[75] "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The
Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting a knot; for Plato speaks to us
indirectly only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the Platonic
Socrates, a figure most ambiguously compacted of the real Socrates and
Plato himself; a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps have been
fancied, or, so to speak, an idolon theatri--Plato's self, but
presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a
kind of stage disguise. So we might fancy but for certain independent
information we possess about Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the
Memorabilia of Xenophon.
The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world.
From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline
of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was
clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek
conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected
pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary
young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical
things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master,
Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as
Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in
all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he
suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a god within. By a
mind, of the compass Plato himself supposes, two quite different
impressions may well have been made on two typically different
observers. The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy,
vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult
and extraordinary thoughts. In the absence, then, of a single written
word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the
true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all
besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite
original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed
something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have
thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was
of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all
that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic
Dialogues credit him. It is a problem about which probably no reader
of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:--how much precisely he must
deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of
defining to himself the Socrates of fact.
In Plato's own writing about Socrates there is, however, a difference.
The Apology, marked as being the single writing from Plato's hand not
in dialogue form, we may naturally take for a sincere version of the
actual words of Socrates; closer to them, we may think, than the Greek
record of spoken words however important, the speeches in Thucydides,
for instance, by the admission of Thucydides himself, was wont to be.
And this assumption is supported by internal evidence. In that
unadorned language, in those harsh grammatic (or rather quite
ungrammatic) constructions we have surely the natural accent of one
speaking under strong excitement. We might think, again, that the
Phaedo, purporting to record his subsequent discourse, is really no
more than such a record, but for a lurking suspicion, which hangs by
the fact that Plato, noted as an assistant at the trial, is expressly
stated by one of the speakers in the Dialogue to have been absent from
the dying scene of Socrates. That speaker however was himself perhaps
the veracious reporter of those last words and acts; for there are
details in the Phaedo too pedestrian and common-place to be taken for
things of mere literary invention: the rubbing of the legs, for
instance, now released from the chain; the rather [78] uneasy
determination to be indifferent; the somewhat harsh committal of the
crudely lamenting wife and his child "to any one who will take the
trouble"--details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave
those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and
tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have
sometimes been compared.
We shall be justified then, in the effort to give reality or truth to
our mental picture of Socrates, if we follow the lead of his own
supposed retrospect of his career in the Apology, as completed, and
explained to wholly sympathetic spirits, by the more intimate
discourses of the Phaedo.
He pleads to be excused if in making his defence he speaks after his
accustomed manner: not merely in home-spun phrase, that is to say, very
different from what is usually heard at least in those sophisticated
law-courts of Athens, nor merely with certain lapsing into his familiar
habit of dialogue, but with a tacit assumption, throughout his
arguments, of that logical realism which suggested the first outline of
Plato's doctrine of the "ideas." Everywhere, with what is like a
physical passion for what is, what is true--as one engaged in a sort of
religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and
meant us to know--he is driving earnestly, yet with method, at those
universal conceptions or definitions which serve to establish [79]
firmly the distinction, attained by so much intellectual labour,
between what is absolute and abiding, of veritable import therefore to
our reason, to the divine reason really resident in each one of us,
resident in, yet separable from, these our houses of clay--between
that, and what is only phenomenal and transitory, as being essentially
implicate with them. He achieved this end, as we learn from Aristotle,
this power, literally, of "a criticism of life," by induction (epagôgê)+
by that careful process of enquiry into the facts of the matter
concerned, one by one (facts most often of conscience, of moral action
as conditioned by motive, and result, and the varying degrees of inward
light upon it) for which the fitting method is informal though not
unmethodical question and answer, face to face with average mankind, as
in those famous Socratic conversations, which again are the first rough
natural growth of Plato's so artistic written Dialogues. The exclusive
preoccupation of Socrates with practical matter therein, his anxious
fixing of the sense of such familiar terms as just and good, for
instance, was part of that humble bearing of himself by which he was to
authenticate a claim to superior wisdom, forced upon him by nothing
less than divine authority, while there was something also in it of a
natural reaction against the intellectual ambition of his youth. He
had gone to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the [80] Phaedo,
in his last discourse, to a physical philosopher, then of great repute,
but to his own great disappointment.--
In my youth he says I had a wonderful desire for the wisdom
which people call natural science--peri physeôs historian.+
It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every matter:
how it comes to be; ceases to be; why it is. I lost my sight in
this enquiry to the degree of un-learning what I had hitherto
seemed to myself and others to know clearly enough. But having
heard one reading from a book written, as he said, by Anaxagoras,
which said that it is Reason that arranges and is the cause of
all things, I was delighted with this cause; and thought to
myself, if this be so, then it does with each what may be best
for it. Thus considering, it was with joy I fancied I had found
me a teacher about the cause--Anaxagoras: that he would show me
for instance, first, whether the earth was round or flat; and
then that it was best for it to be so: and if he made these
points clear I was prepared to ask for no other sort of causes.
