[39] Plato pronounces Cyrus to have been a good general and a patriot, but not to have received any right education, and especially to have provided no good education for his children, who in consequence became corrupt and degenerate (Legg. iii. 694). Upon this remark some commentators of antiquity founded the supposition of grudge or quarrel between Plato and Xenophon. We have no evidence to prove such a state of unfriendly feeling between the two, yet it is no way unlikely: and I think it highly probable that the remark just cited from Plato may have had direct reference to the Xenophontic Cyropædia. When we read the elaborate intellectual training which Plato prescribes for the rulers in his Republic, we may easily understand that, in his view, the Xenophontic Cyrus had received no right education at all. His remark moreover brings to view the defect of all schemes built upon a perfect despot — that they depend upon an individual life.
[40] Plato, Timæus, pp. 20-26. Plato, Kritias, p. 108.
One prominent difference between the two deserves to be noticed. In the Xenophontic training, the ethical, gymnastic, and military, exigencies are carefully provided for: but the musical and intellectual exigencies are left out. The Xenophontic Persians are not affirmed either to learn letters, or to hear and repeat poetry, or to acquire the knowledge of any musical instrument. Nor does it appear, even in the case of the historical Spartans, that letters made any part of their public training. But the Platonic training includes music and gymnastics as co-ordinate and equally indispensable. Words or intellectual exercises, come in under the head of music.[41] Indeed, in Plato’s view, even gymnastics, though bearing immediately on the health and force of the body, have for their ultimate purpose a certain action upon the mind; being essential to the due development of courage, energy, endurance, and self-assertion.[42] Gymnastics without music produce a hard and savage character, insensible to persuasive agencies, hating discourse or discussion,[43] ungraceful as well as stupid. Music without gymnastics generates a susceptible temperament, soft, tender, and yielding to difficulties, with quick but transient impulses. Each of the two, music and gymnastic, is indispensable as a supplement and corrective to the other.
[41] Plato, Republic, ii. p. 376 E.
[42] Plato, Republic, iii. p. 410 B. πρὸς τὸ θυμοειδὲς τῆς φύσεως βλέπων κἀκεῖνο ἐγείρων πονήσει μᾶλλον ἢ πρὸς ἰσχύν, οὐχ ὥσπερ οἱ ἄλλοι ἀθληταὶ ῥώμης ἕνεκα.
[43] Plato, Republ. iii. pp. 410-411. 411 D-E: Μισόλογος δή, οἶμαι, ὁ τοιοῦτος γίγνεται καὶ ἄμουσος, καὶ πειθοῖ μὲν διὰ λόγων οὐδὲν ἔτι χρῆται, βίᾳ δὲ καὶ ἀγριότητι ὥσπερ θηρίον πρὸς πάντα διαπράττεται, καὶ ἐν ἀμαθίᾳ καὶ σκαιότητι μετὰ ἀῤῥυθμίας τε καὶ ἀχαριστίας ζῇ.
Platonic type of character compared with Xenophontic, is like the Athenian compared with the Spartan.
The type of character here contemplated by Plato deserves particular notice, as contrasted with that of Xenophon. It is the Athenian type against the Spartan. Periklês in his funeral oration, delivered at Athens in the first year of the Peloponnesian war, boasts that the Athenians had already reached a type similar to this — and that too, without any special individual discipline, legally enforced: that they combined courage, ready energy, and combined action — with developed intelligence, the love of discourse, accessibility to persuasion, and taste for the Beautiful. That which Plato aims at accomplishing in his Guardians, by means of a state-education at once musical and gymnastical — Periklês declares to have been already realised at Athens without any state-education, through the spontaneous tendencies of individuals called forth and seconded by the general working of the political system.[44] He compliments his countrymen as having accomplished this object without the unnecessary rigour of a positive state-discipline, and without any other restraints than the special injunctions and prohibitions of a known law. It is this absence of state-discipline to which both Xenophon and Plato are opposed. Both of them follow Lykurgus in proclaiming the insufficiency of mere prohibitions; and in demanding a positive routine of duty to be prescribed by authority, and enforced upon individuals through life. In regard to end, Plato is more in harmony with Periklês: in regard to means, with Xenophon.
[44] Thucyd. ii. 38-39-40.
The comparison between this speech and the third book of Plato’s Republic (pp. 401-402-410-411), is very interesting. The words of Perikles, φιλοκαλοῦμεν γὰρ μετ’ εὐτελείας καὶ φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας, taken along with the chapter preceding, mark that concurrent development of τὸ φιλόσοφον and τὸ θυμοειδὲς which Plato provides, and the avoidance of those defects which spring from the separate and exclusive cultivation of either.