Plato and Platonism Part 1

Plato and Platonism.

by Walter Pater.

CHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

[5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic generation, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit per saltum; and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or idea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or of "the perpetual flux," the theory of "induction," or the philosophic view of things generally, the specialist will still be able to find us some earlier antic.i.p.ation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The most elementary act of mental a.n.a.lysis takes time to do; the most rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple that we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and with difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that of Herac.l.i.tus--"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away--may startle a particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half- developed instincts of the human mind itself.

Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical literature. His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for compa.s.s and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of the mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.

In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory.

And as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse of all physical theories, so in reading the Parmenides we might think that all metaphysical questions whatever had already pa.s.sed through the mind of Plato. Some of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone, are of the structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not as the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or there amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very stone he builds with. The central and most intimate principles of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master--to Socrates, who survives chiefly in his pages--but to various precedent schools of speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious philosophy, again, to certain const.i.tutional tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilisations of India and of Egypt, as they still exercise their authority over ourselves.

The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pa.s.s from him to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had their earlier [8] proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading him of certain antic.i.p.ations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.

There are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic, of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines of Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day.

That is the dogmatic method of criticism; judging every product of human thought, however alien [9] or distant from one's self, by its congruity with the a.s.sumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel, according to the mental preference of the particular critic. There is, secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth dispersed among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like that of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the Neo- Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is in the tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the other elements of a pre-conceived system.

Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing "Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third method of criticism, the historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system, we are busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as The Republic, as far as possible in the group of conditions, intellectual, social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if we would really understand it. That ages have their genius as well as the individual; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of conditions which determines [10] a common character in every product of that age, in business and art, in fas.h.i.+on and speculation, in religion and manners, in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its proper point of view in the never-resting "secular process"; the solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or general history; that what it behoves the student of philosophic systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so, beliefs the most fantastic, the "communism" of Plato, for instance, have their natural propriety when duly correlated with those facts, those conditions round about them, of which they are in truth a part.

In the intellectual as in the organic world the given product, its normal or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as people say, by the "environment." The business of the young scholar therefore, in reading Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or make apology for, [11] what may seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental process there, as he might witness a game of skill; better still, as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The Republic, to watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary monument. To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek life generally: such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say, of the really critical study of him.

At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the historic spirit impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading thoughts are partly derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we happen to possess independent information. From that brilliant and busy, yet so unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here another there stands aside to make the initial act of conscious philosophic reflexion. It is done with something of the simplicity, the immediate and visible effectiveness, of the visible world in action all around. Among Plato's many intellectual [12] predecessors, on whom in recent years much attention has been bestowed by a host of commentators after the mind of Hegel, three, whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in the very texture of Plato's work, emerge distinctly in close connexion with The Republic: Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the philosophy of number and music; Parmenides, "My father Parmenides," the centre of the school of Elea; Herac.l.i.tus, thirdly, author of the doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be admitted after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that knowledge greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual influence in Plato's writings.

Herac.l.i.tus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten--he too might be thought, as a writer of prose, one of the "fathers" of Plato. His influence, however, on Plato, though himself a Herac.l.i.tean in early life, was by way of antagonism or reaction; Plato's stand against any philosophy of motion becoming, as we say, something of a "fixed idea"

with him. Herac.l.i.tus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then is denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League) died about forty years before [13] Plato was born. Here then at Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of Ionia, itself so lately emanc.i.p.ated from its tyrants, Herac.l.i.tus, of ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fas.h.i.+on. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged cla.s.s had gone to the wall. In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that cla.s.s, as being also of nature's aristocracy, and a man of powerful intellectual gifts, Herac.l.i.tus, a.s.serts the native liberty of thought at all events; becomes, we might truly say, sickly with "the pale cast" of his philosophical questioning. Amid the irreflective actors in that rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed in it superficial as it is that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He reflects; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly colder. Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance of what comes [14] to mind just then somewhat shrill or overemphatic.

Yet Herac.l.i.tus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think, so early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does but reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he cries out--his philosophy was no matter of formal treatise or system, but of harsh, protesting cries--Panta ch.o.r.ei kai ouden menei.+ All things give way: nothing remaineth. There had been enquirers before him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold, contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes, their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part of the bold enterprise of that romantic age; a series of intellectual adventures, of a piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the sea. The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of gifted and sanguine but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word neotes,+ youth, came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning, deciding, rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world, were themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface of existence.

