Plato

This excellent piece of advice is usually attributed to Plato:

All other parts of me are base and common, but in this one I am unique and very rare and ought to be known and recognized for it, in spite of the natural inconvenience that it is to me (for, indeed, given how necessary it is, Plato is right to call it a great and powerful goddess).

As for other forms of prognostication that used to be made from the anatomy of animals offered in sacrifice — and partly responsible for the layout of their internal organs according to Plato — from the stamping of chickens and the flight of birds, Aues quasdam rerum augurandarum causa natas esse putamus, We believe some birds are born for the sake of auguryfrom thunder and the eddies of rivers, Multa cernunt aruspices, multa augures prouident, multa oraculis declarantur, multa vaticinationibus, multa somniis, multa portentis, Haruspices see many things;

Plato lets it presides over many important aspects of the government he likes to imagine and wishes, for instance, that marriages among the good happen by drawing lots.

In Plato, Socrates mocks Laches who defined fortitude as facing and holding the line against the enemy.

I refer to her Plato’s cave in his Republic, and the physicians, who so often submit the reasons of their art to her authority;

Plato reprehending a boy for playing at nuts, “Thou reprovest me,” says the boy, “for a very little thing.

” “Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing.

’Tis by this receipt that Plato undertakes to cure the unnatural and preposterous loves of his time, as one which he esteems of sovereign virtue, namely, that the public opinion condemns them;

these were the manners of Plato;

These pedants of ours, as Plato says of the Sophists, their cousin-germans, are, of all men, they who most pretend to be useful to mankind, and who alone, of all men, not only do not better and improve that which is committed to them, as a carpenter or a mason would do, but make them much worse, and make us pay them for making them worse, to boot.

Plato’s principal institution in his Republic is to fit his citizens with employments suitable to their nature.

Plato tells us that the eldest son in their royal succession was thus brought up;

an example that Plato has followed in his laws.

In this difficulty, nevertheless, I am clearly of opinion, that they ought to be elemented in the best and most advantageous studies, without taking too much notice of, or being too superstitious in those light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years, and to which Plato, in his Republic, gives, methinks, too much authority.

Let him make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato.

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own.

’tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them.

it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it, according to the opinion of Plato, who says, that constancy, faith, and sincerity, are the true philosophy, and the other sciences, that are directed to other ends;

and the only study, as Plato reports, that the Lacedæmonians reserved to themselves.

according to Plato’s precept, that children are to be placed out and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own souls.

And Plato, having invited her to his feast, we see after how gentle and obliging a manner, accommodated both to time and place, she entertained the company, though in a discourse of the highest and most important nature.

And, as Plato says, we are not to fashion one without the other, but make them draw together like two horses harnessed to a coach.

’Tis marvellous to see how solicitous Plato is in his Laws concerning the gaiety and diversion of the youth of his city, and how much and often he enlarges upon the races, sports, songs, leaps, and dances:

God forbid, says one in Plato, that to philosophize were only to read a great many books, and to learn the arts.

The Athenians, says Plato, study fullness and elegance of speaking;

Callicles in Plato says, that the extremity of philosophy is hurtful, and advises not to dive into it beyond the limits of profit;

’Tis homicide, according to Plato.

It was doubtless from some lascivious poet, and one that himself was in great distress for a little of this sport, that Plato borrowed this story;

Plato brings in Solon, telling a story that he had heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt, that of old, and before the Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly at the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar, which contained more countries than both Africa and Asia put together;

All things, says Plato, are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art;

I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them;

I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority;

For which reason, says Plato, it is much more easy to satisfy the hearers, when speaking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men, because the ignorance of the auditory affords a fair and large career and all manner of liberty in the handling of abstruse things.

And Plato very earnestly advises for the health of the whole body, to give the head and the feet no other clothing than what nature has bestowed.

Plato worries about our bitter relationship with pain and pleasure because it gives the body too much power over the soul and binds the two too closely.

Plato lists physical and human qualities in this order:

Plato is in the right when he tells us that health, beauty, vigor, and riches, and all the other things called goods, are equally evil to the unjust as good to the just, and the evil on the contrary the same.

Plato, indeed, in his Goygias, defines a tyrant to be one who in a city has licence to do whatever his own will leads him to do;

Plato in his Laws esteems nothing of more pestiferous consequence to his city than to give young men the liberty of introducing any change in their habits, gestures, dances, songs, and exercises, from one form to another;

which would seem far fetched were there not as crude derivations in Plato himself.

