Will you make any use of them for warriors?
None at all,
he said; but it would seem that you have left the Dorian and the Phrygian.
I don’t know Footnote 1Plato, like a lawyer or popular essayist, affects ignorance of the technical details; or perhaps rather he wishes to disengage his main principle from the specialists’ controversy about particular modes of music and their names. the musical modes,
I said, but leave us that mode Footnote 2ἐκείνην may mean, but does not say, Dorian, which the Laches (188 D) pronounces the only true Greek harmony. This long anacoluthic sentence sums up the whole matter with impressive repetition and explicit enumeration of all types of conduct in peace and war, and implied reference to Plato’s doctrine of the two fundamental temperaments, the swift and the slow, the energetic and the mild. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, nn. 59, 70, 481. that would fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed, either meeting wounds or death or having fallen into some other mishap, in all these conditions confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes. And another for such a man engaged in works of peace, not enforced but voluntary, Footnote 3Cf. Laws 814 E. either trying to persuade somebody of something and imploring him—whether it be a god, through prayer, or a man, by teaching and admonition—or contrariwise yielding himself to another who petitioning or teaching him or trying to change his opinions, and in consequence faring according to his wish, and not bearing himself arrogantly, but in all this acting modestly and moderately and acquiescing in the outcome. Leave us these two modes—the forced and the voluntary—that will best imitate the utterances of men failing or succeeding, the temperate, the brave—leave us these.
Well,
said he, you are asking me to leave none other than those I just spoke of.
Then,
said I, we shall not need in our songs and airs instruments of many strings or whose compass includes all the harmonies.
Not in my opinion,
said he. Then we shall not maintain makers of triangles and harps and all other many stringed and poly-harmonic Footnote 4Metaphorically. The
many-toned instrumentation of the flutes,
as Pindar calls it, Ol. vii. 12, can vie with the most complex and many-stringed lyre of musical innovation. instruments.Apparently not.
Well, will you admit to the city flute-makers and flute-players? Or is not the flute the most
many-stringed
of instruments and do not the pan-harmonics Footnote 5Cf. 404 D, the only other occurrence of the word in Plato. themselves imitate it?Clearly,
he said. You have left,
said I, the lyre and the cither. These are useful Footnote 6Cf. my note on Timaeus 47 C, in A.J.P. vol. x. p. 61. in the city, and in the fields the shepherds would have a little piccolo to pipe on. Footnote 7Ancient critics noted this sentence as an adaptation of sound to sense. Cf. Demetr. Περὶ ἑρμ. 185. The sigmas and iotas may be fancied to suggest the whistling notes of the syrinx. So Lucretius v. 1385
tibia quas fundit digitis pulsata canentum.
Cf. on Catullus 61. 13 voce carmina tinnula.
So our argument indicates,
he said. We are not innovating, my friend, in preferring Apollo and the instruments of Apollo to Marsyas and his instruments.
No, by heaven!
he said, I think not.
And by the dog, Footnote 8The so-called Rhadamanthine oath to avoid taking the names of the gods in vain. Cf. 592 A, Apology 21 E, Blaydes on Aristophanes Wasps 83.
said I, we have all unawares purged the city which a little while ago we said was wanton. Footnote 9Cf. 372 E. Dummler, Proleg. p. 62, strangely affirms that this is an express retraction of the ἀληθινὴ πόλις. This is to misapprehend Plato’s method. He starts with the indispensable minimum of a simple society, develops it by Herbert Spencer’s multiplication of effects into an ordinary Greek city, then reforms it by a reform of education and finally transforms it into his ideal state by the rule of the philosopher kings. Cf. Introduction p. xiv.
In that we show our good sense,
he said.
Come then, let us complete the purification.
Book 3