Greek Imperialism

by William Scott Ferguson

It was upon his immediate present that Plato focused his attention; to the analysis of its political and moral strength and weakness that he turned his penetrating intelligence; for its betterment that he wrote and taught and suffered. The past he peopled with creations of his own exuberant fancy, of popular misconception, of defective knowledge. He can be easily convicted of gross historical errors. And what is more serious; he has no real regard for historical truth and no sense whatever for the real factors in historical developments. Without the slightest qualm of conscience, and without taking the least pains to ascertain the facts, Plato alters the divine and profane history of his people to make it serve his purpose. And he does this on principle: "The legislator," he says,[46] "has only to reflect and find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life long." To disagreeable things in the sacred story he gives a short shrift. Since the gods are perfect, every report that tends to tarnish the lustre of their reputation must be false. The history of mankind is solved by a similar formula; since justice is the sine qua non of public and private prosperity and happiness, all reports which affirm the conjunction of injustice with well-being, or of righteousness with misfortune, need correction or suppression.[47] History, accordingly, becomes a happy hunting-ground for edifying stories. It at once ceases to yield lessons, which, being grounded in the realities of human experience, are less apropos, perhaps, than the political theorist may like, but are alone valuable.

Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past, but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured past policies and institutions is not less characteristic than the false judgment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events. The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing city-state, but to the movement for their unification which he condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching.

A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the Laws[48] shows in what sense he read his history. His citizens are to have "their food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through "entrusting the practice of the arts to others," the former through getting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the produce, "a return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, day by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not, however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither just nor honorable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due; and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by brave deeds and toil."

Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a régime for them in which, after a most carefully nurtured childhood, three years are spent on reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and law, and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well as the men.

The children's stories are prescribed and are unalterable; so are the music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders, artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody. In other words, the community which Plato in his old age proposed as a model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful and more famous Republic. It is simply a system of governmental control carried to its logical extreme—an emended and perfected edition of Sparta.

That a well-born Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all citizens in an administrative strait-jacket, is not surprising. Many of us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all allowances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of reaction.

The theory of individual liberty, as applied in Athens, had led, in the economic sphere, thought Plato, to the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and, in the political sphere, to the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Plato, therefore, discarded the theory of individual liberty altogether. He was dominated by a general view of life in which all the natural human instincts and cravings were harmful. The only hope for states was that they should educate their best citizens to be their governors. Plato, accordingly, nailed to the mast the doctrine of salvation by education, and despaired of all states in which the carefully trained few of high intellectual capacity did not make the laws and enforce them. Of all these ideas the Athenian democracy was the negation, and Plato hated it with the bitterness of a passionate nature.

That Plato hated the Periclean democracy as a political system is also intelligible from his hatred of imperialism upon which it was based; and there are those to-day, who, for the same reason and also because of a mistaken notion of its dependence upon slavery, find Athenian democracy justified, if at all, by its fruits; who contemplate its art and literature with the same mingled feelings with which they view the hectic beauty of the consumptive. Plato is not of their company. The fruits he finds even more deleterious than the stock which bore them. "In music," he writes,[49] meaning thereby poetry interpreted by the voice with musical accompaniment,—"in music it was that there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness;—freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?" Whereto the Spartan who is his interlocutor says: "Very true."