_Diogenes_.--Plato, stand off. A true philosopher as I was, is no
company for a courtier of the tyrant of Syracuse. I would avoid you as
one infected with the most noisome of plagues--the plague of slavery.
_Plato_.--He who can mistake a brutal pride and savage indecency of
manners for freedom may naturally think that the being in a court
(however virtuous one's conduct, however free one's language there) is
slavery. But I was taught by my great master, the incomparable Socrates,
that the business of true philosophy is to consult and promote the
happiness of society. She must not, therefore, be confined to a tub or a
cell. Her sphere is in senates or the cabinets of kings. While your
sect is employed in snarling at the great or buffooning with the vulgar,
she is counselling those who govern nations, infusing into their minds
humanity, justice, temperance, and the love of true glory, resisting
their passions when they transport them beyond the bounds of virtue, and
fortifying their reason by the antidotes she administers against the
poison of flattery.
_Diogenes_.--You mean to have me understand that you went to the court of
the Younger Dionysius to give him antidotes against the poison of
flattery. But I say he sent for you only to sweeten the cup, by mixing
it more agreeably, and rendering the flavour more delicate. His vanity
was too nice for the nauseous common draught; but your seasoning gave it
a relish which made it go down most delightfully, and intoxicated him
more than ever. Oh, there is no flatterer half so dangerous to a prince
as a fawning philosopher!
_Plato_.--If you call it fawning that I did not treat him with such
unmannerly rudeness as you did Alexander the Great when he visited you at
Athens, I have nothing to say. But, in truth, I made my company
agreeable to him, not for any mean ends which regarded only myself, but
that I might be useful both to him and to his people. I endeavoured to
give a right turn to his vanity; and know, Diogenes, that whosoever will
serve mankind, but more especially princes, must compound with their
weaknesses, and take as much pains to gain them over to virtue, by an
honest and prudent complaisance, as others do to seduce them from it by a
criminal adulation.
_Diogenes_.--A little of my sagacity would have shown you that if this
was your purpose your labour was lost in that court. Why did not you go
and preach chastity to Lais? A philosopher in a brothel, reading
lectures on the beauty of continence and decency, is not a more
ridiculous animal than a philosopher in the cabinet, or at the table of a
tyrant, descanting on liberty and public spirit! What effect had the
lessons of your famous disciple Aristotle upon Alexander the Great, a
prince far more capable of receiving instruction than the Younger
Dionysius? Did they hinder him from killing his best friend, Clitus, for
speaking to him with freedom, or from fancying himself a god because he
was adored by the wretched slaves he had vanquished? When I desired him
not to stand between me and the sun, I humbled his pride more, and
consequently did him more good, than Aristotle had done by all his formal
precepts.
_Plato_.--Yet he owed to those precepts that, notwithstanding his
excesses, he appeared not unworthy of the empire of the world. Had the
tutor of his youth gone with him into Asia and continued always at his
ear, the authority of that wise and virtuous man might have been able to
stop him, even in the riot of conquest, from giving way to those passions
which dishonoured his character.
_Diogenes_.--If he had gone into Asia, and had not flattered the king as
obsequiously as Haephestion, he would, like Callisthenes, whom he sent
thither as his deputy, have been put to death for high treason. The man
who will not flatter must live independent, as I did, and prefer a tub to
a palace.
_Plato_.--Do you pretend, Diogenes, that because you were never in a
court, you never flattered? How did you gain the affection of the people
of Athens but by soothing their ruling passion--the desire of hearing
their superiors abused? Your cynic railing was to them the most
acceptable flattery. This you well understood, and made your court to
the vulgar, always envious and malignant, by trying to lower all dignity
and confound all order. You made your court, I say, as servilely, and
with as much offence to virtue, as the basest flatterer ever did to the
most corrupted prince. But true philosophy will disdain to act either of
these parts. Neither in the assemblies of the people, nor in the
cabinets of kings, will she obtain favour by fomenting any bad
dispositions. If her endeavours to do good prove unsuccessful, she will
retire with honour, as an honest physician departs from the house of a
patient whose distemper he finds incurable, or who refuses to take the
remedies he prescribes. But if she succeeds--if, like the music of
Orpheus, her sweet persuasions can mitigate the ferocity of the multitude
and tame their minds to a due obedience of laws and reverence of
magistrates; or if she can form a Timoleon or a Numa Pompilius to the
government of a state--how meritorious is the work! One king--nay, one
minister or counsellor of state--imbued with her precepts is of more
value than all the speculative, retired philosophers or cynical revilers
of princes and magistrates that ever lived upon earth.
