The Republic — Chapter 29: Book VIII (part 3/4)
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And, in my humble opinion, very satisfactorily discovered, he replied.
Pompeii, near Mount Vesuvius, buried in the eruption of 79 A. D.
Thus, then, I said, the nature and place in the State of one of the four virtues has somehow or other been discovered.
[“He commanded the arms to be produced, the horses brought out, hostages to be given.”--De Bello Gall., vii. II.]
And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names; insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage. And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.
And so by reason of the smallest part or class, and of the knowledge which resides in this presiding and ruling part of itself, the whole State, being thus constituted according to nature, will be wise; and this, which has the only knowledge worthy to be called wisdom, has been ordained by nature to be of all classes the least.
He was, perhaps, as much poet as philosopher. He is generally identified with the Theory of Ideas, that things are what they are by participation with our eternal Idea. His "Commonwealth" was a kind of Utopia.
“Arma proferri, jumenta produci, obsides dari jubet.”
And so the young man returns into the country of the lotus-eaters, and takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men; and if any help be sent by his friends to the oligarchical part of him, the aforesaid vain conceits shut the gate of the king’s fastness; and they will neither allow the embassy itself to enter, nor if private advisers offer the fatherly counsel of the aged will they listen to them or receive them. There is a battle and they gain the day, and then modesty, which they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and cast forth; they persuade men that moderation and orderly expenditure are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them beyond the border.
Will not the guardians be the smallest of all the classes who receive a name from the profession of some kind of knowledge?
Plato of Athens, 429-347 B.C. He used the dialectic method invented by his master Socrates.
False and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their place.
says Livy. And so the first thing they did to prevent the mutinies and insurrections of nations of late conquest was to take from them their arms and horses, and therefore it is that we so often meet in Caesar:
The smiths, he replied, will be far more numerous.
He was put to death by the State in 317, on a false suspicion, and left a message for his son "to bear no grudge against the Athenians."
At length they seize upon the citadel of the young man’s soul, which they perceive to be void of all accomplishments and fair pursuits and true words, which make their abode in the minds of men who are dear to the gods, and are their best guardians and sentinels.
[“Wherein the Roman does questionless excel.”--Livy, ix. 22.]
And will there be in our city more of these true guardians or more smiths?
He was called by Demosthenes, "the pruner of my periods."