The Republic, with which we are here chiefly concerned, since it is in that important work that the author reproduces the dietetic principles of Pythagoras, may have been first published amongst his earlier writings, about the year 395; but that it was published in a larger and revised edition at a later period is sufficiently evident. It consists of ten Books. The question of Dietetics is touched upon in the second and third, in which Plato takes care to point out the essential importance to the well-being of his ideal state, that both the mass of the community and, in a special degree, the guardians or rulers, should be educated and trained in proper dietetic principles, which, if not so definitely insisted upon as we could wish them to have been, sufficiently reveal the bias of his mind towards Vegetarianism. In the second Book the discussion turns principally upon the nature of Justice; and there is one passage which, still more significant for the age in which it was written, is not without instruction for the present. While Sokrates is discussing the subject with his interlocutors, one of them is represented as objecting:
“With much respect be it spoken, you who profess to be admirers of justice, beginning with the heroes of old, have every one of you, without exception, made the praise of Justice and the condemnation of Injustice turn solely upon the reputation and honour and gifts resulting from them. But what each is in itself, by its own peculiar force as it resides in the soul of its possessor, unseen either by gods or men, has never, in poetry or prose, been adequately discussed, so as to show that Injustice is the greatest bane that a soul can receive into itself, and Justice the greatest blessing. Had this been the language held by you all from the first, and had you tried to persuade us of this from our childhood, we should not be on the watch to check one another in the commission of injustice, because everyone would be his own watchman, fearful lest by committing injustice he might attach to himself the greatest of evils.”
Very useful and necessary for those times, and not wholly inapplicable to less remote ages, is the incidental remark in the same book, that “there are quacks and soothsayers who flock to the rich man’s doors, and try to persuade him that they have a power at command which they procure from heaven, and which enables them, by sacrifices and incantations, performed amid feasting and indulgence, to make amends for any crime committed either by the individual himself or by his ancestors.... And in support of all these assertions they produce the evidence of poets—some, to exhibit the facilities of vice, quoting the words:—
“Whoso wickedness seeks, may even in masses obtain it
Easily. Smooth is the way, and short, for nigh is her dwelling.
Virtue, heaven has ordained, shall be reached by the sweat of the forehead.”
—Hesiod, Works and Days, 287.[14]
It is the fifth Book, however, which has always excited the greatest interest and controversy, for therein he introduces his Communistic views. Our interest in it is increased by the fact that it is the original of the ideal Communisms of modern writers—the prototype of the Utopia of More, of the New Atlantis of Francis Bacon, the Oceanica of Harrington, and the Gaudentio of Berkeley, &c.
In maintaining the perfect natural equality of women to men,[15] and insisting upon an identity of education and training, he advances propositions which perhaps only the more advanced of the assertors of women’s rights might be prepared to entertain. Whatever may have been said by the various admirers of Plato, who have been anxious to present his political or social views in a light which might render them less in conflict with modern Conservatism, there can be no doubt for any candid reader of the Republic that the author published to the world his bonâ fide convictions. One of the dramatis personæ of the dialogue, while expressing his concurrence in the Communistic legislation of Sokrates, at the same time objects to the difficulty of realising it in actual life, and desires Sokrates to point out whether, and how, it could be really practicable. Whereupon Sokrates (who it is scarcely necessary to remark, is the convenient mouthpiece of Plato) replies: “Do you think any the worse of an artist who has painted the beau idéal of human beauty, and has left nothing wanting in the picture, because he cannot prove that such a one as he has painted might possibly exist? Were not we, likewise, proposing to construct, in theory, the pattern of a perfect State? Will our theory suffer at all in your good opinion if we cannot prove that it is possible for a city to be organised in the manner proposed?”