264. +Transliteration: homoiôsis tô theô. Pater's translation: "a [process or act of] being made like to God." Plato, Republic 454c. 266. +Transliteration: Kallipolis. Liddell and Scott definition: "beautiful city." Plato, Republic 527c. CHAPTER 10: PLATO'S AESTHETICS [267] WHEN we remember Plato as the great lover, what the visible world was to him, what a large place the idea of Beauty, with its almost adequate realisation in that visible world, holds in his most abstract speculations as the clearest instance of the relation of the human mind to reality and truth, we might think that art also, the fine arts, would have been much for him; that the aesthetic element would be a significant one in his theory of morals and education. Ta terpna en Helladi+ (to use Pindar's phrase) all the delightful things in Hellas:-- Plato least of all could have been unaffected by their presence around him. And so it is. Think what perfection of handicraft, what a subtle enjoyment therein, is involved in that specially Platonic rule, to mind one's business (to ta hautou prattein)+ that he who, like Fra Damiano of Bergamo, has a gift for poikilia,+ intarsia or marqueterie, for example, should confine himself exclusively to that. Before him, [268] you know, there had been no theorising about the beautiful, its place in life, and the like; and as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic of the fine arts. He anticipates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection,--"art for art's sake." Ar' oun kai hekastê tôn technôn esti ti sympheron allo ê hoti malista telean einai;+ We have seen again that not in theory only, by the large place he assigns to our experiences regarding visible beauty in the formation of his doctrine of ideas, but that in the practical sphere also, this great fact of experience, the reality of beauty, has its importance with him. The loveliness of virtue as a harmony, the winning aspect of those "images" of the absolute and unseen Temperance, Bravery, Justice, shed around us in the visible world for eyes that can see, the claim of the virtues as a visible representation by human persons and their acts of the eternal qualities of "the eternal," after all far out-weigh, as he thinks, the claim of their mere utility. And accordingly, in education, all will begin and end "in music," in the promotion of qualities to which no truer name can be given than symmetry, aesthetic fitness, tone. Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it, is but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things.