[15] Surface, we say; but was there really anything beneath it? That was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers, Herac.l.i.tus, with an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny. Perpetual motion, alike in things and in men's thoughts about them,--the sad, self-conscious, philosophy of Herac.l.i.tus, like one, knowing beyond his years, in this barely adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct, makes no pretence to be able to restrain that. Was not the very essence of thought itself also such perpetual motion? a baffling transition from the dead past, alive one moment since, to a present, itself deceased in turn ere we can say, It is here? A keen a.n.a.lyst of the facts of nature and mind, a master presumably of all the knowledge that then there was, a vigorous definer of thoughts, he does but refer the superficial movement of all persons and things around him to deeper and still more masterful currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one's feet. The principle of disintegration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for Herac.l.i.tus these are but very lively instances of movements, subtler yet more wasteful still) are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter and of the soul. Legei pou Herakleitos, says Socrates in the Cratylus, hoti panta ch.o.r.ei kai ouden menei.+ But the principle of lapse, of waste, was, in fact, in one's self. "No one has ever pa.s.sed [16] twice over the same stream." Nay, the pa.s.senger himself is without ident.i.ty.

Upon the same stream at the same moment we do, and do not, embark: for we are, and are not: eimen te kai ouk eimen.+ And this rapid change, if it did not make all knowledge impossible, made it wholly relative, of a kind, that is to say, valueless in the judgment of Plato. Man, the individual, at this particular vanis.h.i.+ng-point of time and place, becomes "the measure of all things."

To know after what manner (says Socrates, after discussing the question in what proportion names, fleeting names, contribute to our knowledge of things) to know after what manner we must be taught, or discover for ourselves, the things that really are (ta onta)+ is perhaps beyond the measure of your powers and mine.

We must even content ourselves with the admission of this, that not from their names, but much rather themselves from themselves, they must be learned and looked for. . . . For consider, Cratylus, a point I oft-times dream on--whether or no we may affirm that what is beautiful and good in itself, and whatever is, respectively, in itself, is something?

Cratylus. To me at least, Socrates, it seems to be something.

Socrates. Let us consider, then, that 'in-itself'; not whether a face, or anything of that kind, is beautiful, and whether all these things seem to flow like water. But, what is beautiful in itself--may we say?--has not this the qualities that define it, always?

Cratylus. It must be so.

Socrates. Can we then, if it is ever pa.s.sing out below, predicate about it; first, that it is that; next, that it has this or that quality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it should straightway become some other thing, and go out under on its way, and be no longer as it is? Now, how could that which is never in the same state be a thing at all? . . .

[17] Socrates. Nor, in truth, could it be an object of knowledge to any one; for, even as he who shall know comes upon it, it would become another thing with other qualities; so that it would be no longer matter of knowledge what sort of a thing it is, or in what condition. Now, no form of knowing, methinks, has knowledge of that which it knows to be no-how.

Cratylus. It is as you say.

Socrates. But if, Cratylus, all things change sides, and nothing stays, it is not fitting to say that there is any knowing at all. . . . And the consequence of this argument would be, that there is neither any one to know, nor anything to be known. If, on the other hand, there be always that which knows, and that which is known; and if the Beautiful is, and the Good is, and each one of those things that really are, is, then, to my thinking, those things in no way resemble that moving stream of which we are now speaking. Whether, then, these matters be thus, or in that other way as the followers of Herac.l.i.tus affirm and many besides, I fear may be no easy thing to search out. But certainly it is not like a sensible man, committing one's self, and one's own soul, to the rule of names, to serve them, and, with faith in names and those who imposed them, as if one knew something thereby, to maintain (damaging thus the character of that which is, and our own) that there is no sound ring in any one of them, but that all, like earthen pots, let water. Cratylus, 439.+

Yet from certain fragments in which the Logos is already named we may understand that there had been another side to the doctrine of Herac.l.i.tus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those contending, infinitely diverse [18] impulses. It was an act of recognition, even on the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom which, "reacheth from end to end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things." But if the "weeping philosopher," the first of the pessimists, finds the ground of his melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he weep at the dulness of men's ears to that continuous strain of melody throughout it. In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and the scene in the Herac.l.i.tean doctrine, was the boldly aggressive, the paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural collusion, as it was, with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth; that sense of rapid dissolution, which, according to one's temperament and one's luck in things, might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly, an interest in the mere phenomena of existence, of one's so hasty pa.s.sage through the world.

The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension of which the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in alliance with a larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer observation of the phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for Herac.l.i.tus, at that early day. So, the seeds of almost all scientific ideas might seem to have been dimly enfolded in the mind of antiquity; but fecundated, admitted to their full working prerogative, one by one, in after ages, by good favour of the special [19] intellectual conditions belonging to a particular generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself preoccupied by a formula, not so much new, as renovated by new application.

