henians; there they seemed to
find a principle which was wanting in their own democracy. The (Greek)
of the Spartans attracted them, that is to say, not the goodness
of their laws, but the spirit of order and loyalty which prevailed.
Fascinated by the idea, citizens of Athens would imitate the
Lacedaemonians in their dress and manners; they were known to the
contemporaries of Plato as 'the persons who had their ears bruised,'
like the Roundheads of the Commonwealth. The love of another church
or country when seen at a distance only, the longing for an imaginary
simplicity in civilized times, the fond desire of a past which never has
been, or of a future which never will be,--these are aspirations of the
human mind which are often felt among ourselves. Such feelings meet with
a response in the Republic of Plato.

But there are other features of the Platonic Republic, as, for example,
the literary and philosophical education, and the grace and beauty
of life, which are the reverse of Spartan. Plato wishes to give his
citizens a taste of Athenian freedom as well as of Lacedaemonian
discipline. His individual genius is purely Athenian, although in theory
he is a lover of Sparta; and he is something more than either--he has
also a true Hellenic feeling. He is desirous of humanizing the wars of
Hellenes against one another; he acknowledges that the Delphian God is
the grand hereditary interpreter of all Hellas. The spirit of harmony
and the Dorian mode are to prevail, and the whole State is to have an
external beauty which is the reflex of the harmony within. But he
has not yet found out the truth which he afterwards enunciated in the
Laws--that he was a better legislator who made men to be of one mind,
than he who trained them for war. The citizens, as in other Hellenic
States, democratic as well as aristocratic, are really an upper class;
for, although no mention is made of slaves, the lower classes are
allowed to fade away into the distance, and are represented in the
individual by the passions. Plato has no idea either of a social State
in which all classes are harmonized, or of a federation of Hellas or
the world in which different nations or States have a place. His city
is equipped for war rather than for peace, and this would seem to be
justified by the ordinary condition of Hellenic States. The myth of the
earth-born men is an embodiment of the orthodox tradition of Hellas,
and the allusion to the four ages of the wo