to crush anything like heresy or dissent among the members of the social body. The state, if it existed at all, must be at one with itself; and they would point to Sparta as a triumphant proof that a rational character night be created by the all-powerful hand of a legislator like Lycurgus. Pericles indeed might boast that at Athens there were no sour looks at a neighbour's eccentricities, and that it was emphatically
A man might say the thing he would:"
but, as we have seen in the case of Socrates, Athenian tolerance might be tried too far, and theories which tended in their view to outrage religion and morality, could not be endured with the same equanimity as in our sceptical and so-called enlightened age.
The opening scene in the "Republic" is such an excellent specimen of Plato's powers of description, that it is well worth giving in full. It is Socrates who speaks:—