ct of
asceticism on human nature? and, Must there not be a certain proportion
between the aspirations of man and his powers?--questions which have
been often discussed both by ancient and modern philosophers. So
by comparing things old and new we may sometimes help to realize to
ourselves the meaning of Plato in the altered circumstances of our own
life.

Like the importance which he attaches to festive entertainments, his
depreciation of courage to the fourth place in the scale of virtue
appears to be somewhat rhetorical and exaggerated. But he is speaking
of courage in the lower sense of the term, not as including loyalty or
temperance. He does not insist in this passage, as in the Protagoras,
on the unity of the virtues; or, as in the Laches, on the identity of
wisdom and courage. But he says that they all depend upon their leader
mind, and that, out of the union of wisdom and temperance with courage,
springs justice. Elsewhere he is disposed to regard temperance rather
as a condition of all virtue than as a particular virtue. He generalizes
temperance, as in the Republic he generalizes justice. The nature of the
virtues is to run up into one another, and in many passages Plato makes
but a faint effort to distinguish them. He still quotes the poets,
somewhat enlarging, as his manner is, or playing with their meaning. The
martial poet Tyrtaeus, and the oligarch Theognis, furnish him with
happy illustrations of the two sorts of courage. The fear of fear, the
division of goods into human and divine, the acknowledgment that peace
and reconciliation are better than the appeal to the sword, the analysis
of temperance into resistance of pleasure as well as endurance of pain,
the distinction between the education which is suitable for a trade or
profession, and for the whole of life, are important and probably new
ethical conceptions. Nor has Plato forgotten his old paradox (Gorgias)
that to be punished is better than to be unpunished, when he says, that
to the bad man death is the only mitigation of his evil. He is not less
ideal in many passages of the Laws than in the Gorgias or Republic. But
his wings are heavy, and he is unequal to any sustained flight.

There is more attempt at dramatic effect in the first book than in
the later parts of the work. The outburst of martial spirit in the
Lacedaemonian, 'O best of men'; the protest which the Cretan makes
against the supposed insult to his lawgiver; the cordial acknowledgm