>>>>Plato was born in 428 at the height of
Athenian democracy in the Classical Age of
Greece. He grew up against the backdrop of
what is called the Peloponnesian War, the
great conflict between Athens and Sparta.
The war between Athens and Sparta was not
only a conflict between two city-states vying
for hegemony of the Greek world. It was an
ideological conflict between two fundamentally
different visions about the right order of
political life. Athens was organized as a
democracy. Sparta was organized as an oligarchy:
that it was, it was ruled by a few. It was
ruled by a select set within the society.
Across the Greek world, even within individual
cities, there was conflict between democrats
and oligarchs. That is those who believed
that ordinary people should rule, and those
who believed that the best, that a select
set within the society should govern. Athens
generally supported democracies all across
the city-states of the Greek world. And Sparta
supported oligarchies. But even within a city
like Athens there were strong elements of
oligarchy. There were those, especially in
the aristocracy, who sought to establish the
rule by the few. There were also those within
the aristocracy of Athens who appealed to
popular ideology, who appealed to the democratic
spirit of the people. And so the Athens in
which Plato was raised was riven by conflict
between democrats and oligarchs, between the
ideology of democracy and of oligarchy. Now
Plato would come to be deeply skeptical of
democracy, not least because of his own family
connections and the death of his teacher Socrates;
one of the great miscarriages of justice in
all human history. Plato had witnessed and
in an especially personal way the failings
of democracy, the dangers of democracy, the
fact that democracy is no guarantee of justice.
Plato's "Republic" looks to create an ideal
constitution that would guarantee the pursuit
of the common good. But we should recognize
that Plato's "Republic", the constitution
that he envisions is at least in part inspired
but the ideology of oligarchy and even by
the example of Sparta. That's right. Plato,
an Athenian, creates an ideal polity that
is at least in part inspired by Sparta: An
extraordinary society that was ruled by a
small elite class of citizen-soldiers who
owned no private property, who lived in common,
who were trained from the very earliest youth
to do nothing except to sacrifice themselves
for the state. And this Spartan willingness
to sacrifice for their community was legendary,
and it was responsible for the rise of Sparta
to enormous power within the Greek world.
And so as we read Plato's "Republic", we should
keep in the background of our mind that for
all of its radicalism, the radical ideas that
it envisions, at least in part these ideals
were instantiated in the example of Sparta
in Plato's own day.
