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VIRTUE IS KNOWLEDGE
No one must have any private property whatsoever, except what is absolutely necessary. Secondly, no one must have any lodging or storehouse at all which is not open to all comers … They must live in common, attending in messes as if they were in the field … They alone of all in the city dare not have any dealings with gold or silver or even touch them or come under the same roof with them.
Is this a description of an ascetic religious order? Or of a communist group in training for a secret mission? Or is it a science-fiction account of a society of the future preparing for a space war? It is actually Plato’s requirements for the ruling class of his ideal Republic. (Republic, Book III, 415 E.)
Plato is the most celebrated, honored and revered of all the philosophers of the Western world. He lived in Athens twenty-four centuries ago, in the fourth century before Christ, and throughout history since then the praise of Plato has been expressed in figures of speech which compete with one another in their eloquence. He is said to be the greatest of the philosophers which Western civilization has produced; he is said to be the father of Western philosophy; the son of the god Apollo; a sublime dramatist and poet with a vision of beauty which enhances all human life; a mystic who, before Christ and Saint Paul, beheld a transcendent realm of goodness, love, and beauty; he is said to be the greatest of the moralists and social philosophers of all time. The British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead said of him that the history of Western philosophy is only a series of footnotes to Plato. And the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said of him, “Plato is Philosophy, and Philosophy, Plato,” and also, “Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.”
Historical Situation
Aside from the great achievement of his philosophy, Plato’s life exhibits many tragic conflicts and deep frustrations, which arose from the larger tragedy which overcame Athens herself—her defeat in war and the subsequent decline of her great civilization. To understand Plato we must place him in his culture, in his time. He was born in Athens circa 427 BC at the end of what is conventionally called the Golden Age of Athens, or the Age of Pericles, who was its statesman-ruler.
The Golden Age of Athens, the Age of Pericles, which lasted from 445 to 431 BC, has come to symbolize perfection in human civilized life. It may be said that the Western world has had a long-standing love affair with the Athens of the Golden Age. We feel closer to Athens, as our ideal and model, than to any other city in all of human history, except possibly Jerusalem. But we relate to Jerusalem not as an ideal city, but only in devotion to the great persons who lived there and to the sacred events that happened there. Why the long love affair with the ancient city of Athens? Athens is our ideal as the first democracy, and as a city devoted to human excellence in mind and body, to philosophy, the arts and science, and to the cultivation of the art of living; and we as a democratic nation empathize with her in her tragic defeat.
By the fifth century BC Athens had become a democracy, as the culmination of a long struggle between a small number of land-owning families of the aristocracy and great numbers of the poor. Pericles, elected annually as the first citizen of the state, skillfully maintained political rights for all citizens, for the aristocracy and for commoners, for rich and for poor (although not for women or slaves). Pericles extended and consolidated the empire of the Athenian city-state, while strengthening within Athens the new political doctrine of egalitarianism, equal rights for all citizens under the law. Most of the prominent and influential citizens of Athens were democratic or had become democratic in their political views. In Athenian society, the poor were held to be as virtuous and as capable as the rich. Of the poor, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote in one of his famous plays: “Justice shines in houses grimy with smoke.” And the philosopher Protagoras said: “Anyone who is just and reverent is qualified to give advice on public affairs.”
The Athenian state had a constitution and a supreme court, which incorporated a jury system of six thousand jurors, divided into panels, and formed the basis of Athenian democracy. All citizens were equal under the law, in basic education, and in political life through direct democratic debate and voting. There was freedom of speech and humane treatment of aliens and slaves. In the Age of Pericles there was full employment and great material prosperity through trade and domestic industry. The city government was viewed as a model of justice for the known world and Athenians had feelings of intense pride and loyalty for the city itself.
The years 445 to 431 BC were years of peace and internal improvements. Under Pericles Athens was made beautiful by vast building projects. Historians of comparative civilizations say no other city was ever so handsomely adorned by public buildings and works of art. Today the remains of temples and public buildings decorated by magnificent sculptures and statuary still stand. Supreme among these is the Parthenon, which was the chief temple of Athens, and dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, whose huge gold and ivory statue was carved under the direction of the sculptor Phidias. The Parthenon and the Propylaea, the great entrance hall, were among the many magnificent public buildings high on the rock cliff, called the Acropolis, overlooking the city. Pericles attracted to Athens the intellectually and artistically gifted from all parts of Greece. In literature there appeared the great Greek dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes; in architecture and sculpture there were Phidias and Mnesicles; in philosophy there were Parmenides, Zeno, Anaxagoras, the Sophists, and Socrates; in history there were the great historians Herodotus and Thucydides. There were brilliant achievements in all fields of culture, science, and medicine. The historian Thucydides writes that Pericles in a famous oration said of the Athenians: “We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the arts without loss of manliness.”
Pericles’s moderate policy in time ran into opposition by extremists on both the aristocratic right and the democratic left. But a strong sense of loyalty to Athens unified the city politically when war with Sparta broke out in the spring of 431 BC At this time most of the communities of Greece were under the leadership of either the Athenian Empire (which was democratic, commercial, and industrial) or the Spartan Empire (which was authoritarian, militaristic, and agricultural). The Peloponnesian War as it developed became clearly a struggle between Athenian democracy and the authoritarianism of Sparta, which was ruled by a military elite with absolute power. In the second year of the war, an uncontrollable plague broke out in Athens which was overcrowded and rapidly becoming impoverished.
Democratic Athens finally surrendered to Sparta in 404 BC, whereupon a revolution was staged by the aristocrats, who conducted a vicious reign of terror, the Rule of the Thirty. Among the leaders of this reign of terror were Charmides (Plato’s uncle) and Critias (Plato’s cousin). They represented the rich and noble families who had been virtually destroyed by the long years of war waged by democratic Athens. When democracy was restored and the Rule of the Thirty brought to an end, the philosopher Socrates was tried by an Athenian jury and was sentenced to death.
Plato’s Life
What do we know of Plato’s life during the war with Sparta? Plato was born three years after the war with Sparta began, a year after the death of Pericles, too late to experience in his own lifetime the peace and glory of the Age of Pericles. He was the son of one of the most aristocratic families in Athens. His father, Ariston, was descended from the last king of Athens. His mother, Perictione, was a descendant of Solon, the aristocratic reformer who wrote the constitution which established Athenian democracy. Both sides of his family were related to noble and aristocratic landowners of Athens, who increasingly opposed the flounderings and failures of the democratic government in its conduct of the war. Plato had grown up in an aristocratic family which had supported Pericles and the democratic government, but now felt itself betrayed by the bungling war policy of the democratic government. The resentment of such families increased as they saw their financial resources drained away during the long-drawn-out war with Sparta, a military autocracy which now appeared far more to their liking than democracy. Plato was no doubt brought up to think of democracy as a form of corruption in government. An armed counterrevolution appeared to the aristocracy to be the only solution to the weakness of Athens against the power of Sparta. Plato, too, must have believed that his relatives Charmides and Critias, who engineered the Rule of the Thirty and its brief reign of terror, would bring about the new order and that his teacher Socrates would provide its philosophy.
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Excerpted from "From Socrates to Sartre"
by .
Copyright © 1985 T.Z. Lavine.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
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