Compare Republic I 348. ↩
Compare “Phaedrus” 250 C. ↩
An untranslateable pun—διὰ τὸ πιθανόν τε καὶ πιστικὸν ὠνόμασε πίθον. ↩
Or, “I am in profound earnest.” ↩
Compare Republic IV 436. ↩
Compare Republic III 392 following. ↩
Compare Laws VI 752 A. ↩
Compare Republic, 9 578 and following. ↩
Compare Republic III 407 E. ↩
Compare “Symposium” 216: “1 Alcibiades” 135. ↩
Reading with the majority of MSS. πράξοντες. ↩
Compare “Protagoras” 328. ↩
Iliad XV 187. following ↩
Compare Republic X 615 E. ↩
Odyssey XI 569. ↩
Compare Sir G. C. Lewis in the Classical Museum, vol. II p. 1. ↩
Politics v. 12, § 8:—“He only says that nothing is abiding, but that all things change in a certain cycle; and that the origin of the change is a base of numbers which are in the ratio of 4 ∶ 3; and this when combined with a figure of five gives two harmonies; he means when the number of this figure becomes solid.” ↩
The Platonic Tetractys consisted of a series of seven terms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27. ↩
“Having a desire to see those ancients who were most renowned for wit and learning, I set apart one day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle might appear at the head of all their commentators; but these were so numerous that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court and outward rooms of the palace. I knew, and could distinguish these two heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd, but from each other. Homer was the tailer and comelier person of the two, walked very erect for one of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff. His visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company, and had never seen or heard of them before. And I had a whisper from a ghost, who shall be nameless, ‘That these commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their principals, in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of these authors to posterity.’ I introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramns, as I presented them to him; and he asked them ‘whether the rest of the tribe were as great dunces as themselves?’ ” ↩
“Howbeit, I think this was no small help and furtherance in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted among his, all things common, and that the same community doth yet remain in the rightest Christian communities” (Utopia, English Reprints, p. 144). ↩
“These things (I say), when I consider with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing marvel that he would make no laws for them that refused those laws, whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of riches and commodities. For the wise men did easily foresee this to be the one and only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all things should be brought in and established” (Utopia, English Reprints, p. 67, 68). ↩
“One of our company in my presence was sharply punished. He, as soon as he was baptised, began, against our wills, with more earnest affection than wisdom, to reason of Christ’s religion, and began to wax so hot in his matter, that he did not only prefer our religion before all other, but also did despise and condemn all other, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and devilish, and the children of everlasting damnation. When he had thus long reasoned the matter, they laid hold on him, accused him, and condemned him into exile, not as a despiser of religion, but as a seditious person and a raiser up of dissension among the people” (p. 145). ↩
Compare his satirical observation: “They (the Utopians) have priests of exceeding holiness, and therefore very few” (p. 150). ↩
When the ambassadors came arrayed in gold and peacocks’ feathers “to the eyes of all the Utopians except very few, which had been in other countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed shameful and reproachful. In so much that they most reverently saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords—passing over the ambassadors themselves without any honour, judging them by their wearing of golden chains to be bondmen. You should have seen children also, that had cast away their pearls and precious stones, when they saw the like sticking upon the ambassadors’ caps, dig and push their mothers under the sides, saying thus to them—‘Look, mother, how great a lubber doth yet wear pearls and precious stones, as though he were a little child still.’ But the mother; yea and that also in good earnest: ‘Peace, son,’ saith she, ‘I think he be some of the ambassadors’
