Complete Works (291 page)

M
EGILLUS
: What do you mean by that, sir?

A
THENIAN
: Courage, I take it, is one part of virtue.

M
EGILLUS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: So now that you’ve heard the story, use your own judgment would you be glad to have as a resident in your house or as a neighbor a man who in spite of considerable courage was immoderate and licentious?

M
EGILLUS
: Heaven forbid! [c]

A
THENIAN
: Well then, what about a skilled workman, knowledgeable in his own field, but unjust?

M
EGILLUS
: No, I’d never welcome him.

A
THENIAN
: But surely, in the absence of self-control, justice will never spring up.

M
EGILLUS
: Of course not.

A
THENIAN
: Nor indeed will the ‘wise’ man we put forward just now,
²⁴
who keeps his feelings of pleasure and pain in tune with right reason and obedient to it.

M
EGILLUS
: No, he certainly won’t.

A
THENIAN
: Now here’s another point for us to consider, which will help us to decide whether civic distinctions are, on a given occasion, conferred [d] correctly or incorrectly.

M
EGILLUS
: And what is that?

A
THENIAN
: If we found self-control existing in the soul in isolation from all other virtue, should we be justified in admiring it? Or not?

M
EGILLUS
: I really couldn’t say.

A
THENIAN
: A very proper reply. If you had opted for either alternative it would have struck an odd note, I think.

M
EGILLUS
: So my reply was all right, then.

A
THENIAN
: Yes. But if you have something which in itself deserves to be admired or execrated, a mere additional element isn’t worth talking [e] about: much better pass it over and say nothing.

M
EGILLUS
: Self-control is the element you mean, I suppose.

A
THENIAN
: It is. And in general, whatever benefits us most, when this element is added, deserves the highest honor, the second most beneficial thing deserves the second highest honor, and so on: as we go down the list, everything will get in due order the honor it deserves.

[697]
M
EGILLUS
: True.

A
THENIAN
: Well then, shan’t we insist again
²⁵
that the distribution of these honors is the business of the legislator?

M
EGILLUS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: Would you prefer us to leave the entire distribution to his discretion and let him deal with the details of each individual case? But as we too have something of a taste for legislation, perhaps you’d like us to try our hands at a three-fold division and distinguish the most important class, then the second and the third.

M
EGILLUS
: Certainly.

[b] A
THENIAN
: We maintain that if a state is going to survive to enjoy all the happiness that mankind can achieve, it is vitally necessary for it to distribute honors and marks of disgrace on a proper basis. And the proper basis is to put spiritual goods at the top of the list and hold them—provided the soul exercises self-control—in the highest esteem; bodily goods and advantages should come second, and third those said to be provided by property and wealth. If a legislator or a state ever ignores these guidelines [c] by valuing riches above all or by promoting one of the other inferior goods to a more exalted position, it will be an act of political and religious folly. Shall we take this line, or not?

M
EGILLUS
: Yes, emphatically and unambiguously.

A
THENIAN
: It was our scrutiny of the political system of the Persians that made us go into this business at such length. Our verdict was that their corruption increased year by year; and the reason we assign for this is that they were too strict in depriving the people of liberty and too energetic [d] in introducing authoritarian government, so that they destroyed all friendship and community of spirit in the state. And with that gone, the policy of rulers is framed not in the interests of their subjects the people, but to support their own authority: let them only think that a situation offers them the prospect of some profit, even a small one, and they wreck cities and ruin friendly nations by fire and sword; they hate, and are hated in return, with savage and pitiless loathing. When they come to need the [e] common people to fight on their behalf, they discover the army has no loyalty, no eagerness to face danger and fight. They have millions and millions of soldiers—all useless for fighting a war, so that just as if manpower were in short supply, they have to hire it, imagining that mercenaries and foreigners will ensure their safety. Not only this, they
[698]
inevitably become so stupid that they proclaim by their very actions that as compared with gold and silver everything society regards as good and valuable is in their eyes so much trash.

M
EGILLUS
: Exactly.

A
THENIAN
: So let’s have done with the Persians. Our conclusion is that the empire is badly run at the moment because the people are kept in undue subjection and the rulers excessively authoritarian.

M
EGILLUS
: Precisely.

A
THENIAN
: Next we come to the political system of Attica. We have to demonstrate, on the same lines as before, that complete freedom from [b] all authority is infinitely worse than submitting to a moderate degree of control.

