[108] Aristeides the Rhetor has some forcible remarks in defending Rhetoric and the Athenian statesmen against the bitter criticisms of Plato in the Gorgias: pointing out that Plato himself had never made trial of the difficulty of governing any real community of men, or of the necessities under which a statesman in actual political life was placed (Orat. xlv. Περὶ Ῥητορικῆς, pp. 109-110, Dindorf).
Xenophon exhorts his countrymen to maintain peace.
Xenophon accompanies his financial scheme with a strong recommendation to his countrymen that they should abstain from warlike enterprises and maintain peace with every one. He expatiates on the manifest advantages, nay, even on the necessity, of continued peace, under the actual poverty of the city: for the purpose of recruiting the exhausted means of the citizens, as well as of favouring his own new projects for the improvement of finance and commerce. While he especially deprecates any attempt on the part of Athens to regain by force her lost headship over the Greeks, he at the same time holds out hopes that this dignity would be spontaneously tendered to her, if, besides abstaining from all violence, she conducted herself with a liberal and conciliatory spirit towards all: if she did her best to adjust differences among other cities, and to uphold the autonomy of the Delphian temple.[109] As far as we can judge, such pacific exhortations were at that time wise and politic. Athens had just then concluded peace (355 B.C.) after the three years of ruinous and unsuccessful war, called the Social War, carried on against her revolted allies Chios, Kos, Rhodes, and Byzantium. To attempt the recovery of empire by force was most mischievous. There was indeed one purpose, for which she was called upon by a wise forecast to put forth her strength — to check the aggrandisement of Philip in Macedonia. But this was a distant purpose: and the necessity, though it became every year more urgent, was not so prominently manifest[110] in 355 B.C. as to affect the judgment of Xenophon. At that early day, Demosthenes himself did not see the danger from Macedonia: his first Philippic was delivered in 351 B.C., and even then his remonstrances, highly creditable to his own forecast, made little impression on others. But when we read the financial oration De Symmoriis we appreciate his sound administrative and practical judgment; compared with the benevolent dreams and ample public largess in which Xenophon here indulges.[111]
[109] Xenoph. De Vectig. v. 3-8.
[110] See my ‘History of Greece,’ ch. 86, p. 325 seq.
I agree with Boeckh, Public Econ. of Athens, ut suprà, p. 601, that this pamphlet of Xenophon is probably to be referred to the close of the Social War, about 355 B.C.
[111] Respecting the first Philippic, and the Oratio De Symmoriis of Demosthenes, see my ‘History of Greece,’ ch. 87, pp. 401-431.
Difference of the latest compositions of Xenophon and Plato, from their point of view in the earlier.
We have seen that Plato died in 347 B.C., having reached the full age of eighty: Xenophon must have attained the same age nearly, and may perhaps have attained it completely — though we do not know the exact year of his death. With both these two illustrious companions of Sokrates, the point of view is considerably modified in their last compositions as compared to their earlier. Xenophon shows the alteration not less clearly than Plato, though in an opposite direction. His discourse on the Athenian revenues differs quite as much from the Anabasis, Cyropædia, and Œkonomikus — as the Leges and Epinomis differ from any of Plato’s earlier works. Whatever we may think of the financial and commercial anticipations of Xenophon, his pamphlet on the Athenian revenues betokens a warm sympathy for his native city — a genuine appreciation of her individual freedom and her many-sided intellectual activity — an earnest interest in her actual career, and even in the extension of her commercial and manufacturing wealth. In these respects it recommends itself to our feelings more than the last Platonic production — Leges and Epinomis — composed nearly at the same time, between 356-347 B.C. While Xenophon in old age, becoming reconciled to his country, forgets his early passion for the Spartan drill and discipline, perpetual, monotonous, unlettered — we find in the senility of Plato a more cramping limitation of the varieties of human agency — a stricter compression, even of individual thought and speech, under the infallible official orthodoxy — a more extensive use of the pædagogic rod and the censorial muzzle than he had ever proposed before.
In thus taking an unwilling leave of the Sokratic family, represented by these two venerable survivors — to both of whom the students of Athenian letters and philosophy are so deeply indebted — I feel some satisfaction in the belief, that both of them died, as they were born, citizens of free Athens and of unconquered Hellas: and that neither of them was preserved to an excessive old age, like their contemporary Isokrates, to witness the extinction of Hellenic autonomy by the battle of Chæroneia.[112]