_Diogenes_.--Don't tell me of the music of Orpheus, and of his taming
wild beasts. A wild beast brought to crouch and lick the hand of a
master, is a much viler animal than he was in his natural state of
ferocity. You seem to think that the business of philosophy is to polish
men into slaves; but I say, it is to teach them to assert, with an
untamed and generous spirit, their independence and freedom. You profess
to instruct those who want to ride their fellow-creatures, how to do it
with an easy and gentle rein; but I would have them thrown off, and
trampled under the feet of all their deluded or insulted equals, on whose
backs they have mounted. Which of us two is the truest friend to
mankind?
_Plato_.--According to your notions all government is destructive to
liberty; but I think that no liberty can subsist without government. A
state of society is the natural state of mankind. They are impelled to
it by their wants, their infirmities, their affections. The laws of
society are rules of life and action necessary to secure their happiness
in that state. Government is the due enforcing of those laws. That
government is the best which does this post effectually, and most
equally; and that people is the freest which is most submissively
obedient to such a government.
_Diogenes_.--Show me the government which makes no other use of its power
than duly to enforce the laws of society, and I will own it is entitled
to the most absolute submission from all its subjects.
_Plato_.--I cannot show you perfection in human institutions. It is far
more easy to blame them than it is to amend them, much may be wrong in
the best: but a good man respects the laws and the magistrates of his
country.
_Diogenes_.--As for the laws of my country, I did so far respect them as
not to philosophise to the prejudice of the first and greatest principle
of nature and of wisdom, self-preservation. Though I loved to prate
about high matters as well as Socrates, I did not choose to drink hemlock
after his example. But you might as well have bid me love an ugly woman,
because she was dressed up in the gown of Lais, as respect a fool or a
knave, because he was attired in the robe of a magistrate.
_Plato_.--All I desired of you was, not to amuse yourself and the
populace by throwing dirt upon the robe of a magistrate, merely because
he wore that robe, and you did not.
_Diogenes_.--A philosopher cannot better display his wisdom than by
throwing contempt on that pageantry which the ignorant multitude gaze at
with a senseless veneration.
_Plato_.--He who tries to make the multitude venerate nothing is more
senseless than they. Wise men have endeavoured to excite an awful
reverence in the minds of the vulgar for external ceremonies and forms,
in order to secure their obedience to religion and government, of which
these are the symbols. Can a philosopher desire to defeat that good
purpose?
_Diogenes_.--Yes, if he sees it abused to support the evil purposes of
superstition and tyranny.
_Plato_.--May not the abuse be corrected without losing the benefit? Is
there no difference between reformation and destruction.
_Diogenes_.--Half-measures do nothing. He who desires to reform must not
be afraid to pull down.
_Plato_.--I know that you and your sect are for pulling down everything
that is above your own level. Pride and envy are the motives that set
you all to work. Nor can one wonder that passions, the influence of
which is so general, should give you many disciples and many admirers.
_Diogenes_.--When you have established your Republic, if you will admit
me into it I promise you to be there a most respectful subject.
_Plato_.--I am conscious, Diogenes, that my Republic was imaginary, and
could never be established. But they show as little knowledge of what is
practicable in politics as I did in that book, who suppose that the
liberty of any civil society can be maintained by the destruction of
order and decency or promoted by the petulance of unbridled defamation.
_Diogenes_.--I never knew any government angry at defamation, when it
fell on those who disliked or obstructed its measures. But I well
remember that the thirty tyrants at Athens called opposition to them the
destruction of order and decency.
_Plato_.--Things are not altered by names.
_Diogenes_.--No, but names have a strange power to impose on weak
understandings. If, when you were in Egypt, you had laughed at the
worship of an onion, the priests would have called you an atheist, and
the people would have stoned you. But I presume that, to have the honour
of being initiated into the mysteries of that reverend hierarchy, you
bowed as low to it as any of their devout disciples. Unfortunately my
neck was not so pliant, and therefore I was never initiated into the
mysteries either of religion or government, but was feared or hated by
all who thought it their interest to make them be respected.
_Plato_.--Your vanity found its account in that fear and that hatred. The
high priest of a deity or the ruler of a state is much less distinguished
from the vulgar herd of mankind than the scoffer at all religion and the
despiser of all dominion. But let us end our dispute. I feel my folly
in continuing to argue with one who in reasoning does not seek to come at
truth, but merely to show his wit. Adieu, Diogenes; I am going to
converse with the shades of Pythagoras, Solon, and Bias. You may jest
with Aristophanes or rail with Thersites.