History tells us of three of the name of Socrates, of five Platos, of eight Aristotles, of seven Xenophons, of twenty Demetrii, and of twenty Theodores;

“We argue rashly and adventurously,” says Timaeus in Plato, “by reason that, as well as ourselves, our discourses have great participation in the temerity of chance.

Plato recommends it for health, as also Pliny says it is good for the stomach and the joints.

” Socrates and Plato “an art to flatter and deceive.

Plato carried away the surname of Divine, by so universal a consent that never any one repined at it, or attempted to take it from him;

‘Tis said that Homer had never more than one, Plato three, and Zeno, founder of the sect of Stoics, none at all.

whereas the first of those of Plato forbids them to inquire so much as into the civil laws, which were to stand instead of divine ordinances;

neither the gods nor good men (says Plato) will accept the present of a wicked man.

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty;

And as Plato says, ’tis to no purpose for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poetry:

Plato argues thus, that the faculty of prophesying is so far above us, that we must be out of ourselves when we meddle with it, and our prudence must either be obstructed by sleep or sickness, or lifted from her place by some celestial rapture.

Plato, in his Laws, assigns an ignominious sepulture to him who has deprived his nearest and best friend, namely himself, of life and his destined course, being neither compelled so to do by public judgment, by any sad and inevitable accident of fortune, nor by any insupportable disgrace, but merely pushed on by cowardice and the imbecility of a timorous soul.

” Cleombrotus of Ambracia, having read Plato’s Phaedo, entered into so great a desire of the life to come that, without any other occasion, he threw himself into the sea.

Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same time with it.

Plato will have nobody marry before thirty;

The pleasant dialogue betwixt Plato’s legislator and his citizens will be an ornament to this place, “What,” said they, feeling themselves about to die, “may we not dispose of our own to whom we please?

Plato adds, that these are immortal children that immortalize and deify their fathers, as Lycurgus, Solon, Minos.

When I find myself disgusted with Plato’s Axiochus, as with a work, with due respect to such an author be it spoken, without force, my judgment does not believe itself:

Will the licence of the time excuse my sacrilegious boldness if I censure the dialogism of Plato himself as also dull and heavy, too much stifling the matter, and lament so much time lost by a man, who had so many better things to say, in so many long and needless preliminary interlocutions?

“I desire to be dissolved,” we should say, “and to be with Jesus Christ” The force of Plato’s arguments concerning the immortality of the soul set some of his disciples to seek a premature grave, that they might the sooner enjoy the things he had made them hope for.

And what Plato says, “That there are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will not reduce to an acknowledgment of the divine power,” does not concern a true Christian:

Plato and these examples would conclude that we are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force.

The error of paganism and the ignorance of our sacred truth, let this great soul of Plato, but great only in human greatness, fall also into this other mistake, “That children and old men were most susceptible of religion,” as if it sprung and derived its credit from our weakness.

“Understanding is in the gods,” says Plato, “and not at all, or very little, in men.

there to fix habitations and human abodes, and plant colonies for our convenience, as Plato and Plutarch have done?

Plato, in his picture of the golden age under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had, his communication with beasts, of whom, inquiring and informing himself, he knew the true qualities and differences of them all, by which he acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence, and led his life more happily than we could do.

Just as the preference in beauty that Plato attributes to the spherical figure the Epicureans gave rather to the pyramidal or square, and cannot swallow a god in the form of a bowl.

And what qualities of our bodily constitution, in Plato and Cicero, may not indifferently serve a thousand sorts of beasts?

Plato says that melancholy persons are the most capable of discipline, and the most excellent;

And Plato thinks there is something of impiety in inquiring too curiously into God, the world, and the first causes of things.

We know things in dreams, says Plato, and are ignorant of them in truth.

You are permitted to embrace Aristotle’s opinions of the immortality of the soul with as much zeal as your honor and life, and to give the lie to Plato thereupon, and shall they be interdicted to doubt him?

he has elsewhere translated from the very words of Plato:

Chrysippus said “That what Plato and Aristotle had writ, concerning logic, they had only done in sport, and by way of exercise;

As to the rest, some have looked upon Plato as a dogmatist, others as a doubter, others in some things the one, and in other things the other.

’Tis said that ten several sects sprung from Plato;

Plato seems to have affected this method of philosophizing in dialogues;

I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pythagoras, have given us their atom, idea and numbers, for current pay.

Plato treats of this mystery with a raillery manifest enough;

Plato divides his belief into several opinions;

Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, makes God a certain power governing all things, and that he has a soul.

When Plato describes Pluto’s orchard to us, and the bodily conveniences or pains that attend us after the ruin and annihilation of our bodies, and accommodates them to the feeling we have in this life,Secreti celant calles, et myrtea circum Sylva tegit;

Can we believe that Plato, he who had such heavenly conceptions, and was so well acquainted with the Divinity as thence to derive the name of the Divine Plato, ever thought that the poor creature, man, had any thing in him applicable to that incomprehensible power?

Can we believe that Plato, he who had such heavenly conceptions, and was so well acquainted with the Divinity as thence to derive the name of the Divine Plato, ever thought that the poor creature, man, had any thing in him applicable to that incomprehensible power?

” And if, to render us capable, our being were reformed and changed (as thou, Plato, sayest, by thy purifications), it ought to be so extreme and total a change, that by physical doctrine it be no more us,Hector erat tunc cum bello certabat;

For if it was still Caesar, they would be in the right who, controverting this opinion with Plato, reproach him that the son might be seen to ride his mother transformed into a mule, and the like absurdities.

“And, Plato, when thou sayest in another place that it shall be the spiritual part of man that will be concerned in the fruition of the recompense of another life, thou tellest us a thing wherein there is as little appearance of truth,Scilicet, avolsis radicibus, ut nequit ullam Dispicere ipsa oculus rem, seorsum corpore toto.

Might not Epicurus, with great color of human reason, object this to Plato, did he not often save himself with this sentence:

Especially if it be a living creature, which its motions render so credible that Plato affirms it, and that many of our people do either confirm, or dare not deny it;

For if there be but one, neither can that spherical motion be of any use to him, nor motion from one place to another, as Plato proves:

and Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras have enslaved him to necessity.

As if it had not been sufficient that Plato was originally descended from the gods by a double line, and that he had Neptune for the common father of his race, it was certainly believed at Athens, that Aristo, having a mind to enjoy the fair Perictione, could not, and was warned by the god Apollo, in a dream, to leave her unpolluted and untouched, till she should first be brought to bed.

These were the father and mother of Plato.

Plato having occasion, in his Timaeus, to speak of the daemons, “This undertaking,” says he, “exceeds my ability.

You would say that we had had coachmakers, carpenters, and painters, that went up on high to make engines of various motions, and to range the wheelwork and interfacings of the heavenly bodies of differing colors about the axis of necessity, according to Plato:

Have I not read in Plato this divine saying, that “nature is nothing but enigmatic poetry!

Plato is but a poet unripped.

Plato, upon the discourse of the state of human bodies and those of beasts, says, “I should know that what I have said is truth, had I the confirmation of an oracle;

As Socrates says, in Plato, “That whoever meddles with philosophy may be reproached as Thales was by the woman, that he sees nothing of that which is before him.

I do not know why I should not as willingly embrace either the ideas of Plato, or the atoms of Epicurus, or the plenum or vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of Thales, or the infinity of nature of Anaximander, or the air of Diogenes, or the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, or the infinity of Parmenides, or the One of Musaeus, or the water and fire of Apollodorus, or the similar parts of Anaxagoras, or the discord and friendship of Empedocles, or the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion of that infinite confusion of opinions and determinations, which this fine human reason produces by its certitude and clearsightedness in every thing it meddles withal, as I should the opinion of Aristotle upon this subject of the principles of natural things;

and there are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that are less philosophers, than the philodoxes of Plato;

Plato, that it was a substance moving of itself;

observe to what a pitch Plato flies in his poetic clouds;

for, having pulled a capon alive, they went about calling it the man of Plato.

This same Plato, who defines man as if he were a cock, says elsewhere, after Socrates, “That he does not, in truth, know what man is, and that he is a member of the world the hardest to understand.

Inasmuch as Plato has placed reason in the brain, anger in the heart, and concupiscence in the liver;

and from this knowledge it should follow that they should remember, being got in the body, as Plato said, “That what we learn is no other than a remembrance of what we knew before;

Plato, to defend himself from this inconvenience, will have future payments limited to the term of a hundred years, relatively to human duration;

the other, that it is a very profitable impression, as Plato says, that vices, when they escape the discovery and cognizance of human justice, are still within the reach of the divine, which will pursue them even after the death of the guilty.

Plato, who professes to have embraced this belief from Pindar and the ancient poets, that we are to undergo infinite vicissitudes of mutation, for which the soul is prepared, having neither punishment nor reward in the other world but what is temporal, as its life here is but temporal, concludes that it has a singular knowledge of the affairs of heaven, of hell, of the world, through all which it has passed, repassed, and made stay in several voyages, are matters for her memory.

