225. +Transliteration: paraleipomenon. Pater's translation: "oversights." The verb paraleipô means, "to leave on one side . . . leave unnoticed."
226. +Transliteration: deisidaimones. Liddell and Scott definition: "fearing the gods," in both a good and bad sense—i.e. either pious or superstitious.
229. +A Chitôn was "a woollen shirt worn next the body." (Liddell and Scott.)
231. +Transliteration: aitês. Pater's translation: "the hearer."
232. +Transliteration: eispnêlas. Pater's translation: "the hearer."
233. +Psalm 127, verse 2. The King James Bible translation is "to eat the bread of sorrows."
CHAPTER 9: THE REPUBLIC
[235] "THE Republic," as we may realise it mentally within the limited proportions of some quite imaginable Greek city, is the protest of Plato, in enduring stone, in law and custom more imperishable still, against the principle of flamboyancy or fluidity in things, and in men's thoughts about them. Political "ideals" may provide not only types for new states, but also, in humbler function, a due corrective of the errors, thus renewing the life, of old ones. But like other medicines the corrective or critical ideal may come too late, too near the natural end of things. The theoretic attempt made by Plato to arrest the process of disintegration in the life of Athens, of Greece, by forcing it back upon a simpler and more strictly Hellenic type, ended, so far as they were concerned, in theory.
It comes of Plato's literary skill, his really dramatic handling of a conversation, that one subject rises naturally out of another in the [236] course of it, that in the lengthy span of The Republic, though they are linked together after all with a true logical coherency, now justice, now the ideal state, now the analysis of the individual soul, or the nature of a true philosopher, or his right education, or the law of political change, may seem to emerge as the proper subject of the whole book. It is thus incidentally, and by way of setting forth the definition of Justice or Rightness, as if in big letters, that the constitution of the typically Right State is introduced into what, according to one of its traditional titles— Peri Dikaiosynês +—might actually have figured as a dialogue on the nature of Justice. But tod' ên hôs eoike prooimion+—the discussion of the theory of the abstract and invisible rightness was but to introduce the practical architect, the creator of the right state. Plato then assumes rather than demonstrates that so facile parallel between the individual consciousness and the social aggregate, passes lightly backwards and forwards from the rightness or wrongness, the normal or abnormal conditions, of the one to those of the other, from you and me to the "colossal man," whose good or bad qualities, being written up there on a larger scale, are easier to read, and if one may say so, "once in bricks and mortar," though but on paper, is lavish of a world as it should be. A strange world in some ways! Let us look from the small type of the individual to the monumental [237] inscription on those high walls, as he proposes; while his fancy wandering further and further, over tower and temple, its streets and the people in them, as if forgetful of his original purpose he tells us all he sees in thought of the City of the Perfect.
To the view of Plato, as of all other Greek citizens, the state, in its local habitation here or there, had been in all cases the gift or ordinance of one or another real though half-divine founder, some Solon or Lycurgus, thereafter a proper object of piety, of filial piety, for ever, among those to whom he had bequeathed the blessings of civilised life. Himself actually of Solon's lineage, Plato certainly is less aware than those who study these matters in the "historic spirit" of the modern world that for the most part, like other more purely physical things, states "are not made, but grow." Yet his own work as a designer or architect of what shall be new is developed quite naturally out of the question how an already existing state, such as the actual Athens of the day, might secure its pre-eminence, or its very existence. Close always, by the concrete turn of his genius, to the facts of the place and the hour, his first thought is to suggest a remedy for the peculiar evils of the Athenians at that moment; and in his delineation of the ideal state he does but elevate what Athens in particular, a ship so early going to pieces, might well be forced to become for her salvation, were [238] it still possible, into the eternal type of veritable statecraft, of a city as such, "a city at unity in itself," defiant of time. He seems to be seeking in the first instance a remedy for the sick, a desperate political remedy; and thereupon, as happens with really philosophic enquirers, the view enlarges on all sides around him.