Plato and Platonism Part 11

The Helots, then, to whom this business exclusively belonged, a race of slaves, distinguishable however from the slaves or serfs who tilled the land, handing on their mastery in those matters in a kind of guild, father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216]

players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lises (to borrow an expression from French feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper functions of gentlemen--schole,+ leisure, in the two senses of the word, which in truth involve one another--their whole time free, to be told out in austere schools. Long easeful nights, with more than enough to eat and drink, the "illiberal" pleasures of appet.i.te, as Aristotle and Plato agree in thinking them, are of course the appropriate reward or remedy of those who work painfully with their hands, and seem to have been freely conceded to those Helots, who by concession of the State, from first to last their legal owner, were in domestic service, and sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon--youth of gold, or gilded steel.

The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coa.r.s.eness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor must have become, in his measure, actually a sharer in them. Just here, for once, we see that slavish ethos,+ the servile range of sentiment, which ought to accompany the condition of slavery, if it be indeed, as Aristotle supposes, one of the [217] natural relations.h.i.+ps between man and man, idealised, or aesthetically right, pleasant and proper; the arete,+ or "best possible condition," of the young servitor as such, including a sort of bodily wors.h.i.+p, and a willingness to share the keen discipline which had developed the so attractive gallantry of his youthful lords.

A great wave, successive waves, of invasion, sufficiently remote to have lost already all historic truth of detail, had left them--these Helots, and the Perioeci, in the country round about--thus to serve among their own kinsmen, though so close to them in lineage, so much on a level with their masters in essential physical qualities that to the last they could never be entirely subdued in spirit. Patient modern research, following the track of a deep-rooted national tradition veiled in the mythological figments which centre in what is called "The Return of the Heraclidae," reveals those northern immigrants or invaders, at various points on their way, dominant all along it, from a certain deep vale in the heart of the mountains of Epirus southwards, gradually through zone after zone of more temperate lowland, to reach their perfection, highlanders from first to last, in this mountain "hollow" of Lacedaemon. They claim supremacy, not as Dorian invaders, but as kinsmen of the old Achaean princes of the land; yet it was to the fact of conquest, to the necessity of [218] maintaining a position so strained, like that, as Aristotle expressly pointed out, of a beleaguered encampment in an enemy's territory, that the singular inst.i.tutions of Lacedaemon, the half-military, half-monastic spirit, which prevailed in this so gravely beautiful place, had been originally due. But observe!--Its moral and political system, in which that slavery was so significant a factor, its discipline, its aesthetic and other scruples, its peculiar moral ethos,+ having long before our Platonic student comes thither attained its original and proper ends, survived,--there is the point! survived as an end in itself, as a matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps still more of personal pride, though of the finer, the very finest sort, in one word as an ideal. Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindication of the Athenian system, makes his hearers understand that the ends of the Lacedaemonian people might have been attained with less self-sacrifice than theirs. But still, there it remained, he diaita Dorike+--the genuine Laconism of the Lacedaemonians themselves, their traditional conception of life, with its earnestness, its precision and strength, its loyalty to its own type, its impa.s.sioned completeness; a spectacle, aesthetically, at least, very interesting, like some perfect instrument shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in Greece, in the world.

Gymnastic, "bodily exercise," of course, does [219] not always and necessarily effect the like of that. A certain perfectly preserved old Roman mosaic pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a terribly fresh picture of the results of another sort of "training," the monstrous development by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle, changing boy or man into a merely mechanic instrument with which his breeders might make money by amusing the Roman people. Victor Hugo's odious dream of L'homme qui rit, must have had something of a prototype among those old Roman gladiators. The Lacedaemonians, says Xenophon on the other hand, h.o.m.oios apo te ton skelon kai apo cheiron kai apo trachelou gymnazontai.+ Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or music, and bold as they could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia, for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body. Though we must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education which began with them betimes, and with a very clearly defined programme, conservative of ancient traditional and unwritten rules, an aristocratic education for the few, the liberales--"liberals," as we may say, in that the proper sense of the word. It made them, in [220]

very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they were meant by-and-by to rule; masters, of their very souls, of their imagination, enforcing on them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority, thus backing, or backed by, a very effective organisation of "the power of the sword."

In speaking of Lacedaemon, you see, it comes naturally to speak out of proportion, it might seem, of its youth, and of the education of its youth. But in fact if you enter into the spirit of Lacedaemonian youth, you may conceive Lacedaemonian manhood for yourselves. You divine already what the boy, the youth, so late in obtaining his majority, in becoming a man, came to be in the action of life, and on the battle-field. "In a Doric state," says Muller, "education was, on the whole, a matter of more importance than government."