Phaedo, 96.
Well! Socrates proceeds to the great natural philosopher, and is
immensely discouraged to find him after all making very little use of
Reason in his explanation why natural things are thus and not
otherwise; explaining everything, rather, by secondary and mechanical
causes. "It was as if," he concludes, "some one had undertaken to
prove that Socrates does everything through Reason; and had gone on to
show that it was because my body is constructed in a certain way, of
certain bones and muscles, that Socrates is now sitting here in the
prison, voluntarily awaiting death."
The disappointment of Socrates with the [81] spirit in which Anaxagoras
actually handled and applied that so welcome sapiential proposition
that Reason panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin +--arranges and is
the cause of all things--is but an example of what often happens when
men seek an a posteriori justification of their instinctive
prepossessions. Once for all he turns from useless, perhaps impious,
enquiries, into the material structure of the stars above him, or the
earth beneath his feet, from all physical enquiry into material things,
to the direct knowledge of man the cosmical order in man, as it may be
found by any one who, in good faith with himself, and with devout
attention, looks within. In this precise sense it was that, according
to the old saying, Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to
earth. Montaigne, the great humanist, expands it.--"'Twas he who
brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to
restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies.
He has done human nature a great service," he adds, "in showing it how
much it can do of itself." And a singular incident gave that piercing
study, that relentless exposure, of himself, and of others, for the
most part so unwelcome to them, a religious or mystic character. He
has a "vocation" thus to proceed, has been literally "called," as he
understands, by the central religious authority of Greece. His
seemingly invidious testing of men's pretensions [82] to know, is a
sacred service to the God of Delphi, which he dares not neglect. And
his fidelity herein had in turn the effect of reinforcing for him, and
bringing to a focus, all the other rays of religious light cast at
random in the world about him, or in himself.
"You know Chaerephon," he says, "his eagerness about any matter he
takes up. Well! once upon a time he went to Delphi, and ventured to
ask of the oracle whether any man living was wiser than I; and, amazing
as it seems, the Pythia answered that there was no one wiser than I."
Socrates must go in order, then, to every class of persons pre-eminent
for knowledge; to every one who seems to know more than he. He found
them--the Athenian poets, for instance, the potters who made the vases
we admire, undeniably in possession of much delightful knowledge
unattained by him. But one and all they were ignorant of the
limitations of their knowledge; and at last he concludes that the
oracle had but meant to say: "He indeed is the wisest of all men who
like Socrates is aware that he is really worth little or nothing in
respect of knowledge." Such consciousness of ignorance was the proper
wisdom of man.
That can scarcely be a fiction. His wholesome appeal then, everywhere,
from what seems, to what really is, is a service to the Delphic god,
the god of sanity. To prove that the oracle had [83] been right after
all, improbable as it seemed, in the signal honour it had put upon him,
would be henceforward his proper business. Committing him to a sort of
ironical humility towards others, at times seemingly petty and prosaic,
certainly very irritating, in regard to himself, in its source and
motive, his business in life as he conceived it was nothing less than a
divine possession. He becomes therefore literally an enthusiast for
knowledge, for the knowledge of man; such knowledge as by a right
method of questioning, of self-questioning (the master's questioning
being after all only a kind of mid-wife's assistance, according to his
own homely figure) may be brought to birth in every human soul,
concerning itself and its experience; what is real, and stable, in its
apprehensions of Piety, Beauty, Justice, and the like, what is of
dynamic quality in them, as conveying force into what one does or
creates, building character, generating virtue. Auto kath' hauto
zêtein ti pot' estin aretê+--to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and
by itself--there's the task. And when we have found that, we shall
know already, or easily get to know, everything else about and about
it: "how we are to come by virtue," for instance.
