Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/322

298 idea that the philosopher may belong to the world as well as to a particular city. When Socrates described himself as, i.e. a citizen of the world, he meant that the State did not bind him in everything, that there was a world of duty and of thought beyond and transcending the State. We can recognise this feeling also in the Republic of Plato, and connect it with a philosophical reaction against the political life of the Athenian citizen. Athens was far more open to criticism now than in the days of Pericles; and a cynical dislike betrays itself in the Republic for the politicians of the day and their tricks, and a longing for a strong government of reason, which Plato could find in no existing Greek. Not indeed that Plato really gave up the as hopeless, or sought for a new form of State to take its place. His object, as seen more especially in his later work, the Laws, is rather "to re-adapt it to the promotion of virtue and noble living." And it is true that the most practical of all the thinking men of Greece, one who lived in this age and was intimately connected with Macedon and her two great kings, has nothing to tell us of the insufficiency of the as such; in his eyes it was Nature's gift to man to enable him to perfect himself in the "good life." Aristotle took the facts of city life as they were and showed how they might be made the most of. "Not a