It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most modern empirical philosophies alike have ill.u.s.trated emphatically, justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of Ephesus. The entire modern theory of "development," in all its various phases, proved or unprovable,--what is it but old Herac.l.i.teanism awake once more in a new world, and grown to full proportions?

Panta ch.o.r.ei, panta rhei+--It is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion too, each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not but is only always becoming. The bold paradox of Herac.l.i.tus is, in effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a cautiously reasoned experience, and, in ill.u.s.tration of the very law of change which it a.s.serts, may itself presently be superseded as a commonplace. Think of all that subtly disguised movement, latens processus, Bacon calls it (again as if by a kind of antic.i.p.ation) which [20] modern research has detected, measured, hopes to reduce to minuter or ally to still larger currents, in what had seemed most substantial to the naked eye, the inattentive mind. To the "observation and experiment" of the physical enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it lives by reveal themselves, after all, as Herac.l.i.tus had declared (scarcely serious, he seemed to those around him) as literally in constant extinction and renewal; the sun only going out more gradually than the human eye; the system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in ceaseless movement nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is in constant increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of infinite s.p.a.ce. The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains, as still loftier mountains found their level there ages ago. The granite kernel of the earth, it is said, is ever changing in its very substance, its molecular const.i.tution, by the pa.s.sage through it of electric currents. And the Darwinian theory--that "species," the identifying forms of animal and vegetable life, immutable though they seem now, as of old in the Garden of Eden, are fas.h.i.+oned by slow development, while perhaps millions of years go by: well! every month is adding to its evidence. Nay, the idea of development (that, too, a thing of growth, developed in the progress of reflexion) is at last invading one by one, as the secret of their explanation, all the products of mind, the very [21] mind itself, the abstract reason; our certainty, for instance, that two and two make four. Gradually we have come to think, or to feel, that primary cert.i.tude. Political const.i.tutions, again, as we now see so clearly, are "not made," cannot be made, but "grow." Races, laws, arts, have their origins and end, are themselves ripples only on the great river of organic life; and language is changing on our very lips.

In Plato's day, the Herac.l.i.tean flux, so deep down in nature itself-- the flood, the fire--seemed to have laid hold on man, on the social and moral world, dissolving or disintegrating opinion, first principles, faith, establis.h.i.+ng amorphism, so to call it, there also. All along indeed the genius, the good gifts of Greece to the world had had much to do with the mobility of its temperament. Only, when Plato came into potent contact with his countrymen (Pericles, Phidias, Socrates being now gone) in politics, in literature and art, in men's characters, the defect naturally incident to that fine quality had come to have unchecked sway. From the lifeless background of an unprogressive world--Egypt, Syria, frozen Scythia--a world in which the unconscious social aggregate had been everything, the conscious individual, his capacity and rights, almost nothing, the Greek had stepped forth, like the young prince in the fable, to set things going. To the philosophic eye however, [22] about the time when the history of Thucydides leaves off, they might seem to need a regulator, ere the very wheels wore themselves out.

Mobility! We do not think that a necessarily undesirable condition of life, of mind, of the physical world about us. 'Tis the dead things, we may remind ourselves, that after all are most entirely at rest, and might reasonably hold that motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious motion, as Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best worth being. And as for philosophy--mobility, versatility, the habit of thought that can most adequately follow the subtle movement of things, that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them.

It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short.

It was the spirit of G.o.d that moved, moves still, in every form of real power, everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality in things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with all his contriving care for the future, he desires to withstand.

Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of the immutable. The Republic is a proposal to establish it indefectibly in a very precisely regulated, a very exclusive community, which shall be a refuge for elect souls from an ill-made world.

That four powerful influences made for the political unity of Greece was pointed out by [23] Grote: common blood, common language, a common religious centre, the great games in which all alike communicated. He adds that they failed to make the Greeks one people. Panh.e.l.lenism was realised for the first time, and then but imperfectly, by Alexander the Great. The centrifugal tendency had ever been too much for the centripetal tendency in them, the progressive elements for the element of order. Their boundless impatience, that pa.s.sion for novelty noted in them by Saint Paul, had been a matter of radical character. Their varied natural gifts did but concentrate themselves now and then to an effective centre, that they might be dissipated again, towards every side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought. Variety and novelty of experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,--herein, certainly, lay at least one half of their vocation in history. The material conformation of Greece, a land of islands and peninsulas, with a range of sea-coast immense as compared with its area, and broken up by repellent lines of mountain this way and that, nursing jealously a little towns.h.i.+p of three or four thousand souls into an independent type of its own, conspired to the same effect. Independence, local and personal,--it was the Greek ideal!