At the time of the Persian attack on the Greeks—on virtually everyone living in Europe, is perhaps a better way of putting it—we Athenians had a constitution, inherited from the distant past, in which a number of public offices were held on the basis of four property-classes. Lady Modesty was the mistress of our hearts, a despot who made us live in willing subjection to the laws then in force. Moreover, the enormous size of the army that was coming at us by land and sea made us desperately afraid, and served [c] to increase our obedience to the authorities and the law. For all these reasons we displayed a tremendous spirit of co-operation. You see, about ten years before the battle of Salamis, Datis had arrived at the head of a Persian army; he had been sent by Darius against the Athenians and the Eretrians with explicit instructions to make slaves of them and bring them home, and he had been warned that failure would mean death. With his vast numbers of soldiers, Datis made short work of the Eretrians, whom [d] he completely overpowered and captured. He then sent to Athens a bloodcurdling report that not a single Eretrian had got away—propaganda which asked us to believe that Datis’ soldiers, hand in hand in a long line, had combed over every inch of Eretria. Well, whatever the truth or otherwise of this tale, it terrified the Greeks; the Athenians were particularly scared, and they sent off envoys in all directions, but no one was prepared to [e] help them except the Spartans—who were, however, prevented by the Messenian war, which was going on at that time, or perhaps by some other distraction (I’m not aware of any information being given on the point). However that may be, the Spartans arrived at Marathon one day too late for the battle. After this, reports of vast preparations and endless threats on the part of the king came thick and fast. The years went by, and then we were told that Darius was dead, but that his son, young and impetuous, had inherited the kingdom and was determined not to give up the invasion. The Athenians reckoned that all these preparations were directed against themselves, because of what had happened at Marathon;
[699]
and when they heard of the canal that had been dug through Athos, the bridging of the Hellespont and the huge number of Xerxes’ ships, they calculated that neither land nor sea offered any prospects of safety. No one, they thought, would come to help them. They remembered the previous attack and the success of the Persians in Eretria: no one had assisted [b] the Athenians then, no one had faced the danger by fighting at their side. On land they expected the same thing to happen this time; and as for the sea, they realized that escape by this route was out of the question, in view of the thousand or more ships coming to the attack. They could think of only one hope, and a thin, desperate hope it was; but there was simply no other. Their minds went back to the previous occasion, and they reflected how the victory they won in battle had been gained in equally desperate [c] circumstances. Sustained by this hope, they began to recognize that no one but they themselves and their gods could provide a way out of their difficulties. All this inspired them with a spirit of solidarity. One cause was the actual fear they felt at the time, but there was another kind too, encouraged by the traditional laws of the state. I mean the ‘fear’ they had learned to experience as a result of being subject to an ancient code of laws. In the course of our earlier discussion
²⁶
we have called this fear ‘modesty’ often enough, and we said that people who aspire to be good must be its slave. A coward, on the other hand, is free of this particular kind of fear and never experiences it. And if ‘ordinary’ fear had not overtaken the cowards on that occasion, they would never have combined to defend themselves or protected temples, tombs, fatherland, and friends and relatives [d] as well, in the way they did. We would all have been split up and scattered over the face of the earth.

M
EGILLUS
: Yes, sir, you are quite right, and your remarks reflect credit both on your country and yourself.

A
THENIAN
: No doubt, Megillus; and it is only right and proper to tell you of the history of that period, seeing that you’ve been blessed with your ancestors’ character. Now then, you and Clinias, consider: have these remarks of ours any relevance at all to legislation? After all, this is the [e] object of the exercise—I’m not going through all this simply for the story. Look: in a way, we Athenians have had the same experience as the Persians. They, of course, reduced the people to a state of complete subjection, and we encouraged the masses to the opposite extreme of unfettered liberty, but the discussion we have had serves well enough as a pointer to the next step in the argument, and shows us the method to follow.

[700]
M
EGILLUS
: Splendid! But do try to be even more explicit about what you mean.

A
THENIAN
: Very well. When the old laws applied, my friends, the people were not in control: on the contrary, they lived in a kind of ‘voluntary slavery’ to the laws.

M
EGILLUS
: Which laws have you in mind?

A
THENIAN
: I’m thinking primarily of the regulations about the music of that period (music being the proper place to start a description of how life became progressively freer of controls). In those days Athenian music comprised various categories and forms. One type of song consisted of [b] prayers to the gods, which were termed ‘hymns’; and there was another quite different type, which you might well have called ‘laments’. ‘Paeans’ made up a third category, and there was also a fourth, called a ‘dithyramb’ (whose theme was, I think, the birth of Dionysus). There existed another kind of song too, which they thought of as a separate class, and the name they gave it was this very word that is so often on our lips: ‘nomes’
²⁷
(‘for the lyre’, as they always added). Once these categories and a number of others had been fixed, no one was allowed to pervert them by using one sort of tune in a composition belonging to another category. And what was [c] the authority which had to know these standards and use its knowledge in reaching its verdicts, and crack down on the disobedient? Well, certainly no notice was taken of the catcalls and uncouth yelling of the audience, as it is nowadays, nor yet of the applause that indicates approval. People of taste and education made it a rule to listen to the performance with silent attention right through to the end; children and their attendants and the general public could always be disciplined and controlled by a stick. [d] Such was the rigor with which the mass of the people was prepared to be controlled in the theatre, and to refrain from passing judgment by shouting. Later, as time went on, composers arose who started to set a fashion of breaking the rules and offending good taste. They did have a natural artistic talent, but they were ignorant of the correct and legitimate standards laid down by the Muse. Gripped by a frenzied and excessive lust for pleasure, they jumbled together laments and hymns, mixed paeans and dithyrambs, and even imitated pipe tunes on the lyre. The result was a total confusion of styles. Unintentionally, in their idiotic way, they [e] misrepresented their art, claiming that in music there are no standards of right and wrong at all, but that the most ‘correct’ criterion is the pleasure of a man who enjoyed the performance, whether he is a good man or not. On these principles they based their compositions, and they accompanied them with propaganda to the same effect. Consequently they gave the ordinary man not only a taste for breaking the laws of music but the arrogance to set himself up as a capable judge. The audiences, once silent,
[701]
began to use their tongues; they claimed to know what was good and bad in music, and instead of a ‘musical meritocracy’, a sort of vicious ‘theatrocracy’ arose. But if this democracy had been limited to gentlemen and had applied only to music, no great harm would have been done; in the event, however, music proved to be the starting point of everyone’s conviction that he was an authority on everything, and of a general disregard for the law. Complete license was not far behind. The conviction [b] that they
knew
made them unafraid, and assurance engendered effrontery. You see, a reckless lack of respect for one’s betters is effrontery of peculiar viciousness, which springs from a freedom from inhibitions that has gone much too far.