9: THE REPUBLIC

     And I shall try first of all to persuade the rulers themselves
     and our soldiers, and afterwards the rest of the community, as
     to the matter of the rearing and the education we gave them,
     that in fact it did but seem to happen with them, they seemed
     to experience all that, only as in dreams.  They were then in
     very truth nourished and fashioned beneath the earth within,
     and the armour upon them and their equipment put together; and
     when they were perfectly wrought out the earth even their mother
     put them forth.  Now, therefore, it is their duty to think
     concerning the land in which they are as of a mother, or
     foster-mother, and to protect it if any foe come against it,
     and to think of their fellow-citizens as being their brothers,
     born of the earth as they.  All ye in the city, therefore, are
     brothers, we shall say to them proceeding with our story; but
     God, when he made you, mixed gold in the generation of those
     among you fit to be our kings, for which cause they are the
     most precious of all; and silver in those fit to be our guards;
     and in the husbandmen and all other handicraftsmen iron and
     brass.  Forasmuch then as ye are all of one kindred, for the
     most part ye would beget offspring like to yourselves; but at
     times a silver child will come of one golden, and from the
     silver a child of gold, and so forth, interchangeably.  To
     those who rule, then, first and above all God enjoins that of
     nothing shall they be so careful guardians, nothing shall they
     so earnestly regard, as the young children--what metal has
     been mixed to their hands in the souls of these.  And if a
     child of their own be born with an alloy of iron or brass, they
     shall by no means have pity upon it, but, allotting unto it the
     value which befits its nature, they shall thrust it into the
     class of husbandmen or artisans.  And if, again, of these a
     child be born with gold or silver in him, with due estimate
     they shall promote such to wardenship or to arms, inasmuch as
     an oracular saying declares that the city is perished already
     when it has iron or brass to guard it.  Can you suggest a way
     of getting them to believe this mythus?  Republic, 414.

[249] Its application certainly is on the surface: the Lacedaemonian details also--the military turn taken, the disinterestedness of the powerful, their monastic renunciation of what the world prizes most, above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy with its "privileges and also its duties." Men are of simpler structure and capacities than you have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more decisively appointed to this rather than to that order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent them (that is the force of the mythus) as actually made of different stuff; and society, assuming a certain aristocratic humour in the nature of things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard, further promote it, by law.

The state therefore, if it is to be really a living creature, will have, like the individual soul, those sensuous appetites which call the productive powers into action, and its armed conscience, and its far- reaching intellectual light: its industrial class, that is to say, its soldiers, its kings--the last, a kind of military monks, as you might think, on a distant view, their minds full of a kind of heavenly effulgence, yet superintending the labours of a large body of work- people in the town and the fields about it. Of the industrial or productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato speaks only in outline, but is significant in what he says; and enough remains of the actual fruits [250] of Greek industry to enable us to complete his outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of Greek art, together with the words of Homer and Pindar, equip and realise the full character of the true Platonic "war-man" or knight; and again, through some later approximate instances, discern something of those extraordinary, half-divine, philosophic kings.

We must let industry then mean for Plato all it meant, would naturally mean, for a Greek, amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts. The "rule" of Plato, its precepts of temperance, proportion, economy, though designed primarily for its soldiers, and its kings or archons, for the military and spiritual orders, would probably have been incumbent also in relaxed degree upon those who work with their hands; and we have but to walk through the classical department of the Louvre or the British Museum to be reminded how those qualities of temperance and the like did but enhance, could not chill or impoverish, the artistic genius of Greek workmen. In proportion to what we know of the minor handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able to fill up, as the condition of everyday life in the streets of Plato's City of the Perfect, a picture of happy protected labour, "skilled" to the utmost degree in all its applications. Those who prosecute it will be allowed, as we may gather, in larger proportion than those who "watch," in silent thought or sword in hand, such animal [251] liberties as seem natural and right, and are not really "illiberal," for those who labour all day with their bodies, though they too will have on them in their service some measure of the compulsion which shapes the action of our kings and soldiers to such effective music. With more or less of asceticism, of a "common life," among themselves, they will be the peculiar sphere of the virtue of temperance in the State, as being the entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule. They represent, as we saw, in the social organism, the bodily appetites of the individual, its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right there, with the conscience and with the reasonable soul in it. Labouring by system at the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps, perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as we know, to enable them the more readily to exchange their produce (nomisma tês allagês heneka)+ working perhaps in guilds and under rules to insure perfection in each specific craft, refining matter to the last degree, they would constitute the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service, like the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul--to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its "golden" humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly resides, and who, as being not merely its discursive or practical reason, but its faculty of contemplation likewise, will be also its priests, the [252] medium of its worship, of its intercourse with the gods.

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