in the water, and the army was utterly undone, some perishing in the river, and any who escaped being cut off by the cavalry, Nicias surrendered to Gylippus, in whom he had more confidence than in the Syracusans. He entreated him and the Lacedæmonians to do what they pleased with himself, but not to go on killing the men.

What they pleased to do with Nicias was to put him to death. "No one of the Hellenes in my time was less deserving of so miserable an end; for he lived in the practice of every virtue." So, with frugally expressed, but not frugal, praise Thucydides dismissed Nicias.

The fate of the rank and file of the surrendered army was more lingering, but not less dreadful. After many months of starvation and every misery endured by them as captives in the public quarries, they were sold into slavery. Thucydides, in review and summary of all, says:

Of all the Hellenic actions which took place in this war, or indeed of all the Hellenic actions which are on record, this was the greatest-the most glorious to the victors, the most ruinous to the vanquished; for they were utterly and at all points defeated, and their sufferings were prodigious. Fleet and army perished from the face of the earth; nothing was saved, and of the many who went forth few returned home. Thus ended the Sicilian expedition.

And thus shall end our presentation of Thucydides.

VI.
PLATO.

SOCRATES is not more easily foremost among Greek philosophers than is Plato foremost among Greek philosophical writers. This distinction, of philosopher and philosophical writer, it is necessary in the present case to make, for the reason that Socrates, as our readers will not need to be reminded, did his whole work in the intellectual world with

use of tongue alone, never once publishing a written word. Foremost of Greek philosophical writers, we have not hesitated to pronounce Plato. But we think of Plato's illustrious disciple, Aristotle, and we are almost ready to say that were the terms of the question only a little changed-were we to decide, not which of the two was the greater philosophical writer, but which was the greater philosophical genius, we should need to pause and to hesitate. While to Plato, however, philosophy was the one exclusive pursuit of his intellectual life, philosophy was simply one of various intellectual pursuits to Aristotle. Poet as well as philosopher-poet more than philosopher, some might be tempted to say was Plato. But he wrote his poetry in the form of philosophy. Aristotle, besides being a philosopher, was a kind of encyclopædist. He by no means, like Plato, gave his literary production always the one form of philosophy socalled. We should not, perhaps, go much amiss to say that Aristotle's chief motive, even in literature, was scientific and practical, while Plato's chief motive, even in philosophy, was literary and poetical.

Plato is a voluminous writer. And he enjoys the fortune, singular among ancient classical authors, to survive in all his works. In fact he may in a sense be said to survive in more than all his works; for many works have come down to us bearing Plato's name, that probably Plato never wrote.

The Republic is, with one exception (the Laws), the largest, and it is, without exception, the greatest, of Plato's productions. It is named from an episode in it. The impropriety of the naming is less gross than might seem, for the episode is so long that it threatens to absorb the whole work. If, according to the title, the Republic ought primarily to give us the writer's ideal of the state, incidentally, in Plato's ample way of treating his subject, it does, in fact, give us his ideas and speculations on a wide range of topics.

It is our plan to make our reproduction of Plato centre

chiefly about the person of Socrates. Indeed, in any just representation of Plato, Socrates could not but be a very conspicuous figure. Plato gives his master the chief part in nearly every one of his dialogues, and some of his dialogues he puts wholly into his master's mouth, by making Socrates speak throughout, reporting, to select friends of his, conversations that he has somewhere held with persons perhaps casually encountered by him in the streets of Athens, or between Athens and the Piræus. This latter is the case with the Republic. The properly, the characteristically, Socratic element is, however, present in very different degrees in different dialogues.

From the Republic we first take, for illustration of the art with which Plato enlivens and garnishes the text of what had else been somewhat tedious and bare dialectical dialogue, the following pretty fable, attributed by him to tradition. Readers will be glad to see the true original of a legend with which, through allusion encountered in literature, they will already perhaps have become familiar. Gy'ges (soft G), who figures in this tale from Plato, figures also in the populous page of Herodotus. Indeed, Herodotus tells of him, with some important variations, this identical story. The feature of the ring is peculiar to Plato. Along with the fable itself we give enough of the setting of the fable to show with what illustrative purpose the fable was used by the speaker in Plato's dialogue. Glaucon is the speaker. He undertakes. to set forth, for Socrates to overthrow it, a notion which he avers to be current and accepted among men, namely, the notion that injustice is better policy than justice. Men practice justice, Glaucon says, only where they cannot successfully practice injustice. Make them free to do as they please, and they will please to be unjust. Here is his argument, in the words of Plato :

The liberty which we are supposing may be most conveniently given to them in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by

Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus, the Lydian. For Gyges, according to the tradition, was a shepherd and servant of the king of Lydia, and, while he was in the field, there was a storm and earthquake, which made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. He was amazed at the sight, and descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body, of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead, and reascended out of the opening. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report concerning the flock to the king; and into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring toward the inner side of the hand, when instantly he became invisible, and the others began to speak of him as if he were no longer there. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outward and reappeared; thereupon he made trials of the ring, and always with the same result; when he turned the collet inward he became invisible, when outward he reappeared. Perceiving this, he immediately contrived to be chosen messenger to the court, where he no sooner arrived than he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king, and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them, and the unjust the other; no man is of such adamantine temper that he would stand fast in justice,—that is what they think. No man would dare to be honest when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; just or unjust would arrive at last at the same goal. And this is surely a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who takes this line of argument will say that they are right. For if you could imagine any one having such a power, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might be sufferers of injustice. Enough of this.

Enough of this," says Plato's speaker, and enough surely, say we, at least for the purpose of showing the lamentable standard of ethics that must have prevailed in antiquity. In close connection with the foregoing passage occurs another passage worth quoting. Glaucon still speaks. He tells Socrates that the "eulogists of injustice," that is to say, men in general-for men in general according to this witness, whatever may be the strain of their talk, really act on the principle that injustice is better than justice-men in general, holds Glaucon, would expect for the ideally just person-what fortune in the world do you suppose? Why, nothing less than this: "He will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes burnt out, and at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled." Language strangely approaching the truth of what did befall the historical Just Man!

Every body has heard of the so-styled "Platonic love." A passage of the Republic will explain what this conception is. It may simply be premised that there was rife in the ancient Greek and Roman world a practice of impure affinity between man and man. The word "love" in the mouth of a Greek was quite as likely to mean this indecent relation as it was to mean any more natural bond of affection between the two different sexes. In the ideal republic, such an unchaste relation of man to man was not to be tolerated. It is tonic and purifying to read the passage in Plato from which we limit ourselves to take the following sentence containing the conclusion, on the subject, arrived at by the colloquists.. It is Socrates who speaks:

Then I suppose that in the city which we are founding you would make a law that a friend should use no other familiarity to his love than a father would use to his son, and this only for a virtuous end, and he must first have the other's consent; and this rule is to limit him in all his intercourse, and he is never to go further, or, if he exceeds, he is to be deemed guilty of coarseness and bad taste.

Such, in the Platonic description, is "Platonic love."