Well! largely by knowing, says naturally the enthusiast for knowledge.
There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend--Mêden estin
agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei +--a strenuously [84] ascertained
knowledge however, painfully adjusted to other forms of knowledge which
may seem inconsistent with it, and impenetrably distinct from any kind
of complaisant or only half-attentive conjecture. "One and the same
species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and
through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic"*: it will
be all this--the Virtue, for instance, which we must seek, as a hunter
his sustenance, seek and find and never lose again, through a survey of
all the many variable and merely relative virtues, which are but
relative, that is to say, "to every several act, and to each period of
life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us"--kath'
hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros hekaston ergon, hekastô
hêmôn --+ "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know
what sort of a thing it is"--ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti
eideiên;+ what its poiotêtes,+ its qualities, are? "Do you suppose that
one who does not know Meno, for example, at all, who he is, can know
whether he is fair and rich and well-born, or the reverse of all that?"
Yes! already for Socrates, we might say, to know what justice or Piety
or Beauty really is, will be like the knowledge of a person; only that,
as Aristotle carefully notes, his scrupulous habit of search for
universal, or catholic, definitions (kath' holou)+ was after all but
[85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts. Strange! out of
the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and
correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for
the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the
mystic intellectualism of Plato--Platonism, with all its hazardous
flights of soul.
A rich contributor to the philosophic consciousness of Plato, Socrates
was perhaps of larger influence still on the religious soul in him. As
Plato accepted from the masters of Elea the theoretic principles of all
natural religion--the principles of a reasonable monotheism, so from
Socrates he derived its indispensable morality. It was Socrates who
first of pagans comprised in one clear consciousness the authentic
rudiments of such natural religion, and gave them clear utterance.
Through him, Parmenides had conveyed to Plato the notion of a "Perfect
Being," to brace and satisfy the abstracting intellect; but it was from
Socrates himself Plato had learned those correspondent practical
pieties, which tranquillise and re-assure the soul, together with the
genial hopes which cheer the great teacher on the day of his death.
Loyal to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religion of
many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through
it to one unmistakable person, of perfect intelligence, power and
goodness, who takes note [86] of him. In the course of his seventy
years he has adjusted that thought of the invisible to the general
facts and to many of the subtler complexities of man's experience in
the world of sight. Sitivit anima mea, the Athenian philosopher might
say, in Deum, in Deum vivum, as he was known at Sion. He has at least
measured devoutly the place, this way and that, which a religion of
infallible authority must fill; has already by implication concurred in
it; and in fact has his reward at this depressing hour, as the action
of the poison mounts slowly to the centre of his material existence.
He is more than ready to depart to what before one has really crossed
their threshold must necessarily seem the cold and empty spaces of the
world no bodily eye can ever look on.
But, he is asked, if the prospect be indeed so cheerful, at all events
for the just, why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death
must be by self-destruction?--Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous
heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên.+ His consistent
piety straightway suggests the solution of that paradox: we are the
property, slaves, of the gods. Now no slave has any sort of right to
destroy himself; to take a life that does not really belong to him.
Comfort himself and his friends, however, as he may, it does tax all
his resources of moral and physical courage to do what is at last
required of him: and it was something quite new, unseen [87] before in
Greece, inspiring a new note in literature--this attitude of Socrates
in the condemned cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction,
multitudes, of a wisdom and piety, after all, so different from his,
have ever since assisted so admiringly, this anticipation of the
Christian way of dying for an opinion, when, as Plato says simply, he
consumed the poison in the prison--to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô.+
It was amid larger consolations, we must admit, that Christian heroes
did that kind of thing. But bravery, you need hardly be reminded, was
ever one of the specially characteristic virtues of the pagan world--
loyalty even unto death. It had been loyalty however hitherto to one's
country, one's home in the world, one's visible companions; not to a
wholly invisible claimant, in this way, upon one, upon one's self.
Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose, had been, as Alcibiades
suggested, by natural constitution a twofold power, an embodied
paradox. The infinitely significant Socrates of Plato, and the quite
simple Socrates of Xenophon, may have been indeed the not incompatible
oppositions of a nature, from the influence of which, as a matter of
fact, there emerged on one hand the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic
School, embodying respectively those opposed austerities and amenities
of character, which, according to the temper of this or that disciple,
had seemed to predominate in their common master. And so the courage
which declined to act as almost [88] any one else would have acted in
that matter of the legal appeal which might have mitigated the penalty
of death, bringing to its appropriate end a life whose main power had
been an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in Socrates,
paradoxically, with a genuine diffidence about his own convictions
which explains some peculiarities in his manner of teaching. The
irony, the humour, for which he was famous--the unfailing humour which
some have found in his very last words--were not merely spontaneous
personal traits, or tricks of manner; but an essential part of the
dialectical apparatus, as affording a means of escape from
responsibility, convenient for one who has scruples about the fitness
of his own thoughts for the reception of another, doubts as to the
power of words to convey thoughts, such as he thinks cannot after all
be properly conveyed to another, but only awakened, or brought to birth
in him, out of himself,--who can tell with what distortions in that
secret place? For we judge truth not by the intellect exclusively, and
on reasons that can be adequately embodied in propositions; but with
the whole complex man. Observant therefore of the capricious results
of mere teaching, to the last he protests, dissemblingly, and with that
irony which is really one phase of the Socratic humour, that in his
peculiar function there have been in very deed neither teacher nor
learners.
[89] The voice, the sign from heaven, that "new deity" he was accused
of fabricating (his singularly profound sense of a mental phenomenon
which is probably not uncommon) held perhaps of the same characteristic
habit of mind. It was neither the playful pretence which some have
supposed; nor yet an insoluble mystery; but only what happens naturally
to a really diffident spirit in great and still more in small matters
which at this or that taxing moment seem to usurp the determination of
great issues. Such a spirit may find itself beset by an inexplicable
reluctance to do what would be most natural in the given circumstances.
And for a religious nature, apt to trace the divine assistance
everywhere, it was as if, in those perilous moments--well! as if one's
guardian angel held one back. A quite natural experience took the
supernatural hue of religion; which, however, as being concerned now
and then with some circumstance in itself trifling, might seem to lapse
at times into superstition.
And as he was thus essentially twofold in character, so Socrates had to
contend against two classes of enemies. "An offence" to the whole
tribe of Sophists, he was hated also by those who hated them, by the
good old men of Athens, whose conservatism finds its representative in
Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic challenge of first
principles, in that ceaseless testing of the origin and claims of what
all [90] honest people might seem to take for granted, only a further
development of the pernicious function of the Sophists themselves, by
the most subtly influential of them all. If in the Apology he proves
that the fathers of sons had no proper locus standi against him, still,
in the actual conduct of his defence, as often in Plato's Dialogues,
there is (the candid reader cannot but admit it) something of
sophistry, of the casuist. Claiming to be but a simple argument, the
Apology of Socrates moves sometimes circuitously, after the manner of
one who really has to make the worse appear the better reason (ton
hêttô logon kreittô poiein)+ and must needs use a certain kind of
artificial, or ingenious, or ad captandum arguments, such as would best
have been learned in the sophistic school. Those young Athenians whom
he was thought to have corrupted of set purpose, he had not only
admired but really loved and understood; and as a consequence had
longed to do them real good, chiefly by giving them that interest in
themselves which is the first condition of any real power over others.
