But he enjoins also other objectionable ends.
In thus taking leave of Plato, at the close of his longest, latest, and most affirmative composition, it is satisfactory to be able to express unqualified sympathy with this main purpose which, as departing lawgiver, he directs his successors to promote. But to these salutary directions, unfortunately, he has attached others noway connected with them except by common feelings of reverence in his own mind and far less deserving of sympathy. He requires that his own religious belief shall be erected into a peremptory orthodoxy, and that heretics shall be put down by the severest penalties. Now a citizen might be perfectly just, temperate, brave, and prudent — and yet dissent altogether from the Platonic creed. For such a citizen — the counterpart of Sokrates at Athens — no existence would be possible in the Platonic community.
Intolerance of Plato — Comparison of the Platonic community with Athens.
We must farther remark that, even when Plato’s ends are unexceptionable, the amount of interference which he employs to accomplish them is often extravagant. As a Constructor, he carries the sentiment of his own infallibility — which in a certain measure every lawgiver must assume — to an extreme worthy only of the kings of the Saturnian age:[501] manifesting the very minimum of tolerance for that enquiring individual reason of which his own negative dialogues remain as immortal masterpieces. We trace this intolerance through all the dialogue Leges. Even when he condescends to advise and persuade, he speaks rather in the tone of an encyclical censor, than of one who has before him a reasonable opponent to be convinced. The separate laws proposed by Plato are interesting to read, as illustrating antiquity: but most of them are founded on existing Athenian law. Where they depart from it, they depart as often for the worse as for the better — so far as I can pretend to judge. And in spite of all the indisputable defects, political and judicial, of that glorious city, where Plato was born and passed most of his days — it was, in my judgment, preferable to his Magnêtic city, as to all the great objects of security, comfort, recreation, and enjoyment. Athens was preferable, even for the ordinary citizen: but for the men of free, inquisitive, self-thinking, minds — the dissentient minority, who lived upon that open speech of which Athenian orators and poets boasted — it was a condition of existence: since the Platonic censorship would have tolerated neither their doctrines nor their persons.
[501] Plato, Politikus, pp. 271 E, 275 A-C.
APPENDIX.
Since the commencement of the present century, with its increased critical study of Plato, different and opposite opinions have been maintained by various authors respecting the genuineness or spuriousness of the Treatise De Legibus. Schleiermacher (Platons Werke, I. i. p. 51) admitted it as a genuine work of Plato, but ranked it among the Nebenwerke, or outlying dialogues: i.e., as a work that did not form an item or stepping-stone in the main Platonic philosophical series (which Schleiermacher attempts to lay out according to a system of internal sequence and gradual development), but was composed separately, in general analogy with the later or more constructive portion of that series. On the other hand, Ast (Platons Leben und Schriften, pp. 376-392) distinctly maintains that the Treatise De Legibus is not the composition of Plato, but of one of his scholars and contemporaries, perhaps Xenokrates or the Opuntian Philippus. Ast supports this opinion by many internal grounds, derived from a comparison of the treatise with other Platonic dialogues.
Zeller (in his Platonische Studien, Tübingen, 1839, pp. 1-144) discussed the same question in a more copious and elaborate manner, and declared himself decidedly in favour of Ast’s opinion — that the Treatise De Legibus was not the work of Plato, but of one among his immediate scholars. But in his History of Grecian Philosophy (vol. ii. pp. 348-615-641, second edition), Zeller departs from this judgment, and pronounces the Treatise to be a genuine work of Plato — the last form of his philosophy, modified in various ways.
Again Suckow (in his work, Die wissenschaftliche und künstlerische Form der Platonischen Schriften, Berlin, 1855, I. pp. 111-118 seq.) advocates Zeller’s first opinion — that the Treatise De Legibus is not the work of Plato.