Plato and Isocrates

The long war which formed the subject of Thucydides’ unfinished history ended with the defeat of Athens in 404 B.c. After a short period of misrule by the ‘Thirty’, a régime set up by the Spartan victors, the democratic constitution was restored in 403 B.c. (the archonship of Eucleides). Thucydides died about that time; Socrates drank the hemlock in 399. Of writers whose work has survived in any measure and who had made their names in the fifth century, only Aristophanes and Andocides the orator were still active. But many of the writers of the new century had grown to manhood at Athens during the Peloponnesian War and had been accustomed to hear discussed the questions which formed the subject of our fifth chapter. It would therefore be a mistake to over-emphasise the change in outlook at Athens after the loss of her empire. On the other hand it was inevitable that this post-war period should be marked by social and economic as well as political changes and that these should leave their mark on political thought. The reverse of this process, political thought shaping political change, is much less prominent now than in earlier centuries. The Athenian empire was built by men who had participated in the educational movements of the early and middle fifth century; farther back the connection was even closer, and Solon could combine the rôles of thinker, educator, poet and statesman. In the fourth century such a combination would have been impossible in action, and it was in the fourth century that Plato lived—the one man whose mental powers would have been equal to the task and who longed for the chance to perform it. ¹ We may well doubt whether we would choose to live in a Plato-planned Athens, even in preference to that unstable and self-centred city which Demosthenes strove to rouse against the menace of Macedon, but we cannot deny his comprehensive intellectual mastery.