Title: Gorgias
Author: Plato


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 fills 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 by 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 the order of the world and of human life is once
more reversed, God withdraws his guiding hand, and man is left to the
government of himself. The world begins again, and arts and laws are
slowly and painfully invented. A secular age succeeds to a
theocratical. In this fanciful tale Plato has dropped, or almost
dropped, the garb of mythology. He suggests several curious and
important thoughts, such as the possibility of a state of innocence,
the existence of a world without traditions, and the difference between
human and divine government. He has also carried a step further his
speculations concerning the abolition of the family and of property,
which he supposes to have no place among the children of Cronos any
more than in the ideal state.

It is characteristic of Plato and of his age to pass from the abstract
to the concrete, from poetry to reality. Language is the expression of
the seen, and also of the unseen, and moves in a region between them. A
great writer knows how to strike both these chords, sometimes remaining
within the sphere of the visible, and then again comprehending a wider
range and soaring to the abstract and universal. Even in the same
sentence he may employ both modes of speech not improperly or
inharmoniously. It is useless to criticise the broken metaphors of
Plato, if the effect of the whole is to create a picture not such as
can be painted on canvas, but which is full of life and meaning to the
reader. A poem may be contained in a word or two, which may call up not
one but many latent images; or half reveal to us by a sudden flash the
thoughts of many hearts. Often the rapid transition from one image to
another is pleasing to us: on the other hand, any single figure of
speech if too often repeated, or worked out too much at length, becomes
prosy and monotonous. In theology and philosophy we necessarily include
both “the moral law within and the starry heaven above,” and pass from
one to the other (compare for examples Psalms xviii. and xix.). Whether
such a use of language is puerile or noble depends upon the genius of
the writer or speaker, and the familiarity of the associations
employed.

In the myths and parables of Plato the ease and grace of conversation
is not forgotten: they are spoken, not written words, stories which are
told to a living audience, and so well told that we are more than
half-inclined to believe them (compare Phaedrus). As in conversation
too, the striking image or figure of speech is not forgotten, but is
quickly caught up, and alluded to again and again; as it would still be
in our own day in a genial and sympathetic society. The descriptions of
Plato have a greater life and reality than is to be found in any modern
writing. This is due to their homeliness and simplicity. Plato can do
with words just as he pleases; to him they are indeed “more plastic
than wax” (Republic). We are in the habit of opposing speech and
writing, poetry and prose. But he has discovered a use of language in
which they are united; which gives a fitting expression to the highest
truths; and in which the trifles of courtesy and the familiarities of
daily life are not overlooked.