A young Lacedaemonian, then, of the privileged cla.s.s left his home, his tender nurses in those large, quiet old suburban houses early, for a public school, a schooling all the stricter as years went on, to be followed, even so, by a peculiar kind of barrack-life, the temper of which, a sort of military monasticism (it must be repeated) would beset him to the end. Though in the gymnasia of Lacedaemon no idle by- standers, no--well! Platonic loungers after truth or what not--were permitted, yet we are told, neither there nor in Sparta generally, neither there nor anywhere else, were the boys permitted [221] to be alone. If a certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable gaze of his fellows, broad, searching, minute, his regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental even more than physical ease. And his education continued late; he could seldom think of marriage till the age of thirty.

Ethically it aimed at the reality, aesthetically at the expression, of reserved power, and from the first set its subject on the thought of his personal dignity, of self-command, in the artistic way of a good musician, a good soldier. It is noted that "the general accent of the Doric dialect has itself the character not of question or entreaty, but of command or dictation." The place of deference, of obedience, was large in the education of Lacedaemonian youth; and they never complained. It involved however for the most part, as with ourselves, the government of youth by itself; an implicit subordination of the younger to the older, in many degrees. Quite early in life, at school, they found that superiors and inferiors, h.o.m.oioi and hypomeiones,+ there really were; and their education proceeded with systematic boldness on that fact. Eiren, melleiren, sideunes,+ and the like--words, t.i.tles, which indicate an unflinching elaboration of the att.i.tudes of youthful subordination and command with responsibility--remain as a part of what we might [222] call their "public-school slang." They ate together "in their divisions" (agelai)+ on much the same fare every day at a sort of messes; not reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes, the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches; were "inspected" frequently, and by free use of viva voce examination "became adepts in presence of mind," in mental readiness and vigour, in the brief mode of speech Plato commends, which took and has kept its name from them; with no warm baths allowed; a daily plunge in their river required. Yes! The beauty of these most beautiful of all people was a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness; had the expression of a certain ascesis in it; was like un-sweetened wine. In comparison with it, beauty of another type might seem to be wanting in edge or accent.

And they could be silent. Of the positive uses of the negation of speech, like genuine scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedaemonians were well aware, gaining strength and intensity by repression. Long s.p.a.ces of enforced silence had doubtless something to do with that expressive brevity of utterance, which could be also, when they cared, so inexpressive of what their intentions really were--something to do with the habit of mind to which such speaking would come naturally. In contrast with the ceaseless prattle of Athens, Lacedaemonian a.s.semblies lasted as short a time as possible, all standing. A [223]

Lacedaemonian amba.s.sador being asked in whose name he was come, replies: "In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own." What they lost in extension they gained in depth.

Had our traveller been tempted to ask a young Lacedaemonian to return his visit at Athens, permission would have been refused him. He belonged to a community bent above all things on keeping indelibly its own proper colour. Its more strictly mental education centered, in fact, upon a faithful training of the memory, again in the spirit of Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed best worth remembering. Hard and practical as Lacedaemonians might seem, they lived nevertheless very much by imagination; and to train the memory, to preoccupy their minds with the past, as in our own cla.s.sic or historic culture of youth, was in reality to develope a vigorous imagination. In music (mousike)+ as they conceived it, there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or listening; and if there was little a Lacedaemonian lad had to read or write at all, he had much to learn, like a true conservative, by heart: those unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders was the authorised depositary, and on which the whole public procedure of the state depended; the archaic forms of religious wors.h.i.+p; the names of their kings, of victors in their games or in battle; the brief record of great events; the oracles they had received; the rhetrai, from [224]

Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lacedaemonian Greek; their history and law, in short, actually set to music, by Terpander and others, as was said. What the Lacedaemonian learned by heart he was for the most part to sing, and we catch a glimpse, an echo, of their boys in school chanting; one of the things in old Greece one would have liked best to see and hear--youthful beauty and strength in perfect service--a manifestation of the true and genuine h.e.l.lenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian's cousins at Sion, singing there the law and its praises.

