Politics   

almost everything has been found out, although sometimes they are not
put together; in other cases men do not use the knowledge which they
have. Great light would be thrown on this subject if we could see such
a form of government in the actual process of construction; for the
legislator could not form a state at all without distributing and
dividing its constituents into associations for common meals, and into
phratries and tribes. But all this legislation ends only in forbidding
agriculture to the guardians, a prohibition which the Lacedaemonians
try to enforce already.
But, indeed, Socrates has not said, nor is it easy to decide, what in
such a community will be the general form of the state. The citizens
who are not guardians are the majority, and about them nothing has
been determined: are the husbandmen, too, to have their property in
common? Or is each individual to have his own? And are the wives and
children to be individual or common. If, like the guardians, they are
to have all things in common, what do they differ from them, or what
will they gain by submitting to their government? Or, upon what
principle would they submit, unless indeed the governing class adopt
the ingenious policy of the Cretans, who give their slaves the same
institutions as their own, but forbid them gymnastic exercises and the
possession of arms. If, on the other hand, the inferior classes are to
be like other cities in respect of marriage and property, what will be
the form of the community? Must it not contain two states in one, each
hostile to the other He makes the guardians into a mere occupying
garrison, while the husbandmen and artisans and the rest are the real
citizens. But if so the suits and quarrels, and all the evils which
Socrates affirms to exist in other states, will exist equally among
them. He says indeed that, having so good an education, the citizens
will not need many laws, for example laws about the city or about the
markets; but then he confines his education to the guardians. Again,
he makes the husbandmen owners of the property upon condition of their
paying a tribute. But in that case they are likely to be much more
unmanageable and conceited than the Helots, or Penestae, or slaves in
general. And whether community of wives and property be necessary for
the lower equally with the higher class or not, and the questions akin
to this, what will be the education, form of government, laws of the
lower class, Socrates has nowhere determined: neither is it easy to
discover this, nor is their character of small importance if the
common life of the guardians is to be maintained.
Again, if Socrates makes the women common, and retains private
property, the men will see to the fields, but who will see to the
house? And who will do so if the agricultural class have both their
property and their wives in common? Once more: it is absurd to argue,
from the analogy of the animals, that men and women should follow the
same pursuits, for animals have not to manage a household. The
government, too, as constituted by Socrates, contains elements of
danger; for he makes the same persons always rule. And if this is
often a cause of disturbance among the meaner sort, how much more
among high-spirited warriors? But that the persons whom he makes
rulers must be the same is evident; for the gold which the God mingles
in the souls of men is not at one time given to one, at another time
to another, but always to the same: as he says, 'God mingles gold in
some, and silver in others, from their very birth; but brass and iron
in those who are meant to be artisans and husbandmen.' Again, he
deprives the guardians even of happiness, and says that the legislator
ought to make the whole state happy. But the whole cannot be happy
unless most, or all, or some of its parts enjoy happiness. In this
respect happiness is not like the even principle in numbers, which may
exist only in the whole, but in neither of the parts; not so
happiness. And if the guardians are not happy, who are? Surely not the
artisans, or the common people. The Republic of which Socrates
discourses has all these difficulties, and others quite as great.
Part VI
The same, or nearly the same, objections apply to Plato's later work,