[24] Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may see, of the still half-Asiatic rather than the full h.e.l.lenic ideal, of the Ionian ideal as conceived by the Athenian people in particular, people of the coast who have the roaming thoughts of sailors, ever ready to float away anywhither amid their walls of wood. And for many of its admirers certainly the whole Greek people has been a people of the sea-coast.

In Lacedaemon, however, as Plato and others thought, hostile, inaccessible in its mountain hollow where it had no need of any walls at all, there were resources for that discipline and order which const.i.tute the other ingredient in a true h.e.l.lenism, the saving Dorian soul in it. Right away thither, to that solemn old mountain village, now mistress of Greece, he looks often, in depicting the Perfect City, the ideal state. Perfection, in every case, as we may conceive, is attainable only through a certain combination of opposites, Attic aleipha with the Doric oxos;+ and in the Athens of Plato's day, as he saw with acute prevision, those centrifugal forces had come to be ruinously in excess of the centripetal. Its rapid, empiric, const.i.tutional changes, its restless development of political experiment, the subdivisions of party there, the dominance of faction, as we see it, steadily increasing, breeding on itself, in the pages of Thucydides, justify Plato's long-drawn paradox that it is easier to wrestle against many than against one. The soul, [25] moreover, the inward polity of the individual, was the theatre of a similar dissolution; and truly stability of character had never been a prominent feature in Greek life. Think of the end of Pausanias failing in his patriotism, of Themistocles, of Miltiades, the saviours of Greece, actually selling the country they had so dearly bought to its old enemies.

It is something in this way that, for Plato, motion and the philosophy of motion identify themselves with the vicious tendency in things and thought. Change is the irresistible law of our being, says the Philosophy of Motion. Change, he protests, through the power of a true philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and it is curious to note the way in which, consciously or unconsciously, that philosophic purpose shapes his treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or innocent words, as "manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the synonyms of what is evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed cycle of political change; but conceives it (being change) as, from the very first, backward towards decadence. The ideal city, again, will not be an art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of art, that he means to shape men anew; by a severely monotonous art however, such art as shall speak to youth, all day long, from year to year, almost exclusively, of the loins girded about.

[26] Stimulus, or correction,--one hardly knows which to ask for first, as more salutary for our own slumbersome, yet so self-willed, northern temperaments. Perhaps all genuine fire, even the Herac.l.i.tean fire, has a power for both. "Athens," says Dante,

--Athens, aye and Sparta's state That were in policy so great, And framed the laws of old, How small a place they hold, How poor their art of n.o.ble living Shews by thy delicate contriving, Where what October spun November sees outrun!

Think in the time thou canst recall, Laws, coinage, customs, places all, How thou hast rearranged, How oft thy members changed!

Couldst thou but see thyself aright, And turn thy vision to the light, Thy likeness thou would'st find In some sick man reclined; On couch of down though he be pressed, He seeks and finds not any rest, But turns and turns again, To ease him of his pain.

Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's Translation.

Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting it with Athens and Sparta as he conceives them, Plato might have said to Athens, in contrast with Sparta, with Lacedaemon, at least as he conceived it.

NOTES

6. +Transliteration: Panta rhei. Translation: "All things give way [or flow]." Plato, Cratylus 402 A, cites Herac.l.i.tus' fragment more fully-- Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta ch.o.r.ei kai ouden menei, or "Heracleitus says somewhere that all things give way, and nothing remains." Pater cites the same fragment in The Renaissance, Conclusion. The verb rheo means "flow," while the verb ch.o.r.eo means "give way."

14. +Transliteration: Panta ch.o.r.ei kai ouden menei. Pater's translation: "All things give way: nothing remaineth." Plato, Cratylus 402A.

14. +Transliteration: neotes. Liddell and Scott definition: "youth: also ... youthful spirit, rashness."

15. +Transliteration: Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta ch.o.r.ei kai ouden menei. Pater's translation in The Renaissance, Conclusion: "[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains." Plato, Cratylus 402a.

16. +Transliteration: eimen te kai ouk eimen. E-text editor's translation: "We are and are not." Herac.l.i.tus, Fragments. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 326. Ed. F.W.A. Mullach. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860 edition). In the same fragment, Herac.l.i.tus is described as having said, Potamois tois autois embainomen te kai ouk embainomen, which translates as "we go into the same river, and [yet] we do not go into the same river."

Plato cites that thought in the pa.s.sage alluded to above, Cratylus 402a.

16. +Transliteration: ta onta. Definition: "the things that are."

17. +Rather than retain the original's very small print for such quotations, I have indented them throughout Plato and Platonism. As Pater indicates, the source of his quotation is the Cratylus, 439.

19. +Transliteration: Panta ch.o.r.ei, panta rhei. See above, notes for pages 6, 14, 15, and 16. The verb rheo means "flow," while the verb ch.o.r.eo means "give way."