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.

In this way the truth-loving Plato, as if inspired, says:

" But virtue is not a lover of boyish things, says the philosopher Plato;

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’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.

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;

Can we outdo Plato in eloquence?

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

Since these things stand fast, it ought to be evident that souls, when they have departed from the body — whether they be of breath, that is, airy, or fiery — are borne aloft.

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 with men before me I shall not be willing to strive, neither with Plato nor with Homer.

'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.

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;

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;

A boy brought up in Plato's house, when he had been brought back to his parents and saw his father shouting, said:

This Plato excludes, wishing the soul to be unborn and uncreated.

The Platonists confound these things by subtlety rather than by truth.

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:

"Father, you did not teach me this — Homer, that man, no, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Susarion, who knew all things.

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

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;

Scipio:

but if it is different, why has it made the world mortal and not, like the god of Plato, everlasting?

And Aristotle, in the third book of his Philosophy, throws much into confusion, dissenting from his master Plato;

For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to behold that workshop of so vast a task, by which he makes the world to be constructed and built by a 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.

From Plato:

From Plato:

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;

"I sent two slaves," says he, "to seek and fetch Plato from the Academy.

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.

Angels too even Plato did not deny.

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

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:

" 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?

The world's form is round, says Plato.

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

Euctemon, Glaucippus, Eurymachus, Polyeuctus, Plato, Antidorus, Charippus, Theodorus, Alcisthenes, Menestratus, Eryximachus, Euphiletus, Eurydamas, Pherecles, Meletus, Timanthes, Archidamus, Telenicus.

If the soul is taken, following Plato, as having three parts, then the virtue of the reasoning part is practical wisdom;

Yet this is the uttermost limit of injustice, if we are to believe Plato at all:

or else we must cling to it only so far—as Plato says—as we win from it a service for philosophy, speaking somewhat like Paul, who exhorts that we should take no forethought for the body unto the occasion of lusts.

Wherefore it is said that Plato too, foreseeing the harm from the body, deliberately chose the unhealthy district of Attica, the Academy, that he might cut away the excessive well-being of the body, as one prunes the vine of its growth into superfluous shoots.