as mere
fragments of the words of Scripture, put together in any form and applied to any subject, have
a power of their own. They are a substitute for poetry and mythology; and they are also
a reform of mythology. The moral of them may be summed up in a word or two: After death
the Judgment; and 'there is some better thing remaining for the good than for the evil.'
All literature gathers into itself many elements of the past: for example, the tale of the
earth-born men in the Republic appears at first sight to be an extravagant fancy, but
it is restored to propriety when we remember that it is based on a legendary belief. The
art of making stories of ghosts and apparitions credible is said to consist in the manner
of telling them. The effect is gained by many literary and conversational devices, such
as the previous raising of curiosity, the mention of little circumstances, simplicity,
picturesqueness, the naturalness of the occasion, and the like. This art is possessed by Plato
in a degree which has never been equalled. The myth in the Phaedrus is even greater than
the myths which have been already described, but is of a different character. It treats
of a former rather than of a future life. It represents the conflict of reason aided
by passion or righteous indignation on the one hand, and of the animal lusts and instincts
on the other. The soul of man has followed the company of some god, and seen truth in
the form of the universal before it was born in this world. Our present life is the result
of the struggle which was then carried on. This world is relative to a former world,
as it is often projected into a future. We ask the question, Where were men before birth?
As we likewise enquire, What will become of them after death? The first question is unfamiliar
to us, and therefore seems to be unnatural; but if we survey the whole human race, it
has been as influential and as widely spread as the other. In the Phaedrus it is really
a figure of speech in which the 'spiritual combat' of this life is represented. The majesty
and power of the whole passage—especially of what may be called the theme or proem (beginning
'The mind through all her being is immortal')—can only be rendered very inadequately in another
language. The myth in the Statesman relates to a former
cycle of existence, in which men were born of the earth, and by the reversal of the earth's
motion had their lives reversed and were restored to youth and beauty: the dead came to life,
the old grew middle-aged, and the middle-aged young; the youth became a child, the child
an infant, the infant vanished into the earth. The connection between the reversal of the
earth's motion and the reversal of human life is of course verbal only, yet Plato, like
theologians in other ages, argues from the consistency of the tale to its truth. The
new order of the world was immediately under the government of God; it was a state of innocence
in which men had neither wants nor cares, in which the earth brought forth all things
spontaneously, and God was to man what man now is to the animals. There were no great
estates, or families, or private possessions, nor any traditions of the past, because men
were all born out of the earth. This is what Plato calls the 'reign of Cronos;' and in
like manner he connects the reversal of the earth's motion with some legend of which he
himself was probably the inventor. The question is then asked, under which of
these two cycles of existence was man the happier,—under that of Cronos, which was
a state of innocence, or that of Zeus, which is our ordinary life? For a while Plato balances
the two sides of the serious controversy, which he has suggested in a figure. The answer
depends on another question: What use did the children of Cronos make of their time?
They had boundless leisure and the faculty of discoursing, not only with one another,
but with the animals. Did they employ these advantages with a view to philosophy, gathering
from every nature some addition to their store of knowledge? or, Did they pass their time
in eating and drinking and telling stories to one another and to the beasts?—in either
case there would be no difficulty in answering. But then, as Plato rather mischievously adds,
'Nobody knows what they did,' and therefore the doubt must remain undetermined.
To the first there succeeds a second epoch. After another natural convulsion, in which
life are not overlooked. End of Introduction