Plato, that it is the distillation of the marrow of the backbone;

” And Plato affirms, “That without laws we should live like beasts.

Plato says that it changes countenance in all respects;

Cicero and Diodorus say that in their time the Chaldees kept a register of four hundred thousand and odd years, Aristotle, Pliny, and others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand years before Plato’s time.

Plato says that they of the city of Sais have records in writing of eight thousand years;

Thrasymachus, in Plato, is of opinion that there is no other right but the convenience of the superior.

Dionysius, the tyrant, offered Plato a robe of the Persian fashion, long, damasked, and perfumed;

Plato refused it, saying, “That being born a man, he would not willingly dress himself in women’s clothes;

These last two stoical quotations, and the reproach that Dicaearchus threw into the teeth of Plato himself, upon this account, show how much the soundest philosophy indulges licenses and excesses very remote from common custom.

Do but observe how Plato is tumbled and tossed about;

Plato would have the judgment of truth, and truth itself, derived from opinions and the senses, to belong to the wit and cogitation.

Plato said, that bodies had never any existence, but only birth;

and Plato, bending his whole endeavor to make his citizens virtuous, also advises them not to despise the good repute and esteem of the people;

but I likewise know that the greatest masters, and Xenophon and Plato are often seen to stoop to this low and popular manner of speaking and treating of things, but supporting it with graces which never fail them.

Plato says, that the long or the short are not properties, that either take away or give value to language.

And Plato, together with temperance and fortitude, requires beauty in the conservators of his republic.

for, as Pindar says, to be true is the beginning of a great virtue, and the first article that Plato requires in the governor of his Republic.

and I am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and loyal a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt — would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself.

insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to clear the law of all inconveniences.

It is worthy of consideration that Laches in Plato, speaking of learning to fence after our manner, says that he never knew any great soldier come out of that school, especially the masters of it:

and in the education of the children of his government, Plato interdicts the art of boxing, introduced by Amycus and Epeius, and that of wrestling, by Antaeus and Cercyo, because they have another end than to render youth fit for the service of war and contribute nothing to it.

” Such a study was that of the younger Cato, feeling his end approach, and which he met with in Plato’s Discourse of the Eternity of the Soul:

for of assurance, an established will and instruction, he had more than Plato had in all his writings;

” Plato likewise, being highly offended with one of his slaves, gave Speusippus order to chastise him, excusing himself from doing it because he was in anger.

” What did Panaetius leave unsaid when he called Plato the Homer of the philosophers?

and to the most labored and solid discourses that philosophy would imprint in us to the contrary, we need no more but oppose the image of Plato being struck with an epilepsy or apoplexy;

’Tis from the great Plato, that I lately learned, that of three sorts of motions which are natural to us, purging is the worst, and that no man, unless he be a fool, ought to take anything to that purpose but in the extremest necessity.

Plato said very well, that physicians were the only men who might lie at pleasure, since our health depends upon the vanity and falsity of their promises.

What Homer and Plato said of the Egyptians, that they were all physicians, may be said of all nations;

It would become justice, and Plato himself, who countenances this manner of proceeding, to furnish me with other means more suitable to my own liking:

I dislike the advice of Plato, that men should always speak in a magisterial tone to their servants, whether men or women, without being sometimes facetious and familiar;

and quote Plato and Aquinas in things the first man they meet could determine as well;

believing, according to the persuasion of Lysias in Plato, that they may with more utility and convenience surrender themselves up to us the less we love them.

Plato ordains that old men should be present at the exercises, dances, and sports of young people, that they may rejoice in others for the activity and beauty of body which is no more in themselves, and call to mind the grace and comeliness of that flourishing age;

I am very much of Plato’s opinion, who says that facile or harsh humors are great indications of the good or ill disposition of the mind.

’Tis a fine humor to strain the writings of Plato, to wrest his pretended intercourses with Phaedo, Dion, Stella, and Archeanassa.

to evade which inconvenience, do but observe what pains Lycurgus and Plato take in their laws.

Is it, perhaps, as Plato says, that they have formerly been debauched young fellows?

What do the so long and lively descriptions in Plato of the loves of his time pretend to?

The gods, says Plato, have given us one disobedient and unruly member that, like a furious animal, attempts, by the violence of its appetite, to subject all things to it;

And what do we know but that Plato, after other well-instituted republics, ordered that the men and women, old and young, should expose themselves naked to the view of one another, in his gymnastic exercises, upon that very account?