To make Meno, Polus, Charmides, really interested in himself, to help
him to the discovery of that wonderful new world here at home--in this
effort, even more than in making them interested in other people and
things, lay and still lies (it is no sophistical paradox!) the central
business of education. Only, the very thoroughness of the sort of
self-knowledge he [91] promoted had in it something sacramental, so to
speak; if it did not do them good, must do them considerable harm;
could not leave them just as they were. He had not been able in all
cases to expand "the better self," as people say, in those he
influenced. Some of them had really become very insolent questioners
of others, as also of a wholly legitimate authority within themselves;
and had but passed from bad to worse. That fatal necessity had been
involved of coming to years of discretion. His claim to have been no
teacher at all, to be irresponsible in regard to those who had in truth
been his very willing disciples, was but humorous or ironical; and as a
consequence there was after all a sort of historic justice in his
death.
The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is
tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that super-
ficial sense of the word according to which every misfortune
is called 'tragic.' In the latter sense, one might say of
Socrates that because he was condemned to death unjustly his
fate was tragic. But in truth innocent suffering of that sort
is merely pathetic, not tragic; inasmuch as it is not within
the sphere of reason. Now suffering--misfortune--comes within
the sphere of reason, only if it is brought about by the free-
will of the subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable;
as must be also the power against which that subject proceeds.
This power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of
a tyrant; because it is only in such case that the man is himself,
so to speak, guilty of his misfortune. In genuine tragedy, then,
they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which, from
this side and from that, come into collision; and such was the
fate of Socrates. His fate therefore is not merely personal, and
as it were part of the romance of an individual: [92] it is the
general fate, in all its tragedy--the tragedy of Athens, of
Greece, which is therein carried out. Two opposed Rights come
forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this
way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the
one towards the other: not as if this were right; that other
wrong. On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious
moral habit: the other principle, over against it, is the equally
religious claim--the claim of the consciousness, of the reason,
creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. The latter remains the common
principle of philosophy for all time to come. And these are the
two principles which come forth over against each other, in the
life and in the philosophy of Socrates. Geschichte der
Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.
"I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander," says
Montaigne, again, "but Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot";
and we may take that as typical of the immense credit of Socrates, even
with a vast number of people who have not really known much about him.
"For the sake of no long period of years," says Socrates himself, now
condemned to death--the few years for which a man of seventy is likely
to remain here--
You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to reproach
from those who desire to malign the city of Athens--that ye put
Socrates to death, a wise man. For in very truth they will
declare me to have been wise--those who wish to discredit you--
even though I be not. Now had you waited a little while this
thing would have happened for you in the course of nature. For
ye see my estate: that it is now far onward on the road of life,
hard by death. Apology, 38.
Plato, though present at the trial, was absent when Socrates "consumed
the poison in the [93] prison." Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells
us in the Phaedo, Plato would however almost certainly have heard from
him, or from some other of that band of disciples who assisted at the
last utterances of their master, the sincerest possible account of all
that was then said and done. Socrates had used the brief space which
elapsed before the officers removed him to the place, "whither he must
go, to die" (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ to discourse with those who
still lingered in the court precisely on what are called "The four last
things." Arrived at the prison a further delay awaited him, in
consequence (it was so characteristic of the Athenian people!) of a
religious scruple. The ship of sacred annual embassy to Apollo at
Delos was not yet returned to Athens; and the consequent interval of
time might not be profaned by the death of a criminal. Socrates
himself certainly occupies it religiously enough by a continuation of
his accustomed discourses, touched now with the deepening solemnity of
the moment.
The Phaedo of Plato has impressed most readers as a veritable record of
those last discourses of Socrates; while in the details of what then
happened, the somewhat prosaic account there given of the way in which
the work of death was done, we find what there would have been no
literary satisfaction in inventing; his indifferent treatment, for
instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in
violent [94] distress--treatment in marked contrast, it must be
observed again, with the dignified tenderness of a later scene, as
recorded in the Gospels.
An inventor, with mere literary effect in view, at this and other
points would have invented differently. "The prison," says Cebes, the
chief disciple in the Phaedo, "was not far from the court-house; and
there we were used to wait every day till we might be admitted to our
master. One morning we were assembled earlier than usual; for on the
evening before we heard that the ship was returned from Delos. The
porter coming out bade us tarry till he should call us. For, he said,
the Eleven are now freeing Socrates from his bonds, announcing to him
that he must die to-day."
