[470c]
if this goes to the mark. I affirm that the
Hellenic race is friendly to itself and akin, and foreign and alien to the
barbarian.” “Rightly,” he said. “We
shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and
barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature,1 and that war is the fit name for this enmity
and hatred. Greeks, however, we shall say, are still by nature the friends
of Greeks when they act in this way, but that Greece is sick in that case and divided by faction,
1 Plato shared the natural feeling of Isocrates, Demosthenes, and all patriotic Greeks. Cf. Isocrates Panegyricus 157, 184, Panath. 163;Menexenus 237 ff., Laws 692 C and 693 A. It is uncritical then with Newman (op. cit. p. 430) and many others to take as a recantation of this passage the purely logical observation in Politicus 262 D that Greek and barbarinan is an unscientific dichotomy of mankind. Cf. on the whole question the dissertation of Friedrich Weber, Platons Stellung zu den Barbaren.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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