Free The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World by Daniel J. Boorstin Page B

proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. (
The Republic,
Jowett trans.)
    Athenians took such pride in being sprung from the soil of the city where they lived that until the mid-fifth century B.C. they wore golden cicadas in their hair as the symbol of their local origin.
    Just as the role of each individual was fixed in the materials of his being, so the society as a whole had its destiny fixed in rigid cycles of history. In contrast to the unchanging Other-World of Ideas, Plato saw a universal earthly law of decay. Aristocracy (rule of the best) degenerates into Timocracy (the rule of honor), which degenerates into Oligarchy (the rule of the wealthy), which in turn degenerates into Democracy (the rule of the people). The chaos of Democracy finally produces Tyranny. Procreation at the wrong seasons accelerates this process by intermingling the races of gold, silver, brass, and iron. Incidentally Plato offers a whimsical Pythagorean formula, improved by the Muses, for finding the best seasons of procreation.
    The Republic
was not the last step in Plato’s move from the Socratic Way of Dialogue to the way of dogma. After
The Republic,
and probably after his last Sicilian venture in 360, Plato wrote another work of similar length,
The Laws.
Ostensibly this, too, is in the form of a dialogue. But long monologues fill whole Books offering Plato’s views as those of “an Athenian Stranger.” Here dialogue ceases to be a lively intellectual encounter and becomes a mere frame for the Athenian Stranger’s opinion.
The Laws’
Twelve Books begin with still another exposition of the origins of government and the lessons of history, the kinds of constitutions, schemes of education, and the nature of virtue. Along the way are sententious observations on the pleasures and perils of strong drink, on crime and punishment, sex, slavery, property, and the family. While
The Republic
was for a community “of a size to which it can grow without losing its unity,” the Laws are designed for a community of 5,040 households. To ensure that the Laws will be “irreversible,” Plato prescribes a Nocturnal Council of specially educated Guardians. Most of the ideas in
The Laws
are better explained in other dialogues. But the hopes for the rule of the wise found in
The Republic,
a city “laid up in the heavens,” have become demands for the rule of earthly laws. And so Plato has displaced the question by the answer.

9
    Aristotle: An Outsider in Athens

    Who would have guessed that Plato’s most famous disciple would be (in words attributed to Plato) “the foal that kicks its mother”? Or that the inheritor of the mantle of the man sent to his death for exposing the pretensions of his time would be the West’s first encyclopedist? Or that it was possible to build a philosophy on a faith that “What everyone believes is true” (
Consensus omnium
)? Or that this Aristotle, a prize pupil in Plato’s Academy for twenty years, instructed in the Theory of Forms denying the reality of the sensible world, would produce a grand omnium-gatherum of facts on everything in the heavens and on the earth—from the ways of bees and horses to the form of the human heart and brain and the laws of nations civilized and barbaric?
    Yet precisely such a prodigy emerged from classical Athens. Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.
    Aristotle is the colossus