ABSTRACT
The historical conduct of the Pythagoreans and of Socrates, of Plato himself and his nephew Speusippus, will serve to heighten this suspicion, and suspicion will become very much like certainty as Plato develops his argument further. The "guards" must be constantly vigilant against any kind of "innovation" in the regime of education—music and gymnastics—that Plato has prescribed for them. Plato's aversion to the mercantile democracy is equally apparent in his opposition to the litigation which commercialism inevitably meant. Plato, living as he did in a democratic environment, felt the need for change to aristocratic government, and hence stressed courage as an essential quality in men who wish to effect change. The apparent inequalities which depend, in any such society as the Greek, on a thousand accidents of birth and upbringing, are thus by Plato carried right back to the nature of things and made the justification for the aristocratic state.
