this rule shall lose his civic rights until he gives up his trade.132 Agriculture alone shall be open to them, and only so much of this as will not cause them to neglect their higher welfare.133
However, this prejudice has been read into some passages in Plato by a forced interpretation. The assertion of Socrates,134 that craftsmen have not temperance (σωφροσύνη), since they do other people’s business, is made merely to draw Critias into the argument.
The statement that all arts having for their function provision for the body are slavish,135 does not necessarily imply prejudice against physical labor. Such arts are slavish, to Plato, because they have no definite principle of service as gymnastics has. He is merely illustrating the point that it is an inferior type of statesmanship that works without a definite principle for the highest political welfare.
The idea, expressed in the Politics,136 that the masses (πλῆθος) cannot acquire political science is a criticism against unprepared statesmanship rather than against labor. Indeed, Plato asserts the same of the wealthy.137
Moreover, the following facts should be observed: that the prejudice of Plato against the manual arts is chiefly limited to the Laws; that even there his prejudice is primarily against retail trade rather than against industry;138 that in so far as a real hostility exists, its true source is not in any opposition to labor or industry per se, but rather in the political belief that only as citizens have leisure for politics can prepared statesmen take the place of superficial politicians,139 and in the moral feeling that constant devotion merely to the physical necessities of life causes men to neglect the primary purpose of their existence.140
Modern scholars have usually been extreme in their interpretation of Plato on this point.141 Such unwarranted generalizations as the following are common: