THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO - Studyplace

xxiv
INTRODUCTION
the lawgiver and others of the Seven Sages. The death of Pericles
at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War had marked the moment
when the men of thought and the men of action began to
take different paths, destined to diverge more and more widely
until the Stoic sage renounced his local allegiance to become a
citizen of the universe. Pericles had been the last philosophic statesman.
His loftiness of spirit, as Socrates remarks in the Phaedrus,
was due to his converse with Anaxagoras, whose speculations gave
Pericles an insight and a breadth of view which he carried into his
practical work as leader of the democratic Assembly. Under the
stress of war, men of thought, like Thucydides and Euripides, went
into exile, voluntary or enforced. Socrates just fulfilled his civic
duties, but kept clear of politics. The task of winning the war was
left to business men like Clean, or ambitious egoists like Alcibiades.
To Plato, this drifting apart of the men of thought and the men of
action was a disastrous calamity, indeed the root of the social evils
of his time. His problem, as presented in the Gorgias, was not to
be solved merely by dropping out of public life to become absorbed
in abstract speculation. Philosophy meant to him what it had meant
to his master. The Socratic philosophy, analysed and formulated in
the early dialogues, was not the study of nature or logic or metaphysics;
it was the pursuit of wisdom, and to achieve wisdom
would be to achieve human perfection, wdl-being, happiness. lbis
again meant not merely 'caring for one's own soul' as an isolated
individual, saving himself and leaving society to its fate. Human
excellence, as Plato and Aristotle after him always maintained, is
the excellence of an essentially social creature, a citizen. To produce
this experience and consequent well-being is the true end of the
'Royal Art' of statesmanship. Hence the life of philosophy and the
life of the active statesman ought not to be, as they appeared to
Callicles, alternative careers, but a single life in which all the highest
powers of man would find full expression. Society could be
saved only by reuniting the two elements which had been drifting
apart. This is the theoretical or perfect solution, which Plato says he
had formulated before his first visit to Sicily. The long passage
above quoted from the seventh Letter continues as follows: