In the previous books Plato has described the ideal State; now he returns to the perverted or declining forms, on which he had lightly touched at the end of Book IV. These he describes in a succession of parallels between the individuals and the States, tracing the origin of either in the State or individual which has preceded them. He begins by asking the point at which he digressed; and is thus led shortly to recapitulate the substance of the three former books, which also contain a parallel of the philosopher and the State.
Of the first decline he gives no intelligible account; he would not have liked to admit the most probable causes of the fall of his ideal State, which to us would appear to be the impracticability of communism or the natural antagonism of the ruling and subject classes. He throws a veil of mystery over the origin of the decline, which he attributes to ignorance of the law of population. Of this law the famous geometrical figure or number is the expression. Like the ancients in general, he had no idea of the gradual perfectibility of man or of the education of the human race. His ideal was not to be attained in the course of ages, but was to spring in full armour from the head of the legislator. When good laws had been given, he thought only of the manner in which they were likely to be corrupted, or of how they might be filled up in detail or restored in accordance with their original spirit. He appears not to have reflected upon the full meaning of his own words, ‘In the brief space of human life, nothing great can be accomplished’; or again, as he afterwards says in the Laws, ‘Infinite time is the maker of cities.’ The order of constitutions which is adopted by him represents an order of thought rather than a succession of time, and may be considered as the first attempt to frame a philosophy of history.
The first of these declining States is timocracy, or the government of soldiers and lovers of honour, which answers to the Spartan State; this is a government of force, in which education is not inspired by the Muses, but imposed by the law, and in which all the finer elements of organization have disappeared. The philosopher himself has lost the love of truth, and the soldier, who is of a simpler and honester nature, rules in his stead. The individual who answers to timocracy has some noticeable qualities. He is described as ill educated, but, like the Spartan, a lover of literature; and although he is a harsh master to his servants he has no natural superiority over them. His character is based upon a reaction against the circumstances of his father, who in a troubled city has retired from politics; and his mother, who is dissatisfied at her own position, is always urging him towards the life of political ambition. Such a character may have had this origin, and indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a similar kind. But there is obviously no connection between the manner in which the timocratic State springs out of the ideal, and the mere accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a retired statesman.
The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even less historical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek history of a polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an oligarchy of wealth, or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The order of history appears to be different; first, in the Homeric times there is the royal or patriarchal form of government, which a century or two later was succeeded by an oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and in which wealth was only the accident of the hereditary possession of land and power. Sometimes this oligarchical government gave way to a government based upon a qualification of property, which, according to Aristotle’s mode of using words, would have been called a timocracy; and this in some cities, as at Athens, became the conducting medium to democracy. But such was not the necessary order of succession in States; nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the endless fluctuation of Greek history (like the tides in the Euripus), except, perhaps, in the almost uniform tendency from monarchy to aristocracy in the earliest times. At first sight there appears to be a similar inversion in the last step of the Platonic succession; for tyranny, instead of being the natural end of democracy, in early Greek history appears rather as a stage leading to democracy; the reign of Peisistratus and his sons is an episode which comes between the legislation of Solon and the constitution of Cleisthenes; and some secret cause common to them all seems to have led the greater part of Hellas at her first appearance in the dawn of history, e.g. Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, and nearly every State with the exception of Sparta, through a similar stage of tyranny which ended either in oligarchy or democracy. But then we must remember that Plato is describing rather the contemporary governments of the Sicilian States, which alternated between democracy and tyranny, than the ancient history of Athens or Corinth.
The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later Greek delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives of mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the conduct and actions of one were attributed to another in order to fill up the outline. There was no enormity which the Greek was not today to believe of them; the tyrant was the negation of government and law; his assassination was glorious; there was no crime, however unnatural, which might not with probability be attributed to him. In this, Plato was only following the common thought of his countrymen, which he embellished and exaggerated with all the power of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he drew from life; or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a personal acquaintance with Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of them would rather tend to render doubtful his ever having ‘consorted’ with them, or entertained the schemes, which are attributed to him in the Epistles, of regenerating Sicily by their help.
Plato in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of democracy which he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy is a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host, which is the leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to think. But if he is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover of tyranny. His deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved for the tyrant, who is the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness, and who in his utter helplessness and suspiciousness is leading an almost impossible existence, without that remnant of good which, in Plato’s opinion, was required to give power to evil (Book I). This ideal of wickedness living in helpless misery, is the reverse of that other portrait of perfect injustice ruling in happiness and splendour, which first of all Thrasymachus, and afterwards the sons of Ariston had drawn, and is also the reverse of the king whose rule of life is the good of his subjects.
Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding ethical gradation: the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not extinguishing but harmonizing the passions, and training them in virtue; in the timocracy and the timocratic man the constitution, whether of the State or of the individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly, upon the love of honour; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue, has superseded all the rest. In the second stage of decline the virtues have altogether disappeared, and the love of gain has succeeded to them; in the third stage, or democracy, the various passions are allowed to have free play, and the virtues and vices are impartially cultivated. But this freedom, which leads to many curious extravagances of character, is in reality only a state of weakness and dissipation. At last, one monster passion takes possession of the whole nature of man—this is tyranny. In all of them excess—the excess first of wealth and then of freedom, is the element of decay.
The eighth book of the Republic abounds in pictures of life and fanciful allusions; the use of metaphorical language is carried to a greater extent than anywhere else in Plato. We may remark,
(1), the description of the two nations in one, which become more and more divided in the Greek Republics, as in feudal times, and perhaps also in our own;
(2), the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean formula as equality among unequals;
(3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic of liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the tyrant;
(4), the proposal that mere debts should not be recoverable by law is a speculation which has often been entertained by reformers of the law in modern times, and is in harmony with the tendencies of modern legislation. Debt and land were the two great difficulties of the ancient lawgiver: in
