But admission to these mysteries must have been reserved for comparatively few, personal friends and mature thinkers: the members formed rather a private club than an educational system. The young Athenian who wished, when his primary education was finished, to study philosophy under Plato, had two means open to him: there were lectures in various public places; there was also a school for lads in the Akademeia.
The only lecture,[575] of which any very definite trace is left, was not a great success from the educational point of view. Plato announced beforehand that his subject would be “The Good.” A great crowd collected, expecting to hear a neat Isocratean discussion of such things as Health, Wealth, Friendship, which were popularly considered to be rival claimants for the title of the Good. But Plato began to talk about arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, and discussed the One as the Good. The whole lecture was couched in enigmatical language. The majority of the audience went away in despair.[576] Only practised Platonists like Aristotle and Herakleides and Hestiaios did their best to understand the lecture, and took notes. The whole idea of a “popular lecture” must have been repugnant to Plato. In his view, knowledge was only for the few, who, starting with great natural abilities, could devote themselves for years at a time to continual study and research. The pupil must be talented to start with: he must undergo a long course of preparatory studies in Logic and Mathematics: only when middle-aged might he approach the inner mysteries of Philosophy. Holding such educational ideas as these, Plato naturally made his lectures unintelligible to all but a few: his main subject for public exposition seems to have been that curious mathematical metaphysic which Aristotle combats as Platonic, although it is nowhere found in the extant dialogues. By reading the Metaphysics of Aristotle the modern inquirer can perhaps realise how difficult Plato’s lectures must have been.[577]
At the school in the Akademeia, Plato seems to have instructed his lads chiefly in Logic and Mathematics. Logic consisted chiefly of definitions, such as those for which Sokrates was always hunting, and that curious process of “division” which is exemplified at such length in the Sophist and Politikos. Diogenes Laertius[578] gives a long catalogue of such divisions, of which only a few can be found in extant works: the rest must have figured in the school, and survived as traditions in the commentaries. A comic poet has left a picture of the logic school at work[579]:—
“A. What of Plato and Speusippos and Menedemos? Upon what are they now engaged? What is their thought? What argument is investigated among them? Tell me, I pray, if you know.
“B. I can tell you clearly. For at the Panathenaia I saw a herd (ἀγέλη: note the Spartan word) of lads in the gymnasium of the Akademeia, and listened to strange, portentous arguments. They were drawing up definitions about natural history. They separated the life of animals and the nature of trees and the tribes of vegetables: then, among these last, they inquired to what tribe the cucumber belonged.… First of all they stood speechless, and, putting their heads down, thought for a long time. Then suddenly, while the lads still had their heads down, and were thinking, one of them said it was a circular vegetable, another declared that it was a herb, another suggested a tree. A Sicilian Doctor who was present ridiculed them most rudely. But the lads took no notice; and Plato, very gently and without losing his temper at all, told them to try again to define the species to which it belonged. So they began their divisions again.”
In the Sophist the mysterious stranger divides Art into (1) creative or productive, (2) acquisitive. Then acquisitive art into (1) acquisition by exchange, (2) acquisition by capture. Then the art which acquires its object by capture is divided into public or competitive and secret or hunting. Then, when hunting has been duly divided and subdivided, a definition of angling is obtained. In the parody by Epikrates, the same process is employed in order to define “cucumber,” although the stages are, of course, confused. A cucumber is a form of life. Life is divided into animals and vegetation: vegetation into trees and vegetables. Then the doubt arises, to which half does the cucumber belong. Some of the pupils say it is a vegetable, some a tree. So the lesson begins again.
Plato’s pupils seem to have been expected to take great care of their personal appearance: their neatness is a common butt of contemporary comedians[580]:—
Then rose a smart young man from the Akademeia
Of Plato.…
His hair was neatly smoothed, his foot was neatly