Oldalképek
PDF
ePub
[graphic][subsumed][ocr errors]

Ballantyne Press

BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO., EDINBURGH CHANDOS STREET, LONDON

[blocks in formation]

I19

ediz

614607

[blocks in formation]

13. Herrick's Hesperides.
14. Coleridge's Table-Talk.
15. Boccaccio's Decameron.
16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad.
18. Medieval Tales.

19. Voltaire's Candide, and
Johnson's Rasselas.

LONGFELLOW's Translation.

Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Plays, and Poems. Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit. (Hitopadesa.) 31. Charles Lamb's Essays of

Elia.

32. The History of Thomas

Ellwood.

33. Emerson's Essays, &c.
34. Southey's Life of Nelson.
35. Confessions of an Opium-
Eater, &c. By THOMAS DE
QUINCEY.

36. Stories of Ireland. By Mi-s
EDGEWORTH.

"Marvels of clear type and general neatness."-Daily Telegraph.

INTRODUCTION.

[ocr errors]

PLATO in his "Republic' argues that it is the aim of Individual Man as of the State to be wise, brave and temperate. In a State, he says, there are three orders, the Guardians, the Auxiliaries, the Producers. Wisdom should be the special virtue of the Guardians; Courage of the Auxiliaries; and Temperance of all. These three virtues belong respectively to the Individual Man, Wisdom to his Rational part; Courage to his Spirited; and Temperance to his Appetitive; while in the State as in the Man it is Injustice that disturbs their harmony.

Because the character of Man appears in the State unchanged, but in a larger form, Plato represented Socrates as studying the ideal man himself through an Ideal Commonwealth.

In another of his dialogues, "Critias," of which we have only the beginning, Socrates wishes that he could see how such a commonwealth would work, if it were set moving. Critias undertakes to tell him. For he has received tradition of events that happened more than nine thousand years ago, when the Athenians themselves were such ideal citizens. Critias has received this tradition, he says, from a ninetyyear-old grandfather, whose father, Dropides, was the friend of Solon. Solon, lawgiver and poet, had heard it from the priests of the goddess Neïth or Athene at Sais, and had begun to shape it into a heroic poem.

This was the tradition :-Nine thousand years before the time of Solon, the goddess Athene, who was worshipped also in Sais, had given to her Athenians a healthy climate, a fertile soil, and temperate people strong in wisdom and courage. Their Republic was like that which Socrates imagined, and it had to bear the shock of a great invasion by the people of the vast island Atlantis. This island, larger than all Libya and Asia put together, was once in the sea westward beyond the Atlantic waves,-thus America was dreamed of long before it was discovered. Atlantis had

« ElőzőTovább »