The Lacedaemonian women, more virgins when wives than our daughters are, saw every day the young men of their city stripped naked in their exercises, themselves little heeding to cover their thighs in walking, believing themselves, says Plato, sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe.

Somebody told Plato that all the world spoke ill of him.

I believe it to be true, as Plato says, that the gods made man for their sport,Quænam ista iocandi Sævitia!

this other action subjects all other thought, and by its imperious authority makes an ass of all Plato’s divinity and philosophy;

Plato declares that, in all sorts of love, facility and promptness are forbidden to the defendant.

For this reason it was, that Plato wisely made a law that before marriage, to determine of the fitness of persons, the judges should see the young men who pretended to it stripped stark naked, and the women but to the girdle only.

For whereas Homer extends it so far as to the budding of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare:

Plato ordains in his Laws that he who has performed any signal and advantageous exploit in war may not be refused during the whole expedition, his age or ugliness notwithstanding, a kiss or any other amorous favor from any woman whatever.

Plato indifferently invites both the one and the other to the society of all studies, exercises, and vocations, both military and civil, in his Commonwealth;

For Dionysius, because he could not equal Philoxenus in poetry and Plato in discourse, condemned the one to the quarries, and sent the other to be sold for a slave into the island of Aegina.

To condemn them for having done amiss, were folly, as Plato says, for what is done can never be undone;

Therefore it is that Plato in his Republic prohibits this exercise to fools and ill-bred people.

I am of opinion that, in Plato and Xenophon, Socrates disputes more in favor of the disputants than in favor of the dispute, and more to instruct Euthydemus and Protagoras in the, knowledge of their impertinence, than in the impertinence of their art.

Let us always have this saying of Plato in our mouths:

and Plato, a master in all political government himself, nevertheless took care to abstain from it), and partly out of cowardice.

nor to give Plato the lie, who looks upon it as the most pleasant employment to every one to do his particular affairs without wrong to another.

for there have been such, as savage as any human opinion could conceive, who, nevertheless, have maintained their body with as much health and length of life as any Plato or Aristotle could invent.

a civil government is, as Plato says, a mighty and puissant thing, and hard to be dissolved;

Plato says, that whoever escapes from the world’s handling with clean breeches, escapes by miracle:

I have read a dialogue of Plato, of the like motley and fantastic composition, the beginning about love, and all the rest to the end about rhetoric;

’tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble, demoniac.

The poet, says Plato, seated upon the muses tripod, pours out with fury whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe of a fountain, without considering and weighing it;

Plato himself is throughout poetical;

and Plato sets down a middle path of life betwixt the two.

Alcibiades, in Plato, had rather die young, beautiful, rich, noble, and learned, and all this in full excellence, than to stop short of such condition;

Plato, likewise, will not consent that a man should violate the peace of his country in order to cure it, and by no means approves of a reformation that disturbs and hazards all, and that is to be purchased at the price of the citizens’ blood and ruin;

I was a Platonist in this point, before I knew there had ever been such a man as Plato in the world.

The extremest sort of injustice, according to Plato, is where that which is unjust, should be reputed for just.

Such there are who quote Plato and Homer, who never saw either of them;

he called it “a short tyranny,” and Plato, “the privilege of nature.

I should willingly maintain the priority in good things, according to the song that Plato calls an idle thing, taken out of some ancient poet:

judging with Plato, “that lawyers and physicians are the pests of a country.

Plato says also, that prudence is no other thing than the execution of this ordinance;

Plato requires three things in him who will examine the soul of another:

so Plato had reason to say that, to be a right physician, it would be necessary that he who would become such, should first himself have passed through all the diseases he pretends to cure, and through all the accidents and circumstances whereof he is to judge.

their fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato.

Plato does not believe that Aesculapius troubled himself to provide, by regimen, to prolong life in a weak and wasted body, useless to his country and to his profession, or to beget healthful and robust children;

Plato is more angry at excess of sleeping, than at excess of drinking.

the honor of this occupation, nay, even its hardships and difficulties, which Plato holds so light that, in his Republic, he makes women and children share in them, are delightful to you.

Plato, moreover, says, that ’tis the office of prudence to draw instructions of divination of future things from dreams:

And so Plato likewise says, that the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases is violent;

Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, “that it is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of understanding know how to entertain one another.

Plato found a mean betwixt the two;

and Plato is much more Socratic than Pythagoric, and it becomes him better.

Plato couples them together, and wills that it should be equally the office of fortitude to fight against pain, and against the immoderate and charming blandishments of pleasure:

nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine;