Timaeus — Plato

1 Style and subject in Poetry. Reptiblic III. arranging them. For there is a subtle influence of logic which Introduc- requires to be transferred from prose to poetry, just as the music and perfection of language are infused by poetry into prose. In all ages the poet has been a bad judge of his own meaning (Apol.

22 B) ; for he does not see that the word which is full of associations to his own mind is difficult and unmeaning to that of another; or that the sequence which is clear to himself is puzzling to others.

There are many passages in some of our greatest modern poets which are far too obscure ; in which there is no proportion between style and subject ; in which any hallexpressed figure, any harsh construction, any distorted collocation of words, any remote sequence of ideas is admitted ; and there is no voice 'coming sweetly from nature,' or music adding the expression of feeling to thought.

As if there could be poetry without beauty, or beauty without ease and clearness. The obscurities of early Greek poets arose necessarily out of the state of language and logic which existed in their age. They are not examples to be followed by us; for the use of language ought in every generation to become clearer and clearer. Like Shakespere, they were great in spite, not in consequence, of their imperfections of expression.

But there is no reason for returning to the necessary obscurity which prevailed in the infancy of literature. The English poets of the last century were certainly not obscure ; and we have no excuse for losing what they had gained, or for going back to the earlier or transitional age which preceded them.

The thought of our own times has not outstripped language ; a want of Plato's ' art of measuring ' is the real cause of the disproportion between them. 3. In the third book of the Republic a nearer approach is made to a theory of art than anywhere else in Plato. His views may be summed up as follows: — True art is not fanciful and imitative, but simple and ideal, — the expression of the highest moral energy, whether in action or repose.

To live among works of plastic art which are of this noble and simple character, or to listen to such strains, is the best of influences, — the true Greek atmosphere, in which youth should be brought up. That is the way to create in them a natural good taste, which will have a feeling of truth and beauty in all things. For though the poets are to be expelled, still art is recognized as another aspect of 2reason — like love in the Symposium, extending over the same Republic ill. sphere, but confined to the preliminary education, and acting Introducthrough the power of habit (vii. 522 A) ; and this conception of art is not limited to strains of music or the forms of plastic art, but pervades all nature and has a wide kindred in the world. The Republic of Plato, hke the Athens of Pericles, has an artistic as well as a political side.

There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts ; only in two or three passages does he even allude to them (cp. Rep, iv. 420; Soph. 236 A). He is not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias, the Parthenon, the Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He would probably have regarded any abstract truth of number or figure (529 E) as higher than the greatest of them.

Yet it is hard to suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to inspire in youth, did not pass into his own mind from the works of art which he saw around him. We are living upon the fragments of them, and find in a few broken stones the standard of truth and beauty.

But in Plato this feeling has no expression ; he nowhere says that beauty is the object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form (Phaedrus, 250 E) ; he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts. Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that the greatest perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost entire silence about them.

In one very striking passage (iv. 420) he tells us that a work of art, like the State, is a whole; and this conception of a whole and the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating principles of Greek art (cp. Xen. Mem*, iii. 10. 6; and Sophist, 235, 236). 4.

Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better not be in robust health ; and should have known what illness is in his own person. But the judge ought to have had no similar experience of evil ; he is to be a good man who, having passed his youth in innocence, became acquainted late in life with the vices of others.

And therefore, according to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man according to Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy. The bad, on the other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no know3lii The transposition of ranks. Republic III. Icdgc of virtuc. It may be doubted, however, whether this train Introduc- of reflection is well founded. In a remarkable passage of the Laws (xii. 950 B) it is acknowledged that the evil may form a correct estimate of the good. The union of gentleness and courage in Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox, yet was afterwards ascertained to be a truth.

And Plato might also have found that the intuition of evil may be consistent with the abhorrence of it (cp. infra, ix. 582). There is a directness of aim in virtue which gives an insight into vice. And the knowledge of character is in some degree a natural sense independent of any special experience of good or evil. 5.

One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-Greek and also very different from anything which existed at all in his age of the world, is the transposition of ranks. In the Spartan state there had been enfranchisement of Helots and degradation of citizens under special circumstances. And in the ancient Greek aristocracies, merit was certainly recognized as one of the elements on which government was based.

The founders of states were supposed to be their benefactors, who were raised by their great actions above the ordinary level of humanity ; at a later period, the services of warriors and legislators were held to entitle them and their descendants to the privileges of citizenship and to the first rank in the state.

And although the existence of an ideal aristocracy is slenderly proven from the remains of early Greek history, and we have a difficulty in ascribing such a character, however the idea may be defined, to any actual Hellenic state — or indeed to any state which has ever existed in the world — still the rule of the best was certainly the aspiration of philosophers, who probably accommodated a good deal their views of primitive history to their o\Vn notions of good government.

Plato further insists on applying to the guardians of his state a series of tests by which all those who fell short of a fixed standard were either removed from the governing body, or not admitted to it; and this 'academic' discipline did to a certain extent prevail in Greek states, especially in Sparta.

He also indicates that the system of caste, which existed in a great part of the ancient, and is by no means extinct in the modern European world, should be set aside from time to time in favour of merit. He is aware how deeply the greater part of