[374a]
by no small increment, but
by a whole army, that will march forth and fight it out with assailants in
defence of all our wealth and the luxuries we have just
described.” “How so?” he said; “are
the citizens themselves1 not sufficient
for it?” “Not if you,” said I, “and
we all were right in the admission we made when we were molding our city. We
surely agreed, if you remember, that it is impossible for one man to do the
work of many arts well.” “True,” he said.
“Well, then,” said I,
1 Cf. 567 Eτί δέ; αὐτόθεν. In the fourth century “it was found that amateur soldiers could not compete with professionals, and war became a trade” (Butcher, Demosthenes p. 17). Plato arrives at the same result by his principle “one man one task” (370 A-B). He is not here “making citizens synonymous with soldiers” nor “laconizing” as Adam says.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.