The Platonic student of the ways of the Lacedaemonians observes then, is interested in observing, that their education, which indeed makes no sharp distinction between mental and bodily exercise, results as it had begun in "music"--ends with body, mind, memory above all, at their finest, on great show-days, in the dance. Austere, self-denying Lacedaemon had in fact one of the largest theatres in Greece, in part scooped out boldly on the hill-side, built partly of enormous blocks of stone, the foundations of which may still be seen. We read what Plato says in The Republic of "imitations," of the imitative arts, imitation reaching of course its largest development on the stage, and are perhaps surprised at the importance he a.s.signs, in every department of [225] human culture, to a matter of that kind. But here as elsewhere to see was to understand. We should have understood Plato's drift in his long criticism and defence of imitative art, his careful system of rules concerning it, could we have seen the famous dramatic Lacedaemonian dancing. They danced a theme, a subject. A complex and elaborate art this must necessarily have been, but, as we may gather, as concise, direct, economically expressive, in all its varied sound and motion, as those swift, lightly girt, impromptu Lacedaemonian sayings. With no movement of voice or hand or foot, paraleipomenon,+ unconsidered, as Plato forbids, it was the perfect flower of their correction, of that minute patience and care which ends in a perfect expressiveness; not a note, a glance, a touch, but told obediently in the promotion of a firmly grasped mental conception, as in that perfect poetry or sculpture or painting, in which "the finger of the master is on every part of his work." We have nothing really like it, and to comprehend it must remember that, though it took place in part at least on the stage of a theatre--was in fact a ballet-dance, it had also the character both of a liturgical service and of a military inspection; and yet, in spite of its severity of rule, was a natural expression of the delight of all who took part in it.

So perfect a spectacle the G.o.ds themselves might be thought pleased to witness; were in [226] consequence presented with it as an important element in the religious wors.h.i.+p of the Lacedaemonians, in whose life religion had even a larger part than with the other Greeks, conspicuously religious, deisidaimones,+ involved in religion or superst.i.tion, as the Greeks generally were. More closely even than their so scrupulous neighbours they a.s.sociated the state, its acts and officers, with a religious sanction, religious usages, theories, traditions. While the responsibilities of secular government lay upon the Ephors, those mysteriously dual, at first sight useless, and yet so sanctimoniously observed kings, "of the house of Heracles," with something of the splendour of the old Achaean or Homeric kings, in life as also in death, the splendid funerals, the pa.s.sionate archaic laments which then followed them, were in fact of spiritual or priestly rank, the living and active centre of a poetic religious system, binding them "in a beneficent connexion" to the past, and in the present with special closeness to the oracle of Delphi.

Of that catholic or general centre of Greek religion the Lacedaemonians were the hereditary and privileged guardians, as also the peculiar people of Apollo, the G.o.d of Delphi; but, observe! of Apollo in a peculiar development of his deity. In the dramatic business of Lacedaemon, centering in these almost liturgical dances, there was little comic acting. The fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and loud [227] laughter, was to their master, who had no taste for the like, a rea.s.suring note of his superiority. He therefore indulged them in it on occasion, and you might fancy that the religion of a people so strenuous, ever so full of their dignity, must have been a religion of gloom. It was otherwise. The Lacedaemonians, like those monastic persons of whom they so often remind one, as a matter of fact however surprising, were a very cheerful people; and the religion of which they had so much, deeply imbued everywhere with an optimism as of hopeful youth, encouraged that disposition, was above all a religion of sanity.

The observant Platonic visitor might have taken note that something of that purgation of religious thought and sentiment, of its expression in literature, recommended in Plato's Republic, had been already quietly effected here, towards the establishment of a kind of cheerful daylight in men's tempers.

In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that harmony of functions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo, sanest of the national G.o.ds, became also the tribal or home G.o.d of Lacedaemon. That common Greek wors.h.i.+p of Apollo they made especially their own, but (just here is the noticeable point) with a marked preference for the human element in him, for the mental powers of his being over those elemental or physical forces of production, which he also mystically represents, and which resulted [228] sometimes in an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service. He remains youthful and unmarried. In congruity with this, it is observed that, in a quasi-Roman wors.h.i.+p, abstract qualities and relations.h.i.+ps, ideals, become subsidiary objects of religious consideration around him, such as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter even. Nay, other G.o.ds also are, so to speak, Apollinised, adapted to the Apolline presence; Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps that he may never depart thence. Amateurs everywhere of the virile element in life, the Lacedaemonians, in truth, impart to all things an intellectual character. Adding a vigorous logic to seemingly animal instincts, for them courage itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind at Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intellectual condition, a form of right knowledge.

