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Updated: May 21, 2025
The Greeks, as Professor Jowett says, had noble conceptions of womanhood; but Plato's ideal for the sexes had no counterpart in their actual life, nor could they have understood the sort of equality upon which he insisted. The same is true of the Romans throughout their history.
And at Rome, when he was created consul in name, but indeed received sovereign and dictatorial authority against Catiline and his conspirators, he attested the truth of Plato's prediction, that then only would the miseries of states be at an end, when by a happy fortune supreme power, wisdom, and justice should be united in one.
We have, given us by Diogenes Laertius, another division of the characters, as he calls them, of Plato's writings, different from that exhibited in the scheme above. This we have thought proper to subjoin, on account of its antiquity and general reception. Dialogues
The modern writer cannot escape Plato's conclusion, And again, Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as to say, Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of madness. One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier ones in describing their state of mind.
It may be an instinctive agreement with Plato's definition of the wise man, as ever wanting to be with him who is better than himself. But in its usual form it becomes an unspeakable degradation, inducing servility, and lick-spittle humility, and all the vices of the servile mind. There can never be true friendship without self-respect, and unless soul meets soul free from self-seeking.
What can be more adorned than Cicero's Philosophical Works? What more than Plato's? It is their eloquence only that has preserved and transmitted them down to us through so many centuries; for the philosophy of them is wretched, and the reasoning part miserable. But eloquence will always please, and has always pleased. Study it therefore; make it the object of your thoughts and attention.
As Plato's mind's eye saw his Republic, Bacon his New Atlantis, More his Utopia; so let us see before and above us the Ideal Canada, and boldly aim at the programme of doing something in the world." "Can you show me anything special that we can do in the world?" the old man asked. His caution was wavering a little. "It is not impossible I may be with you," he added.
And of this number we are told Ephialtes made one, who broke the power of the council of Areopagus, giving the people, according to Plato's expression, so copious and so strong a draught of liberty, that, growing wild and unruly, like an unmanageable horse, it, as the comic poets say, " got beyond all keeping in, Champing at Euboea, and among the islands leaping in."
This chronological theory that Shaw stood on Shakespeare's shoulders logically involved the supposition that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that he decided in desperation that all three were equal.
One could see in those wonderfully harmonious features that Aristotle was right when he discerned beauty in order and proportion; while another declared that he found there the evidence of Plato's doctrine of the identity of the good and the beautiful for this face was so lovely because it was the mirror of a soul which had been disembodied in the plenitude of maiden purity and virtue, unjarred by any discord; and this gave rise to a vehement discussion as to the essential nature of beauty and of virtue.
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