Chapter X. On Plato’s Idea of Justice

WHEREAS the oracles of the Hebrews teach that their prophets and righteous men bravely endured the most extreme insults and outrages and every kind of danger, you may learn the agreement of Plato’s opinion on this point also from these words of his, which he has set down in the second Book of the Republic:

[P] [1]’Such then being our representation of the unjust man, let us now in our argument set the just man beside him “in his nobleness and simplicity,” a man, as Aeschylus says:

“Whose will is not to seem good, but to be.” [2]

‘We must take away the seeming. For if he is to seem just, he will have honours and rewards for seeming to be so: and then it will be uncertain whether he is just for the sake of justice, or for the sake of the rewards and honours.

‘We must strip him then of everything except justice, and make his condition the reverse of the former. Though never doing wrong, he must have the reputation of the worst wrongdoing, that his justice may be strictly tested by his being proof against infamy, and its consequences: and he must be immovably steadfast even unto death, being in reality just but “with a life-long reputation for injustice.” ‘

And soon after he adds:

‘Let me therefore describe it; and so, Socrates, if my speech be somewhat coarse, imagine the speaker to be not me, but those who praise injustice above justice. And they will tell you as follows, that in these circumstances the just man will be scourged, racked, fettered, will have both eyes torn out, and at last after suffering every kind of torture he will be crucified, and will learn that a man should wish not to be, but to seem, just.’

Such is Plato’s description in words, but the righteous men and prophets among the Hebrews are recorded long before to have suffered in deed all that he describes. For though most just, yet as if the most unjust, ‘they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were slain with the sword, they wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented,... wandering in deserts, and mountains, and caves, and the holes of the earth, of whom the world was not worthy.’ [3]

The Apostles also of our Saviour, though following the highest path of justice and piety, were by the multitude involved in the reputation of injustice, and what they suffered we may learn from themselves when they say, ‘We are made a spectacle unto the world, both to angels and to men [4] . . . And even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling-place: [5] . . . being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure; being defamed, we intreat: we are made as the filth of the world.’

Nay, even unto this present time the noble witnesses of our Saviour throughout all man’s habitable world, while exercising themselves ‘not to seem but to be’ both just and pious, have endured all the sufferings which Plato enumerated: for they were both scourged, and endured bonds and racks, and even had their eyes torn out, and at last after suffering all terrible tortures they were crucified. None like them will you find by any searching among the Greeks, so that one may naturally say that the philosopher did no less than prophesy in these words concerning those who among us were distinguished in piety and true righteousness.