Such a.s.sertion of the consciously human interest in a religion based originally on a preoccupation with the unconscious forces of nature, was exemplified in the great religious festival of Lacedaemon. As a spectator of the Hyacinthia, our Platonic student would have found himself one of a large body of strangers, gathered together from Lacedaemon and its dependent towns and villages, within the ancient precincts of Amyclae, at the season between spring and summer when under the first fierce heat of the year the abundant hyacinths fade from the fields. Blue flowers, [229] you remember, are the rarest, to many eyes the loveliest; and the Lacedaemonians with their guests were met together to celebrate the death of the hapless lad who had lent his name to them, Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient mortal king who had reigned in this very place; in either case, greatly beloved of the G.o.d, who had slain him by sad accident as they played at quoits together delightfully, to his immense sorrow. That Boreas (the north-wind) had maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circ.u.mstance we hardly need to remind us that we have here, of course, only one of many transparent, unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great solar change, so sudden in the south, like the story of Proserpine, Adonis, and the like. But here, more completely perhaps than in any other of those stories, the primary elemental sense had obscured itself behind its really tragic a.n.a.logue in human life, behind the figure of the dying youth. We know little of the details of the feast; incidentally, that Apollo was vested on the occasion in a purple robe, brought in ceremony from Lacedaemon, woven there, Pausanias tells us, in a certain house called from that circ.u.mstance Chiton.+ You may remember how sparing these Lacedaemonians were of such dyed raiment, of any but the natural and virgin colouring of the fleece; that purple or red, however, was the colour of their royal funerals, as indeed Amyclae itself was famous for purple stuffs--Amyclaeae vestes. As [230] the general order of the feast, we discern clearly a single day of somewhat shrill gaiety, between two days of significant mourning after the manner of All Souls' Day, directed from mimic grief for a mythic object, to a really sorrowful commemoration by the whole Lacedaemonian people--each separate family for its own deceased members.

It was so again with those other youthful demi-G.o.ds, the Dioscuri, themselves also, in old heroic time, resident in this venerable place: Amyclaei fratres, fraternal leaders of the Lacedaemonian people. Their statues at this date were numerous in Laconia, or the docana, primitive symbols of them, those two upright beams of wood, carried to battle before the two kings, until it happened that through their secret enmity a certain battle was lost, after which one king only proceeded to the field, and one part only of that token of fraternity, the other remaining at Sparta. Well! they were two stars, you know, at their original birth in men's minds, Gemini, virginal fresh stars of dawn, rising and setting alternately--those two half-earthly, half-celestial brothers, one of whom, Polydeuces, was immortal. The other, Castor, the younger, subject to old age and death, had fallen in battle, was found breathing his last. Polydeuces thereupon, at his own prayer, was permitted to die: with undying fraternal affection, had forgone one moiety of his privilege, and lay in the grave for a day in his [231]

brother's stead, but shone out again on the morrow; the brothers thus ever coming and going, interchangeably, but both alike gifted now with immortal youth.

In their origin, then, very obviously elemental deities, they were thus become almost wholly humanised, fraternised with the Lacedaemonian people, their closest friends of the whole celestial company, visitors, as fond legend told, at their very hearths, found warming themselves in the half-light at their rude fire-sides. Themselves thus visible on occasion, at all times in devout art, they were the starry patrons of all that youth was proud of, delighted in, horsemans.h.i.+p, games, battle; and always with that profound fraternal sentiment. Brothers, comrades, who could not live without each other, they were the most fitting patrons of a place in which friends.h.i.+p, comrades.h.i.+p, like theirs, came to so much. Lovers of youth they remained, those enstarred types of it, arrested thus at that moment of miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the clean, youthful friends.h.i.+p, "pa.s.sing even the love of woman," which, by system, and under the sanction of their founder's name, elaborated into a kind of art, became an elementary part of education. A part of their duty and discipline, it was also their great solace and encouragement. The beloved and the lover, side by side through their long days of eager labour, and above all on the battlefield, became respectively, aites,+ the [232] hearer, and eispnelas,+ the inspirer; the elder inspiring the younger with his own strength and n.o.ble taste in things.

What, it has been asked, what was there to occupy persons of the privileged cla.s.s in Lacedaemon from morning to night, thus cut off as they were from politics and business, and many of the common interests of men's lives? Our Platonic visitor would have asked rather, Why this strenuous task-work, day after day; why this loyalty to a system, so costly to you individually, though it may be thought to have survived its original purpose; this laborious, endless, education, which does not propose to give you anything very useful or enjoyable in itself?

An intelligent young Spartan might have replied: "To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus into the eyes of all Greece." He might have observed--we may safely observe for him--that the inst.i.tutions of his country, whose he was, had a beauty in themselves, as we may observe also of some at least of our own inst.i.tutions, educational or religious: that they bring out, for instance, the lights and shadows of human character, and relieve the present by maintaining in it an ideal sense of the past. He might have added that he had his friends.h.i.+ps to solace him; and to encourage him, the sense of honour.