They were very young men, we are told, who were with Socrates, and how
sweetly, kindly, approvingly, he listened to their so youthfully
sanguine discussion on the immortality of the soul. For their sakes
rather than his own he is ready to treat further, by way of a
posteriori arguments, a belief which in himself is matter of invincible
natural prepossession. In the court he had pleaded at the most for
suspended judgment on that question:--"If I claimed on any point to be
wiser than any one else it would be in this, that having no adequate
knowledge of things in Hades so I do not fancy I know." But, in the
privacy of these last hours, he is confident in his utterance on the
[95] subject which is so much in the minds of the youths around him;
his arguments like theirs being in fact very much of the nature of the
things poets write (poiêmata)+ or almost like those medicinable fictions
(pseudê en pharmakou eidei)+ such as are of legitimate use by the
expert. That the soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought!) is a harmony;
that there are reasons why this particular harmony should not cease,
like that of the lyre or the harp, with the destruction of the
instrument which produced it; why this sort of flame should not go out
with the upsetting of the lamp:--such are the arguments, sometimes
little better than verbal ones, which pass this way and that around the
death-bed of Socrates, as they still occur to men's minds. For
himself, whichever way they tend, they come and go harmlessly, about an
immovable personal conviction, which, as he says, "came to me apart
from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness":
(Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias).+ The
formula of probability could not have been more aptly put. It is one
of those convictions which await, it may be, stronger, better,
arguments than are forthcoming; but will wait for them with unfailing
patience.--"The soul therefore Cebes," since such provisional arguments
must be allowed to pass, "is something sturdy and strong (ischuron ti
estin)+ imperishable by accident or wear; and we shall really exist in
Hades." Indulging a little [96] further the "poetry turned logic" of
those youthful assistants, Socrates too, even Socrates, who had always
turned away so persistently from what he thought the vanity of the eye,
just before the bodily eye finally closes, and his last moment being
now at hand, ascends to, or declines upon, the fancy of a quite visible
paradise awaiting him.--
It is said that the world, if one gaze down on it from above,
is to look on like those leathern balls of twelve pieces,
variegated in divers colours, of which the colours here--those
our painters use--are as it were samples. There, the whole
world is formed of such, and far brighter and purer than they;
part sea-purple of a wonderful beauty; a part like gold; a part
whiter than alabaster or snow; aye, composed thus of other
colours also of like quality, of greater loveliness than ours--
colours we have never seen. For even those hollows in it, being
filled with air and water, present a certain species of colour
gleaming amid the diversity of the others; so that it presents
one continuous aspect of varied hues. Thus it is: and conform-
ably tree and flower and fruit are put forth and grow. The
mountains again and the rocks, after the same manner, have a
smoothness and transparency and colours lovelier than here. The
tiny precious stones we prize so greatly are but morsels of
them--sards and jasper and emerald and the rest. No baser kind
of thing is to be found in that world, but finer rather. The
cause of which is that the rocks there are pure, not gnawed away
and corrupted like ours by rot and brine, through the moistures
which drain together here, bringing disease and deformity to
rocks and earth as well as to living things. There are many
living creatures in the land besides men and women, some abiding
inland, and some on the coasts of the air, as we by the sea,
others in the islands amidst its waves; for, in a word, what the
water of the sea is to us for our uses, that the air is to them.
The blending of the seasons there is such that they have no
sickness and come to years more numerous far than ours: while
[97] for sight and scent and hearing and the like they stand as
far from us, as air from water, in respect of purity, and the
aether from air. There are thrones moreover and temples of the
gods among them, wherein in very deed the gods abide; voices
and oracles and sensible apprehensions of them; and occasions
of intercourse with their very selves. The sun, the moon and
the stars they see as they really are; and are blessed in all
other matters agreeably thereto. Phaedo, 110.
