A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the _Laws_[48] shows in what sense he read his history. His citizens are to have "their food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through "entrusting the practice of the arts to others," the former through getting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the produce, "a return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, day by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not, however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither just nor honorable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due; and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by brave deeds and toil." Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a régime for them in which, after a most carefully nurtured childhood, three years are spent on reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and law, and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well as the men. The children's stories are prescribed and are unalterable; so are the music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders, artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody. In other words, the community which Plato in his old age proposed as a model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful and more famous _Republic_. It is simply a system of governmental control carried to its logical extreme--an emended and perfected edition of Sparta. That a well-born Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all citizens in an administrative strait-jacket, is not surprising. Many of us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all allowances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of reaction.