Phaedrus — Plato

GENERAL INTRODUCTION xxix judgment, the absolute truth. The paintings, the songs, the stories, the 3ramas, are full of what is beautiful to the senses, but to the soul they are for the most part ugly and evil. When they tell of the gods and heroes they are full of lies. When they pretend to portray the virtues temperance and courage, they misrepresent and mislead.

This influence is for the most part corrupting, and they should all be banished from education and from the State, except such as really lead the soul toward the truth. In a like spirit Plato criticised the business and political life of his time. The people are wasting their life for that which is not bread. Some want military glor}^ some want money, some want pleasure.

All these wants lead more or less rapidly to ruin in this world and the next. The people need one thing — to be under the power of the truth. They need wise and righteous men, who have, .by years of search, come to know the truth, to direct the state and the activities of its citizens. Only in such a state can there be true health and happiness for the people. PLATO AS DRAMATIST.

I do not call Plato a dramatist merely because he wrote in dialogue. A dialogue is not always dramatic. The speakers may be only masks, through which one hears always the author's voice. Plato himself often writes in this style. In such cases we presently see through the masks and discover that the dialogue is only an essay. There is proof of Plato's dramatic gift in the

XXX GENERAL INTRDOUCTION graphic pictures of Greek life which make the setting of his dialogues. But this would have slight importance, if those pictures were found to be only a sort of artistic coating for his philosophical pill. The justification for calling Plato a dramatist becomes more substantial when one finds a dialogue whose story. illustrates the theme discussed. Take, for example. The Symposium. The theme is love.

One after another of the banqueters praises love in a new way. At length Socrates unfolds his own view. Suddenly in bursts a crowd of revelers, drowning all discussion and scattering all serious thought. When the leader of the revel learns what the banqueters have been doing, he also will make a speech. But he will choose his own subject. He will make a speech about Socrates. The interruption and the speech are very interesting, but what of that?

It would be interesting if Bildad, the Shuhite, should comfort Job with a fiddle. Why should Plato, any more than the author of Job, interrupt sublime discourse by a farce ?

A little closer inspection, however, shows that the interruption is not real, that the subject is not changed, that the debauched revelers and the story which Alcibiades tells of his relations with Socrates, together illustrate the whole range of beastly, human, and divine love which it is the purpose of the dialogue to portray.

In the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and elsewhere, there are other fine examples of Plato's skill in making the story of one spirit with the argument. But the full justification for calling Plato a dramatist docs not rest upon such occasional examples of his art. If this were all, we should only say that

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXXI Plato is a philosopher who sometimes shows that he might have been a dramatist. Plato is a dramatist because of this : It is never enough for him to know the absolute solution of any problem. He wishes also to knoWy with the sympathetic imagination^ just how men of every sort look at that problem.

In most of his dialogues, not all, Plato somewhere seeks to work his way toward the absolute truth by rigid systematic thinking. There he is purely philosopher. There the dialogue is only form, and the ^speakers courteously make way for the argument. But in no dialogue is this the only thing done.

All sorts and conditions of men are introduced— a slave boy, a confidence man, an ignorant braggart, a rake, a youth eager for learning, a professor of thihgs-in-general, a physician, a poet, a business man, a philosopher — a great range of people, historical and fictitious, representing every phase of the life of his time. These people are not masks. Some of them feel even to us as real as Shakespeare's Mercutio, or Polonius, or Dogberry.

Often they are given their way with the argument. Often within the same dialogue first one and then another type of man takes the lead and fixes the plane of the conversation. Now they tussle at the problem like puppy dogs (Republic, VII., 539), Socrates tussling gayly with the rest. Now some one smothers discerning inquiry with a fine oration, and per- j haps Socrates matches this with another of the same sort.

Now. an eager youth plunges courageously into a discussion beyond his depth, and Socrates follows him with joyful applause, often without a hint that there are depths in the problem which the