Chapter XXXIX: Leges and Epinomis (9)

In thus taking leave of Plato, at the close of his longest, latest, and most affirmative composition, it is satisfactory to be able to express unqualified sympathy with this main purpose which, as departing lawgiver, he directs his successors to promote. But to these salutary directions, unfortunately, he has attached others noway connected with them except by common feelings of reverence in his own mind and far less deserving of sympathy. He requires that his own religious belief shall be erected into a peremptory orthodoxy, and that heretics shall be put down by the severest penalties. Now a citizen might be perfectly just, temperate, brave, and prudent--and yet dissent altogether from the Platonic creed. For such a citizen--the counterpart of Sokrates at Athens--no existence would be possible in the Platonic community.

[Side-note: Intolerance of Plato--Comparison of the Platonic community with Athens.]

We must farther remark that, even when Plato's ends are unexceptionable, the amount of interference which he employs to accomplish them is often extravagant. As a Constructor, he carries the sentiment of his own infallibility--which in a certain measure every lawgiver must assume--to an extreme worthy only of the kings of the Saturnian age:[501] manifesting the very minimum of tolerance for that enquiring individual reason of which his own negative dialogues remain as immortal masterpieces. We trace this intolerance through all the dialogue Leges. Even when he condescends to advise and persuade, he speaks rather in the tone of an encyclical censor, than of one who has before him a reasonable opponent to be convinced. The separate laws proposed by Plato are interesting to read, as illustrating antiquity: but most of them are founded on existing Athenian law. Where they depart from it, they depart as often for the worse as for the better--so far as I can pretend to judge. And in spite of all the indisputable defects, political and judicial, of that glorious city, where Plato was born and passed most of his days--it was, in my judgment, preferable to his Magnêtic city, as to all the great objects of security, comfort, recreation, and enjoyment. Athens was preferable, even for the ordinary citizen: but for the men of free, inquisitive, self-thinking, minds--the dissentient minority, who lived upon that open speech of which Athenian orators and poets boasted--it was a condition of existence: since the Platonic censorship would have tolerated neither their doctrines nor their persons.

[Footnote 501: Plato, Politikus, pp. 271 E, 275 A-C.]