The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the same time: not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own admonitions in practice.
Finally, education is of supreme importance to a country:
The minister of education is the most important officer of State; of all appointments his is the greatest; he will rule according to law, must be fifty years old, and have children of his own, both boys and girls by preference, at any rate one or the other.
These are some of the salient points of Plato’s teaching, but a careful reading of the _Republic_ and the _Laws_ will reveal many further issues and many side-lights on the main thesis. Plato does not trouble to be rigorously consistent, and, like Euripides, he does not hesitate at times to play the part of the candid friend, and to point out what he thinks are the natural weaknesses of the female sex. Sometimes he is right, sometimes he is wrong. ‘Women,’ he says, ‘are too prone to secrecy and stealth; they are accustomed to creep into dark places and resist being dragged into the light.’
Here Plato seems to hit the truth. If there is one quality—call it virtue or vice, as you will—which is peculiarly a woman’s and not a man’s characteristic, it is secretiveness. The result of many centuries of self-suppression, it gives a certain aggravating charm to the female mind, and usually does no particular harm. But it is, perhaps, the chief reason of women’s comparative failure in literature. Sincerity in writing is the saving grace, and if a book is not frank, it should never be written. Few women authors resemble Sappho, or Jane Austen, or Mme. Colette in contemporary French literature, who, unlike though they are in the circumstances of their lives, do all make a serious attempt at truth. Most women fail in frankness towards themselves and their readers. George Eliot, Ouida, George Sand (to take another typical and strongly differentiated trio) dissemble their facts as much as they dissemble their names. Like ostriches, they hide their faces under a cloud of words.
To turn from Plato’s ideal State to the actual condition of woman’s life during the fourth century in Athens, as we have it revealed in the pages of the orators, is like passing from a breezy hillside into a dark, close-shut room. We see the working of the harem system, with all its atmosphere of secrecy and suspicion. The women are closely watched; for it is presumed that they will be unfaithful to their husbands if they can: they live secluded in the women’s quarter of the house—the gynæconitis—and for any strange man to enter their rooms is a grave impropriety. In Demosthenes, for example, we find it imputed to Androtion, as a proof of unbearable insolence, that in his capacity of tax-collector he forced his way into the women’s apartments, and compelled the master of the house to hide under the bed, putting him thus to shame before his womankind. That a wife should appear publicly with her husband at a dinner party, and take a share in men’s pleasures, is equally an offence against morality. Neæra was known to have sat at dinner with her husband and his friends, and this fact, testified by witnesses, is taken as an obvious proof that she was a woman of abandoned character. The sister of Nicodemus, Isæus argues, could not have been legally married, for she was often seen at entertainments with the man she called her husband, and ‘wedded wives do not go out to dinner with their husbands, or expect to join in festivities.’