FORE:Again, Plato is false to his own rule when he selects his philosophic governors out of the military caste. If the same individual can be a warrior in his youth and an administrator255 in his riper years, one man can do two things well, though not at the same time. If the same person can be born with the qualifications both of a soldier and of a politician, and can be fitted by education for each calling in succession, surely a much greater number can combine the functions of a manual labourer with those of an elector. What prevented Plato from perceiving this obvious parallel was the tradition of the paterfamilias who had always been a warrior in his youth; and a commendable anxiety to keep the army closely connected with the civil power. The analogies of domestic life have also a great deal to do with his proposed community of women and children. Instead of undervaluing the family affections, he immensely overvalued them; as is shown by his supposition that the bonds of consanguinity would prevent dissensions from arising among his warriors. He should have known that many a home is the scene of constant wrangling, and that quarrels between kinsfolk are the bitterest of any. Then, looking on the State as a great school, Plato imagined that the obedience, docility, and credulity of young scholars could be kept up through a lifetime; that full-grown citizens would swallow the absurdest inventions; and that middle-aged officers could be sent into retirement for several years to study dialectic. To suppose that statesmen must necessarily be formed by the discipline in question is another scholastic trait. The professional teacher attributes far more practical importance to his abstruser lessons than they really possess. He is not content to wait for the indirect influence which they may exert at some remote period and in combination with forces of perhaps a widely different character. He looks for immediate and telling results. He imagines that the highest truth must have a mysterious power of transforming all things into its own likeness, or at least of making its learners more capable than other men of doing the worlds work. Here also Plato, instead of being too logical, was not logical256 enough. By following out the laws of economy, as applied to mental labour, he might have arrived at the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers, and thus anticipated the best established social doctrine of our time.The rift within the lute went on widening till all its music was turned to jarring discord. With the third great Attic dramatist we arrive at a period of complete dissolution.71 Morality is not only separated from mythological tradition, but is openly at war with it. Religious belief, after becoming almost monotheistic, has relapsed into polytheism. With Euripides the gods do not, as with his predecessors, form a common council. They lead an independent existence, not interfering with each other, and pursuing private ends of their ownoften very disreputable ones. Aphrodite inspires Phaedra with an incestuous passion for her stepson. Artemis is propitiated by human sacrifices. Hr causes Heracls to kill his children in a fit of delirium. Zeus and Poseid?n are charged with breaking their own laws, and setting a bad example to mortals. Apollo, once so venerated, fares the worst of any. He outrages a noble maiden, and succeeds in palming off her child on the man whom she subsequently marries. He instigates the murder of a repentant enemy who has come to seek forgiveness at his shrine. He fails to protect Orestes from the consequences of matricide, committed at his own unwise suggestion. Political animosity may have had something to do with these attacks on a god who was believed to side with the Dorian confederacy against Athens. Doubtless, also, Euripides disbelieved many of the scandalous stories which he selected as appropriate materials for dramatic representation. But a satire on immoral beliefs would have been unnecessary had they not been generally accepted. Nor was the poet himself altogether a freethinker. One of his latest and most splendid works, the Bacchae, is a formal submission to the orthodox creed. Under the stimulus of an insane delusion, Pentheus is torn to pieces by his mother Agav and her attendant Maenads, for having presumed to oppose the introduction of Dionysus-worship into Thebes. The antecedents of the new divinity are questionable, and the nature of his influence on the female population extremely suspicious. Yet much stress is laid on the impiety of Pentheus, and we are clearly intended to consider his fate as well-deserved.
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