Republic

And again, we will not take weapons to the temples for dedicatory offerings, especially the weapons of Greeks, if we are at all concerned to preserve friendly relations with the other Greeks. Rather we shall fear that there is pollution in bringing such offerings to the temples from our kind unless in a case where the god bids otherwise. Most rightly, he said. And in the matter of devastating the land of Greeks and burning their houses, how will your soldiers deal with their enemies. I would gladly hear your opinion of that. In my view, said I, they ought to do neither, but confine themselves to taking away the annual harvest. Shall I tell you why? Do. In my opinion, just as we have the two terms, war and faction, so there are also two things, distinguished by two differentiae. The two things I mean are the friendly and kindred on the one hand and the alien and foreign on the other. Now the term employed for the hostility of the friendly is faction, and for that of the alien is war. What you say is in nothing beside the mark, he replied. Consider, then, 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, 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, and faction is the name we must give to that enmity. I will allow you that habit of speech, he said. Then observe, said I, that when anything of this sort occurs in faction, as the word is now used, and a state is divided against itself, if either party devastates the land and burns the houses of the other such factional strife is thought to be an accursed thing and neither party to be true patriots. Otherwise, they would never have endured thus to outrage their nurse and mother. But the moderate and reasonable thing is thought to be that the victors shall take away the crops of the vanquished, but that their temper shall be that of men who expect to be reconciled and not always to wage war. That way of feeling, he said, is far less savage than the other. Well, then, said I, is not the city that you are founding to be a Greek city? It must be, he said. Will they then not be good and gentle? Indeed they will. And won’t they be philhellenes, lovers of Greeks, and will they not regard all Greece as their own and not renounce their part in the holy places common to all Greeks ? Most certainly.