lifelong terror, he himself the most pitiable slave of all.
The only pleasure that such a man ever knows is mere sensual enjoyment—in itself worthless and fleeting. The attractions of gold or of glory are of a nobler stamp; but the best and purest of all pleasures that a man can feel, and the ineffable sweetness of which the world can never realise, is that which the philosopher alone finds in the study and contemplation of existence. For he prunes close the hydra-headed passions by which the many are enslaved, and subjects the lion to the man, by making reason rule his soul. Thus none can measure his happiness; but it cannot be possessed by any in perfection, save in our own ideal state—"which does not, indeed, at present exist in this world, but has, perhaps, its pattern laid up in heaven for him who is willing to see it, and, seeing it, rules his life on earth accordingly."[1]
Such is the Platonic State, with its strange medley of noble aspirations and impracticable details. How far Plato himself believed it to be ideal, or how far, if he had been Alexander's tutor, he would have tried to carry it out in history, we have no means of telling. But it is easy to understand his feeling, and the point of view from which he wrote. He is weary of the pretensions, the falsehood, and the low morality around him—("it is dreadful to think," he says, "that half the people we meet have perjured themselves in one of the numerous law-courts")—and so he turns away with a
- ↑ Rep. ix. ad fin.