The great assertor of the abstract, the impalpable, the unseen, at any
cost, shows there a mastery of visual expression equal to that of his
greatest disciple.--Ah, good master! was the eye so contemptible an
organ of knowledge after all?
Plato was then about twenty-eight years old; a rich young man, rich
also in intellectual gifts; and what he saw and heard from and about
Socrates afforded the correction his opulent genius needed, and made
him the most serious of writers. In many things he was as unlike as
possible to the teacher--rude and rough as some failure of his own old
sculptor's workshop--who might seem in his own person to have broken up
the harmonious grace of the Greek type, and carried people one step
into a world already in reaction against the easy Attic temper, a world
in which it might be necessary to go far below the surface for the
beauty of which those homely lips had discoursed so much. Perhaps he
acted all the more surely as a corrective force on Plato, henceforward
an opponent of the [98] obviously successful mental habits of the day,
with an unworldliness which, a personal trait in Plato himself there
acquired, will ever be of the very essence of Platonism.--"Many are
called, but few chosen": Narthêkophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te
pauroi.+ He will have, as readers of The Republic know, a hundred
precepts of self-repression for others--the self-repression of every
really tuneable member of a chorus; and he begins by almost effacing
himself. All that is best and largest in his own matured genius he
identifies with his master; and when we speak of Plato generally what
we are really thinking of is the Platonic Socrates.
NOTES
79. +Transliteration: epagôgê. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
bringing on, to, or in . . . argument from induction."
80. +Transliteration: peri physeôs historian. E-text editor's
translation: "inquiry into nature." Plato, Phaedo 96a.
81. +Transliteration: panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin. Pater's
translation: "arranges and is the cause of all things." Plato, Phaedo
97c, offers a close paraphrase of Anaxagoras' saying.
83. +Transliteration: Auto kath' hauto zêtein ti pot' estin aretê.
Pater's translation: "to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by
itself." Plato, Meno 100b.
83. +Transliteration: Mêden estin agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei.
Pater's translation: "There is no good thing which knowledge does not
comprehend." Plato, Meno 87d.
84. *Tauton pantachou eidos--holon kai hygies--hen kata pantôn, dia
pantôn, epi pasi-kath' holou. Pater's translation: "One and the same
species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and
through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic." Perhaps
Pater is combining phrases here; only the first phrase was locatable.
Plato, Meno 72d.
84. +Transliteration: kath' hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros
hekaston ergon, hekastô hêmôn. Pater's translation: "to every several
act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do,
in each one of us." Plato, Meno 72a.
84. +Transliteration: ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti eideiên.
Pater's translation: "That, about which I don't know what it is, how
should I know what sort of a thing it is." Plato, Meno 71b.
84. +Transliteration: poiotêtes. Pater's translation: "qualities."
84. +Transliteration: kath' holou. Pater's translation: "universal, or
catholic, definitions;" the phrase might be translated, "in accordance
with the whole."
86. +Transliteration: Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous heatous
eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên. Pater's translation: "why
is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self-
destruction." Plato, Phaedo 62a.
87. +Transliteration: to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô. Pater's
translation: "he consumed the poison in the prison." Plato, Phaedo
57a.
90. +Transliteration: ton hêttô logon kreittô poiein. Pater's
translation: "to make the worse appear the better reason." Plato,
Apology 23d.
93. +Transliteration: hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai. Pater's
translation: "whither he must go, to die." The pronoun should be first
person--"whither I must go." Plato, Apology 39e.
95. +Transliteration: poiêmata. Liddell and Scott definition: "anything
made or done . . . a poetical work."
95. +Transliteration: pseudê en pharmakou eidei. Pater's translation:
"medicinable fictions." Plato, Republic 389b contains a similar
phrase.
95. +Transliteration: Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos,
kai euprepeias. Pater's translation: "came to me apart from
demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness." Plato,
Phaedo 92c.
95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin. Pater's translation: "is
something sturdy and strong." Plato, Phaedo 95c.
98. +Transliteration: Narthêkophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi.
Pater's translation: "Many are called, but few chosen." Plato, Phaedo,
69c.