VI
It follows almost inevitably from what we have said of Plato’s environment, that his ideal community was not to be unlimited in population. Quite the contrary. Plato said that “the city may increase to any size which is consistent with its unity; that is the limit.” The modern political scientist, who lives within a national state of millions of people, and who thinks of the greatness of states largely in terms of their population, has scoffed without mercy at the fact that Plato limited his community to an arbitrary number, 5,040, about the number that can be conveniently addressed by a single orator. As a matter of fact there is nothing ridiculous in Plato’s definition: he was not speaking of a horde of barbarians: he was laying down the foundations for an active polity of citizens: and it is plain enough in all conscience that when you increase the number of people in a community you decrease the number of things that they can share in common. Plato could not anticipate the wireless telephone and the daily newspaper; still less would he have been likely to exaggerate the difference which these instrumentalities have made in the matters that most intimately concern us; and when he set bounds to the population his city would contain, he was anticipating by more than two thousand years the verdict of modern town planners like Mr. Raymond Unwin.
People are not the members of a community because they live under the same system of political government or dwell in the same country. They become genuine citizens to the extent that they share certain institutions and ways of life with similarly educated people. Plato was primarily concerned with providing conditions which would make a community hold together without being acted upon by any external force—as the national state is acted upon today by war or the threat of war. This concern seems to underlie every line of the Republic. In attacking his problem, the business of supplying the physical wants of the city seemed relatively unimportant; and even though Greece in the time of Plato traded widely with the whole Mediterranean region, Plato did not mistake commercial unity for civic unity. Hence in his scheme of things the work of the farmer and the merchant and the trader was subordinate. The important thing to consider was the general conditions under which all the individuals and groups in a community might live together harmoniously. This is a long cry from the utopias of the nineteenth century, which we will examine later; and that is why it is important to understand Plato’s point of view and follow his argument.