If, however, we turn back to v. p.738 C, we shall see that Plato ratifies these καθιερώσεις, when they have once got footing, and rejects only the new ones. The rites, worship, and sacrifices, in his city, are assumed to have been determined by local or oracular inspiration (v. p. 738 B): the orthodox creed is set out by himself.
Intolerant spirit of Plato’s legislation respecting uniformity of belief.
Such is the Act of Uniformity promulgated by Plato for his new community of the Magnêtes, and such the terrible sanctions by which it is enforced. The lawgiver is the supreme and exclusive authority, spiritual as well as temporal, on matters religious as well as on matters secular. No dissenters from the orthodoxy prescribed by him are admitted. Those who believe more than he does, and those who believe less, however blameless their conduct, are condemned alike to pass through a long solitary imprisonment to execution. Not only the speculations of enquiring individual reason, but also the spontaneous inspirations of religious disquietude or terror, are suppressed and punished.[346]
[346] Plato himself is here the Νόμος Πόλεως, which the Delphian oracle, in its responses, sanctioned as the proper rule for individual citizens, Xenophon, Memor. iv. 3, 16. Compare iv. 6. 2, and i. 3, 1; Lysias, Or. xxx. 21-26. θύειν τὰ πάτρια — θύειν τὰ ἐκ τῶν κύρβεων, is εὐσεβεία.
See K. F. Hermann, Gottesdienstliche Alterthümer der Griechen, sect. 10: Nägelsbach, Nach-Homerische Theologie, pp. 201-204.
Cicero also enacts, in his Treatise De Legibus (ii. 8-10):— “Separatim nemo habessit Deos: neve novos, sed ne advenas, nisi publicé adscitos, privatim colunto.” Compare Livy, xxxix. 16, about the Roman prohibitions of sacra externa. But Cicero does not propose to inflict such severe penalties as Plato.
We seem to be under a legislation imbued with the persecuting spirit and self-satisfied infallibility of mediaeval Catholicism and the Inquisition. The dissenter is a criminal, and among the worst of criminals, even if he do nothing more than proclaim his opinions.[347] How striking is the contradiction between this spirit and that in which Plato depicts the Sokrates of the Phædon, the Apology, and the Gorgias! How fully does Sokrates in the Phædon[348] recognise and respect the individual reason of his two friends, though dissenting from his own! How emphatically does he proclaim, in the Apology and Gorgias, not merely his own individual dissent from his fellow-citizens, but also his resolution to avow and maintain it against one and all, until he should hear such reasons as convinced him that it was untrue! How earnestly does he declare (in the Apology) that he has received from the Delphian God a mission to cross-examine the people of Athens, and that he will obey the God in preference to them:[349] thus claiming to himself that special religious privilege which his accuser Melêtus imputes to him as a crime, and which Plato, in his Magnêtic colony, also treats as a crime, interdicting it under the severest penalties! During the interval of forty-five years (probably) between the trial of Sokrates and the composition of the Leges, Plato had passed from sympathy with the free-spoken dissenter to an opposite feeling — hatred of all dissent, and an unsparing employment of penalties for upholding orthodoxy. I have already remarked on the Republic, and I here remark it again — if Melêtus lived long enough to read the Leges, he would have found his own accusation of Sokrates amply warranted by the enactments and doctrines of the most distinguished Sokratic Companion.[350]
[347] Milton, in his Areopagitica, or Argument for Unlicensed Printing (vol. i. p. 149, Birch’s edition of Milton’s Prose Works), has some strenuous protestations against the rigour of the Platonic censorship in this tenth Book. In the year 1480 Hermolaus Barbarus wrote to George Merula as follows:— “Plato, in Institutione De Legibus, inter prima commemorat, in omni republicâ præscribi caverique oportere, ne cui liceat, quæ composuerit, aut privatim ostendere, aut in usum publicum edere, antequam ea constitute super id judices viderint, nec damnarint. Utinam hodieque haberetur hæc lex: neque enim tam multi scriberent, neque tam pauci bonas litteras discerent. Nunc et copiâ malorum librorum offundimur, et omissis eminentissimis autoribus, plebeios et minutulos consectamur. Et, quod calamitosissimum est, periti juxta imperitique de studiis impuné ac promiscué judicant” (Politiani Opera, 1553, p. 197).
I transcribe the above passage from an interesting article upon Book-Censors, in Beckmann’s History of Inventions (Ed. 1817, vol. iii. p. 93 seq.), where numerous examples are cited of the prohibition, combustion, or licensing of books by authority, from the burning of the work of Protagoras by decree of the Athenian assembly, down to modern times; illustrating the tendency of different sects and creeds, in proportion as they acquired power, to silence all open contradiction. The Christian Arnobius, at a time when his creed was under disfavour by the Emperors, protests against this practice, in a liberal and comprehensive phrase which would have much offended Plato (at the time when he wrote the Leges) and Hermolaus:— “Alios audio mussitare indignanter et dicere:— Oportere statui per Senatum, aboleantur ut hæc scripta quibus Christiana religio comprobetur et vetustatis opprimatur auctoritas. … Nam intercipere scripta, et publicatam velle submergere lectionem, non est Deos defendere, sed veritatis testificationem timere” (Arnob. adv. Gentes, iii. p. 104. Also iv. p. 152).
“We are told by Eusebius (Beckmann, ed. 1817, vol. iii. p. 96; Bohn’s ed., vol. ii. p. 514) that Diocletian caused the sacred Scriptures to be burnt. After the spreading of the Christian religion, the clergy exercised against books that were either unfavourable or disagreeable to them, the same severity which they had censured in the heathens as foolish and prejudicial to their own cause. Thus were the writings of Arius condemned to the flames at the Council of Nice; and Constantine threatened with the punishment of death those who should conceal them. The clergy assembled at the Council of Ephesus requested the Emperor Theodosius II. to cause the works of Nestorius to be burnt; and this desire was complied with. The writings of Eutyches shared the like fate at the Council of Chalcedon: and it would not be difficult to collect examples of the same kind from each of the following centuries.”