Honour, friends.h.i.+p, loyalty to the ideal of the [233] past, himself as a work of art! There was much of course in his answer. Yet still, after all, to understand, to be capable of, such motives, was itself but a result of that exacting discipline of character we are trying to account for; and the question still recurs, To what purpose? Why, with no prospect of Israel's reward, are you as scrupulous, minute, self- taxing, as he? A tincture of asceticism in the Lacedaemonian rule may remind us again of the monasticism of the Middle Ages. But then, monastic severity was for the purging of a troubled conscience, or for the hope of an immense prize, neither of which conditions is to be supposed here. In fact the surprise of Saint Paul, as a practical man, at the slightness of the reward for which a Greek spent himself, natural as it is about all pagan perfection, is especially applicable about these Lacedaemonians, who indeed had actually invented that so "corruptible" and essentially worthless parsley crown in place of the more tangible prizes of an earlier age. Strange people! Where, precisely, may be the spring of action in you, who are so severe to yourselves; you who, in the words of Plato's supposed objector that the rulers of the ideal state are not to be envied, have nothing you can really call your own, but are like hired servants in your own houses,-- qui manducatis panem doloris?+

Another day-dream, you may say, about those [234] obscure ancient people, it was ever so difficult really to know, who had hidden their actual life with so much success; but certainly a quite natural dream upon the paradoxical things we are told of them, on good authority. It is because they make us ask that question; puzzle us by a paradoxical idealism in life; are thus distinguished from their neighbours; that, like some of our old English places of education, though we might not care to live always at school there, it is good to visit them on occasion; as some philosophic Athenians, as we have now seen, loved to do, at least in thought.

NOTES

198. +Transliteration: Gnothi sauton . . . Meden agan. E-text editor's translation: "Know thyself . . . nothing too much." Plato, Protagoras 343b.

200. +Transliteration: mousike. Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung to music...."

205. +Transliteration: hoi gerontes, he gerousia. Liddell and Scott definitions: "the old . . . a Council of Elders, Senate, esp. at Sparta, where it consisted of 28."

206. +Transliteration: paraleipomenon. Pater's translation: "oversights." The verb paraleipo means, "to leave on one side . . .

leave unnoticed."

207. +Transliteration: koile Sparte. Pater's translation: "hollow Sparta."

207. +Transliteration: polichnia. Pater's translation: "hamlets."

214. +Transliteration: ophrya te kai koilainetai. E-text editor's translation: "craggy and hollowed out." Strabo cites this proverb about Corinth. Strabo, Geography, Book 8, Chapter 6, Section 23.

216. +Transliteration: schole. Pater's translation: "leisure."

216. +Transliteration: ethos. Liddell and Scott definition: "an accustomed place . . . custom, usage, habit."

217. +Transliteration: arete. Liddell and Scott definition: "goodness, excellence, of any kind."

218. +Transliteration: ethos. Liddell and Scott definition: "an accustomed place . . . custom, usage, habit."

218. +Transliteration: he diaita Dorike. E-text editor's translation: "the Dorian way of life."

219. +Transliteration: h.o.m.oios apo te ton skelon kai apo cheiron kai apo trachelou gymnazontai. E-text editor's translation: "Their exercises train the legs, arms and neck with the same care." Xenophon, Minor Works, Const.i.tution of the Lacedaemonians, Chapter 5, Section 9.

221. +Transliteration: h.o.m.oioi . . . hypomeiones. Pater's translation: "superiors and inferiors."

221. +Transliteration: Eiren, melleiren, sideunes. Liddell and Scott definition of the first term: "a Lacedaemonian youth from his 18th.

year, when he was ent.i.tled to speak in the a.s.sembly and to lead an army." I have not come across the second or third terms, but the root meaning of the words suggests that they would mean, roughly, "one who is of age, or nearly of age" and "a young man who is old enough to bear a sword."

222. +Transliteration: agelai. Pater's translation: "in their divisions."

223. +Transliteration: mousike. Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung to music...."

225. +Transliteration: paraleipomenon. Pater's translation: "oversights." The verb paraleipo means, "to leave on one side . . .

leave unnoticed."

226. +Transliteration: deisidaimones. Liddell and Scott definition: "fearing the G.o.ds," in both a good and bad sense--i.e. either pious or superst.i.tious.

229. +A Chiton was "a woollen s.h.i.+rt worn next the body." (Liddell and Scott.)

231. +Transliteration: aites. Pater's translation: "the hearer."

232. +Transliteration: eispnelas. 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 h.e.l.lenic type, ended, so far as they were concerned, in theory.