statesmen. "All flatterers, cooks, confectioners, tavern-keepers!" answers Socrates; "Whom have they made better? They have filled the city with harbours, docks, walls, tributes, and such trash, instead of temperance and righteousness!" They have made the city bloated and sick; when the crisis comes, the city will know how it has been deceived, and tear in pieces its present flatterers! The dialogue breaks into four main theses: It is worse to do than to suffer wrong; it is better to be punished for wrong done than not to be punished; we do not what we will, but what we desire; to be, and not to seem, is the end of life. It is characteristic of Plato that anger against the world never makes him cynical, but the reverse: he meets his griefs by harder thinking and more determined faith in his highest moral ideal. He speaks in the Phædo of men who are made misanthropic by disappointments; "It is bad that, to hate your fellow-men; but it is worse to hate Reason and the Ideal!" He fell, like Carlyle, and perhaps like Shakespeare, into the first error; he never came near the second.
The next dialogue, Meno, on the old question "whether Goodness is Teachable," still bears the stamp of Socrates's death in the introduction of Anytus and the rather cruel references to his son (see above, p. 176). But pure speculation predominates, especially the theory of Ideas, which was already prominent in the Phædo. The Lysis, on Friendship, is an unimportant work; Plato could only treat that subject under the deeper name of Love. This he does in two dialogues which stand apart, even in Plato, for a certain glamour that is all their own. The Phædrus comes later; the Symposium marks the close of this present period. If the claim were advanced that
