Volume 6

Plato : with an English translation.

  • Plato.
Date:
1914-1935
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Plato : with an English translation. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reformers, that they would refuse to take in hand either individual or state or to legislate before they either received a clean slate or themselves made it clean;” ” And they would be right,” he said. ” And thereafter, do you not think that they would sketch the figure of the constitution?” ” Surely.” And then, I take it, in the course of the work they would glance ® frequently in either direction, at justice, beauty, sobriety and the like as they are in the nature of things,^ and alternately at that which they were trying to reproduce in mankind, mingling and blending from various pursuits that hue of the flesh, so to speak, deriving their judgement from that likeness of humanity which Homer too called when it appeared in men the image and likeness of God.^^ ” ” Right,” he said. ” And they would erase one touch or stroke and paint in another until in the measure of the possible ® they had made the characters of men pleasing and dear to God as may be.” “That at any rate ^ would be the fairest painting.” “ Are we then making any im- pression on those Λνηο you said^ were advancing to attack us ^vith might and main ? Can we convince them that such a political artist of character and such a painter exists as the one we then were praising when our proposal to entrust the state to him angered them, and are they now in a gentler mood when they hear what we are now saying ? ” ” Much gentler,” he said, i. 26. 65 “divina mallem ad nos,” C/. also Tim. 90 a, Phaedr. 249 c. The modern reader may think of Tennyson, In Mem. cviii. ” What find I in the highest place But mine own phantom chanting hymns? ” Cf. also Adam ad loc. ® Cf. 500 D ana on 493 d. ^ For yovv cf. supra^ Vol. I. on 334 a, ^ C/. 474 a.