The orthodox religious belief, which Plato imposes upon his 5040 Magnêtic citizens under the severest penalties, would thus be found inconsistent with the general belief, not merely of ordinary Greeks, but also of the various lettered and philosophical individuals who thought for themselves. Most of these latter would have passed, under one of the three heads of Platonic heresy, into the Platonic prison for five years, and from thence either to recantation or death. The arguments which Plato considered so irresistible, that none but silly youths could be deaf to them — did not appear conclusive to Aristotle and other intelligent contemporaries. Plato makes up his own mind, what proceedings he thinks worthy and unworthy of the Gods, and then proclaims with confidence as a matter of indisputable fact, that they act conformably. But neither Herodotus, nor Aristotle, would have granted his premisses: they conceived the attributes and character of the Gods differently from him, and differently from each other. And if we turn to the Kratylus of Plato, we find Sokrates there declaring, that men knew nothing about the Gods: that speculations about the Gods were in reality speculations about the opinions of men respecting the Gods.[402]
[402] Plato, Kratylus, pp. 400-401. Περὶ θεῶν οὐδὲν ἴσμεν, οὔτε περὶ αὐτῶν, οὔτε περὶ τῶν ὀνομάτων, ἅττα ποτὲ αὐτοὶ ἑαυτοὺς καλοῦσι (400 D) … σκοπῶμεν ὥσπερ προειπόντες τοῖς θεοῖς ὅτι περὶ αὐτῶν οὐδὲν ἡμεῖς σκεψόμεθα, οὐ γὰρ ἀξιοῦμεν οἷοί τ’ ἂν εἶναι σκοπεῖν, ἀλλὰ περὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ἥντινά ποτε δόξαν ἔχοντες ἐτίθεντο αὐτοῖς τὰ ὀνόματα· τοῦτο γὰρ ἀνεμέσητον (401 A). Compare also Kratyl. p. 425 B.
Local infallibility was claimed as a rule in each community, though rarely enforced with severity: Plato both claims it more emphatically, and enforces it more rigorously.
Such opinions were local, traditional, and dissentient, among the numerous distinct cities and tribes which divided the inhabited earth between them in Plato’s time.[403] Each of these claimed a local infallibility, principally as to religious rites and customs, indirectly also as to dogmas and creed: and Plato’s Magnêtic community, if it had come into existence, would have added one to the number of distinct varieties. To this general sentiment, deeply rooted in the emotions and unused to the scrutiny of reason, the philosophers were always more or less odious, as dissenters, enquirers, and critics, each on his own ground.[404] At Athens the sentiment manifested itself occasionally in severe decrees and judicial sentences against obnoxious freethinkers, especially in the case of Sokrates. If the Athenians had carried out consistently and systematically the principle involved in their sentence against Sokrates, philosophy must have been banished from Athens.[405] The school of Plato could never have been maintained. But the principle of intolerance was usually left dormant at Athens: philosophical debate continued active and unshackled, so that the school of Plato subsisted in the city without interruption for nearly forty years until his death. We might have expected that the philosophers, to whose security toleration of free dissent and debate was essential, would have upheld it as a general principle against the public. But here we find the most eminent among them, at the close of a long life, not only disallowing all liberty of philosophising to others, and assuming to himself the exclusive right of dictating the belief, as well as the conduct, of his imaginary citizens — but also enforcing this exclusive principle with an amount of systematic rigour, which I do not believe to have been equalled in any actual Grecian city. This is a memorable fact in the history of Grecian philosophy. The Stoic Kleanthes, in the century after Plato’s death, declared that the Samian astronomer Aristarchus ought to be indicted for impiety, because he had publicly advocated the doctrine of the Earth’s rotation round the Sun. Kleanthês and Plato thus stand out as known examples, among Grecian philosophers before the Christian era, of that intolerance which would apply legal penalties against individual dissenters and competitors.[406]
[403] Plato, Politikus, p. 262 D. γένεσιν ἀπείροις οὖσι καὶ ἀμίκτοις καὶ ἀσυμφώνοις πρὸς ἄλληλα. Herodot. iii. 39.
[404] Plato, Euthyphron, p. 3.
[405] See the Apologies both of Plato and Xenophon. In one of the rhetorical discourses cited by Aristotle, on the subject of the trial of Sokrates (seemingly that by the Rhetor Theodektês), the point is put thus:— Μέλλετε δὲ κρίνειν, οὐ περὶ Σωκράτους, ἀλλὰ περὶ ἐπιτηδεύματος, εἰ χρὴ φιλοσοφεῖν (Aristot. Rhetor. ii. 1399, a. 8, b. 10).
[406] The Platonist and astronomer Derkyllides afterwards (about 100-120 A.D.) declares those who affirm the doctrine, that the earth moves and that the stars are stationary, to be accursed and impious — τοὺς δὲ τὰ κινητὰ στήσαντας, τὰ δὲ ἀκίνητα φύσει καὶ ἕδρᾳ κινήσαντας, ὡς παρὰ τὰς τῆς μαντικῆς ὑποθέσεις, ἀποδιοπομπεῖται. (Theon Smyrnæus, De Astronomiâ, ch. 41, p. 328, fol. 26, ed. Martin.)
Farther civil and political regulations for the Magnêtic community. No evidence that Plato had studied the working of different institutions in practice.
The eleventh Book of the Treatise De Legibus, and the larger portion of the twelfth, are devoted to a string of civil and political regulations for the Magnêtic community. Each regulation is ushered in with an expository prologue, often with severe reproof towards persons committing the various forbidden acts. There is little of systematic order in the enumeration of subjects. In general we may remark that neither here nor elsewhere in the Treatise is there any proof, that Plato — though doubtless he had visited Italy, Sicily, and Egypt, perhaps other countries — had taken much pains to acquaint himself with the practice of human life, or that he had studied and compared the working of different institutions in different communities. His experience seems all derived from Athenian law and practice: the criticisms and modifications which he applies to it flow from his own sentiment and theory: from his religious or ethical likings or dislikings. He sets up a type of character which he desires to enforce among his citizens, and which he guards against adulteration by very stringent interference. The displeasure of the Gods is constantly appealed to, as a justification for the penalties which he proposed: sometimes even the current mythes are invoked as authority, though in other places Plato so greatly disparages them.[407]