III
In describing his ideal community Plato, like a trained workman, begins with his physical foundations. So far from putting his utopia in a mythical island of Avilion, where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow, it is plain that Plato was referring repeatedly to the soil in which Athens was planted, and to the economic life which grew out of that soil. Since he was speaking to his own countrymen, he could let a good many things pass for common knowledge which we, as strangers, must look into more carefully in order to have a firmer sense of his utopian realities. Let it be understood that in discussing the physical side of the Republic, I am drawing from Aristotle as well as Plato, and from such modern Greek scholars as Messrs. Zimmern, Myres, and Murray.
Nowadays when we talk about a state we think of an expanse of territory, to begin with, so broad that we should in most cases be unable to see all its boundaries if we rose five miles above the ground on a clear day. Even if the country is a little one, like the Netherlands or Belgium, it is likely to have possessions that are thousands of miles away; and we think of these distant possessions and of the homeland as part and parcel of the state. There is scarcely any conceivable way in which a Dutchman in Rotterdam, let us say, possesses the Island of Java: he does not live on the island, he is not acquainted with the inhabitants, he does not share their ideas or customs. His interest in Java, if he have an interest at all, is an interest in sugar, coffee, taxes, or missions. His state is not a commonwealth in the sense that it is a common possession.
To the Greek of Plato’s time, on the contrary, the commonwealth was something he actively shared with his fellow citizens. It was a definite parcel of land whose limits he could probably see from any convenient hilltop; and those who lived within those limits had common gods to worship, common theaters and gymnasia, and a multitude of common interests that could be satisfied only by their working together, playing together, thinking together. Plato could probably not have conceived of a community with civilized pretensions in which the population was distributed at the rate of ten per square mile; and if he visited such a territory he would surely have said that the people were barbarians—men whose way of living unfitted them for the graces and duties of citizenship.
Geographically speaking, then, the ideal commonwealth was a city-region; that is, a city which was surrounded by enough land to supply the greater part of the food needed by the inhabitants; and placed convenient to the sea.
Let us stand on a high hill and take a look at this city region; the sort of view that Plato himself might have obtained on some clear spring morning when he climbed to the top of the Acropolis and looked down on the sleeping city, with the green fields and sear upland pastures on one side, and the sun glinting on the distant waters of the sea a few miles away.
It is a mountainous region, this Greece, and within a short distance from mountain top to sea there was compressed as many different kinds of agricultural and industrial life as one could single out in going down the Hudson valley from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Harbor. As the basis for his ideal city, whether Plato knew it or not, he had an “ideal” section of land in his mind—what the geographer calls the “valley section.” He could not have gotten the various groups which were to be combined in his city, had they been settled in the beginning on a section of land like the coastal plain of New Jersey. It was peculiarly in Greece that such a variety of occupations could come together within a small area, beginning at the summit of the valley section with the evergreen trees and the woodcutter, going down the slop to the herdsman and his flock of goats at pasture, along the valley bottom to the cultivator and his crops, until at length one reaches the river’s mouth where the fisher pushes out to sea in his boat and the trader comes in with goods from other lands.
The great civilizations of the world have been nourished in such valley sections. We think of the river Nile and Alexandria; the Tiber and Rome, the Seine and Paris; and so on. It is interesting that our first great utopia should have had an “ideal” section of territory as its base.
IV
In the economic foundations of the Republic, we look in vain for a recognition of the labor problem. Now the labor problem is a fundamental difficulty in our modern life; and it seems on the surface that Plato is a little highbrow and remote in the ease with which he gets over it. When we look more closely into the matter, however, and see the way in which men got their living in the “morning lands”—as the Germans call them—we shall find that the reason Plato does not offer a solution is that he was not, indeed, confronted by a problem.
Given a valley section which has not been ruthlessly stripped of trees; given the arts of agriculture and herding; given a climate without dangerous extremes of heat and cold; given the opportunity to found new colonies when the
