[Side-note: Plato carries abstraction farther than Xenophon or Aristotle.]
Both in Xenophon and in Aristotle, as well as at Sparta, the citizen is subjected to a public compulsory training, severe as well as continuous: but he is still a citizen as well as a functionary. He has private interests as well as public duties:--a separate home, property, wife, and family. Plato, on the contrary, contends that the two are absolutely irreconcileable: that if the Guardian has private anxieties for his own maintenance, private house and lands to manage, private sympathies and antipathies to gratify--he will become unfaithful to his duties as Guardian, and will oppress instead of protecting the people.[126] You must choose between the two (he says): you cannot have the self-caring citizen and the public-minded Guardian in one.[127]
[Footnote 126: Plato, Republic, iii. pp. 416-417.]
[Footnote 127: See the contrary opinion asserted by Nikias in his speech at Athens, Thucyd. vi. 9.]
[Side-note: Anxiety shown by Plato for the good treatment of the Demos, greater than that shown by Xenophon and Aristotle.]
Looking to ideal perfection, I think Plato is right. If the Rulers and Guardians have private interests of their own, those interests will corrupt more or less the discharge of their public duties. The evil may be mitigated, by forms of government (representative and other arrangements), which make the continuance of power dependent upon popular estimation of the functionaries: but it cannot be abolished. Neither Xenophon, nor Aristotle, nor the Spartan system, provided any remedy for this difficulty. They scarcely even recognise the difficulty as real. In all the three, the proportion of trained citizens to the rest of the people, would be about the same (so far as we can judge) as the proportion of the Platonic Guardians to the Demos or rest of the people. But when we look to see what security either of the three systems provide for good behaviour on the part of citizens towards non-citizens, we find no satisfaction; nor do they make it, as Plato does, one prominent object of their public training. Plato shows extreme anxiety for the object: as is proved by his sacrificing, in order to ensure it, all the private sources of pleasure to his Guardians. Aristotle reproaches him with doing this, so as to reduce the happiness of his Guardians to nothing: but Plato, from his own point of view, would not admit the justice of such reproach, since he considers happiness to be derived from, and proportional to, the performance of duty.