Plato

In the Laws, indeed, Plato — that philosopher sprung from the Hebrews — bids the farmers neither to draw water for irrigation nor to take it from others, unless they have first dug for themselves down to the so-called virgin soil and found the ground without water.

Plato, for instance, says that this manner was of old in vogue, commonly among all the Greeks, but especially among the Spartans and the Cretans, who had the best laws.

Plato does not deny that he imports the noblest things for philosophy from the barbarians, and confesses that he came to Egypt.

Plato’s “Republic” and “Statesman” must be regarded to-day not merely as historical records of a by-gone philosophy, but as living, teaching dissertations upon theories which cannot fail to awaken in studious minds the highest ideals of life and government.

This section embraces such names as Grotius, Plato, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Walter Batgehot, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli, as well as those builders of Ideal Governments, More, Bacon, Campanella and Rousseau.

Plato has established this in his laws, and the same rule prevailed in Greece, as appears from the following passage in Euripides, “our fathers of old did well in banishing from their intercourse and sight any one that had shed another’s blood;

they say that Plato came into Italy to acquaint himself with the Pythagoreans, and learned all things Pythagorean, and was the first not only to hold the same view as Pythagoras concerning the eternity of souls, but also to bring forward a reason for it.

His teacher Plato fashioned a threefold soul, whose sovereign part — that is, reason — he placed in the head as in a citadel;

Aristotle — far excelling all others, save that I always except Plato, both in genius and in diligence — when he had embraced those four familiar kinds of first principles from which all things arise, holds that there is a certain fifth nature, from which mind comes.

And shall it not, then, be permitted to set forth in Latin the discussions of Plato upon living well and happily?

And yet, if I were to translate Plato or Aristotle plainly, in the way our poets translated the plays, I should, I believe, deserve ill of my fellow citizens by importing those divine geniuses into our knowledge.

'Since we have at last found you at leisure, I shall certainly hear why it is that you do not exactly hate our Epicurus — as those generally do who dissent from him — but at any rate do not approve of him, the one man who in my judgment saw the truth, freed men's minds from the greatest errors, and handed down all that pertains to living well and happily.

Plato and Aristotle and the whole throng of sages destined to go their separate ways drew more from Socrates' character than from his words.

Plato said those things, Zeno said them, Chrysippus and Posidonius and a vast army of our school, so many and such men.

" Why should I not tell of him, reading on that last night Plato's book with a sword laid at his head?

for Plato very rightly noted this very thing.

Diogenes of Sinope, having been cast out of his fatherland, in nothing differing from the very meanest of men, came to Athens, and found there still many of the companions of Socrates—Plato, that is, and Aristippus and Aeschines and Antisthenes and Euclides the Megarian;

but about the divine, whether you please to call it a city or an ordering, tell where and how it stands, drawing as near as you can to Plato's freedom of expression, such indeed as you seemed to us just now to do.

From whose number both Plato and Socrates must be removed — the one because he left behind a most perfect school, the Peripatetics and the Academics, differing in name but agreeing in substance, from whom the Stoics themselves dissented in words rather than in opinions;

'In like manner you, when, as those men would throw the commonwealth into confusion, so you would throw into confusion philosophy already well established, bring forward Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and even Plato and Socrates.

What shall I say of Plato, who certainly would not have pursued these matters in so many books had he not approved them?

therefore punishment does not befit the good man, and for this reason neither does anger, since punishment befits anger.

in both he will look not to the past but to the future—for, as Plato says, no wise man punishes because a wrong has been done, but that wrong may not be done;

but it has profited to know this much—that you should withhold wine from heated dispositions, which Plato thinks must be denied to children, and forbids that fire be kindled with fire.

It has, indeed, seemed to itself to have drawn even from the sacred writings, as they call them, because antiquity reckoned most of its authors to be even gods, let alone divine men — such as the Egyptian Mercury, to whom Plato especially attached himself;

Let him summon up some Eubulus and Critolaus and Xenocrates, and in this place Aristotle the friend of Plato.

Plato is unwilling, as if the immortality of the soul were thereby endangered.

It was a good practice of Plato to raise this question, and to enquire whether the true procedure is to start from or to lead up to one’s first principles, as in a race-course one may run from the judges to the far end of the track or the reverse.

Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things;

In fact, a similar argument is employed by Plato to refute the view that pleasure is the Good:

Nor do you relax at all in your zeal for letters, but, as Plato says, in the storm and tempest of affairs, standing apart as it were beneath some strong wall, you fill your soul with no disturbance;

But Plato, with his command of language, at the same time contends with his doctrines and also ridicules the persons of his speakers:

Basil to Libanius If gaining and angling are said to be the same thing, and the word which your sophistry has fetched out for us from the inmost shrines of Plato has the same meaning, consider, my admirable friend, which of us is the harder to angle for:

but you have heard, I believe, Tubero, that after the death of Socrates, Plato journeyed first into Egypt to learn, and afterward into Italy and Sicily, that he might thoroughly master the discoveries of Pythagoras;

so that to me that saying of Plato—or of whoever said it—seems most elegant:

But if at any time the people either offered violence to a just king or stripped him of his kingdom, or even—which happens more often—tasted the blood of the best men and laid the whole commonwealth under its own caprice (and do not think that there is any sea or any flame so great that it is not easier to quell than a multitude unbridled by insolence), then comes about that which is splendidly sa …

It would be long to speak of Plato's inconsistency, who in the Timaeus denies that the father of this world can be named, while in the books of the Laws he holds that we ought not to inquire at all what god is.

I shall marvel at the dullness of those who would have a living, immortal, and blessed being be round, on the ground that Plato denies any shape to be fairer than that.

From the same school of Plato, Heraclides of Pontus crammed his books with childish fables, and yet at one time thinks the world, at another the divine mind, to be god;

illegible character] quae ut vox ipsa indicat inter gentes dissitas, ordine naturae prior est, et sic a Platone ponitur.

The former, as the Greek word shows, signifies trade or exchange between widely separated nations, and it ranks first in the order of Nature, as is shown in Plato’s Republic.

Plato, Sophista 223d.

wherever a man has stationed himself, thinking it best, or has been stationed by his commander, there he must, as it seems to me, remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or of anything else before the shameful.

For surely the man who is truly a man must not cling to living for whatever length of time, nor be a lover of his life, but must leave these things to God, and believe the women when they say that no one can escape his destiny, and then consider, on this footing, in what way he may best live the time he has to live.

A noble saying of Plato's.

To wait is long (for, as Plato says, the conjecture of the human mind is difficult), not to wait is rash.

Plato," says he, "gives thanks to Socrates, because he learned from him;

1 When Plato had crossed a river by boat and the ferryman had exacted nothing of him, believing this to be done in his honor, he said that the ferryman had a service laid up with Plato;

For this whole body of the world — whether unborn and unmade, as Pythagoras holds, or born and made, as Plato holds — once for all, in its construction, was found ordered and equipped and arranged with every governance of reason.

as Plato describes the great Jupiter in heaven, attended by an army of gods and demons alike.

let them say before the tribunal, if they will, that Minos and Rhadamanthus, by the consent of Plato and the poets, have this lot;

The search with a platter and girdle was probably a custom derived from Greece, for a similar formality is described by Plato.

We have something similar in the Laws of Plato:

and be as Plato (*Aflāṭūn*) said:

let another's ignorance of you do no harm to your knowledge of yourself.

Plato (1) built the foundation of his doctrine on the coming-to-be of the world upon the eternity (*azalīyah*) of an original matter, which he expresses as the unformed element, or first prime matter (*hayūlā*) (2):

Plutarch (Fluṭarkhus), in his treatise on *Natural Opinions* (*al-Ārāʼ al-Ṭabīʻīyah*), ascribed to him that Plato says that bodies were in the beginning in motion, a motion not ordered, and that the God arranged them in order, since order is better than the absence of order.

As for the first party, that is, the philosophers of Islam, the followers of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle:

" This charge, you most malignant of creatures, you bitter enemies of every best man, was brought against Plato, brought against Epicurus, brought against Zeno;

Cast it in Plato's teeth that he sought money, in Aristotle's that he took it, in Democritus's that he neglected it, in Epicurus's that he spent it;

You would scarcely have the chance of a happier choice even if you were to seek out good men among the Platos and Xenophons and that whole crop of Socratic offspring, or if the age of Cato were put within your power—an age that bore many men worthy to be born in Cato's day, as well as many worse than at any other time, contrivers of the greatest crimes;

For whether we believe the Greek poet that 'sometimes it is pleasant even to be mad,' or Plato that 'the man in possession of his senses has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry,' or Aristotle that 'no great genius has ever existed without a mixture of madness':

Where then were the Christians, when the islands of Hiera, Anaphe and Delos and Rhodos and Cea went to the bottom with many thousands of men — or that one, greater than Asia or Africa, which Plato records as sunk in the Atlantic sea?

Therefore, since this world contains the elements — to treat summarily of the whole, as supplying its parts (for whatever its condition is, the same surely will be that also of the elements and members) — it must either have been instituted by someone, as Plato's humaneness has it, or by no one, as Epicurus's hardness has it;

The poets, accusers of the gods, Plato decreed should be banished;

The first discipline of the vizier is that he consider closely the king's character and his dealing: