Those evils of Athens then, which were found in very deed somewhat later to be the infirmity of Greece as a whole, when, though its versatile gifts of intellect might constitute it the teacher of its eventual masters, it was found too incoherent politically to hold its own against Rome:--those evils of Athens, of Greece, came from an exaggerated assertion of the fluxional, flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian element in the Hellenic character. They could be cured only by a counter-assertion of the centripetal Dorian ideal, as actually seen best at Lacedaemon; by the way of simplification, of a rigorous limitation of all things, of art and life, of the souls, aye, and of the very bodies of men, as being the integral factors of all beside. It is in those simpler, corrected outlines of a reformed Athens that Plato finds the "eternal form" of the State, of a city as such, like a well-knit athlete, or one of those perfectly disciplined Spartan dancers. His actual purpose therefore is at once reforming and conservative. The drift of his charge is, in his own words, that no political constitution then existing is suitable to the philosophic, that is to [239] say, as he conceives it, to the aristocratic or kingly nature. How much that means we shall see by and bye, when he maintains that in the City of the Perfect the kings will be philosophers. It means that those called, like the gifted, lost Alcibiades, to be the saviours of the state, as a matter of fact become instead its destroyers. The proper soil in which alone that precious exotic seed, the kingly or aristocratic seed, will attain its proper qualities, in which alone it will not yield wine inferior to its best, or rather, instead of bearing any wine at all, become a deadly poison, is still to be laid down according to rules of art, the ethic or political art; but once provided must be jealously kept from innovation. Organic unity with one's self, body and soul, is the well-being, the rightness, or righteousness, or justice of the individual, of the microcosm; but is the ideal also, it supplies the true definition, of the well-being of the macrocosm, of the social organism, the state. On this Plato has to insist, to the disadvantage of what we actually see in Greece, in Athens, with all its intricacies of disunion, faction against faction, as displayed in the later books of Thucydides. Remember! the question Plato is asking throughout The Republic, with a touch perhaps of the narrowness, the fanaticism, or "fixed idea," of Machiavel himself, is, not how shall the state, the place we must live in, be gay or rich or populous, but strong--strong enough to remain [240] itself, to resist solvent influences within or from without, such as would deprive it not merely of the accidental notes of prosperity but of its own very being.