Plato’s Republic dates roughly from the time of that long and disastrous war which Athens fought with Sparta. In the course of such a war, amid the bombast that patriotic citizens give way to, the people who keep their senses are bound to get pretty well acquainted with their enemy. If you will take the trouble to examine Plutarch’s account of the Laws of Lycurgus and Mr. Alfred Zimmern’s magnificent description of the Greek Commonwealth you will see how Sparta and Athens form the web and woof of the Republic--only it is an ideal Sparta and an ideal Athens that Plato has in mind. It is well to remember that Plato wrote in the midst of defeat; a great part of his region, Attica, had been devastated and burned; and he must have felt that makeshift and reform were quite futile when a Peloponnesian war could make the bottom drop out of his world. To Plato an ill-designed ship of state required more than the science of navigation to pull it through stormy waters: if it was in danger of perpetually foundering, it seemed high time to go back to the shipyards and inquire into the principles upon which it had been put together. In such a mood, I suggest parenthetically, we today will turn again to fundamentals. 3 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.