Sayfa 144 / 1391

The Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an

artistic as well as a political side.

There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only

in two or three passages does he even allude to them (Rep.;

Soph.). He is not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias,

the Parthenon, the Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He

would probably have regarded any abstract truth of number or

figure as higher than the greatest of them. Yet it is hard to

suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to inspire in

youth, did not pass into his own mind from the works of art which

he saw around him. We are living upon the fragments of them, and

find in a few broken stones the standard of truth and beauty. But

in Plato this feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that

beauty is the object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can

take an external form (Phaedrus); he does not distinguish the

fine from the mechanical arts.