The military problem 101 



manly courage, or as he puts it below 'health and prowess/ But at the 

 present time there is, in states where the training of the young is made a 

 special object, a tendency 1 to overdo it: they bring up the boys as 

 regular athletes, producing a habit of body that hinders the shapely 

 development and growth of the frame. The Thebans in particular are 

 thought to be meant. His own system does not thus run to excess. 

 Gentle exercises gradually extended will develop fine bodies to match 

 fine souls. Now his labouring classes receive no bodily training of the 

 kind. The frame of the artisan is left to become cramped and warped 

 by the monotonous movements of his trade. So too the farm-labourer 

 is left to become hard and stiff-jointed. Neither will have the supple 

 agility needed for fighting as an art. We have seen that this line had 

 already been taken by Plato in the Republic ; indeed it was one that a 

 Greek could hardly avoid. Yet the shock-tactics of heavy columns 

 were already revolutionizing 'Greek warfare as much as the light troops 

 organized by Iphicrates. Were Aristotle's military principles not quite 

 up to date? Philip made the Macedonian rustic into a first-rate soldier. 

 But the northern tribesman was a free man. The rustic of the model 

 state was to be a slave or serf : therefore he could not be a soldier. To 

 keep him in due subjection he must not be allowed to have arms or 

 trained to use them skilfully. This policy is nothing more or less than 

 the precautionary device 2 resorted to in Crete; the device that he twits 

 Plato with omitting in the Republic, though without it his Guardians 

 would not be able to control the landholding Husbandmen. And yet 

 the weakness of the Cretan system is duly noted 3 in its place. The 

 truth is, Aristotle was no more exempt from the worship of certain ill- 

 defined political terms than were men of far less intellectual power. 

 The democrat worshipped 'freedom' in the sense 4 of 'do as you please/ 

 the mark of a freeborn citizen. The philosopher would not accept so 

 crude a doctrine, but he is none the less determined to mark off the 

 'free' from the unfree, socially as well as politically. Adapting an in- 

 stitution known in Thessalian 6 cities, he would have two open 'places' 

 (dyopai) in his model state; one for marketing and ordinary daily 

 business, the other reserved for the free citizens. Into the latter no 

 tradesman (fidvavo-ov) or husbandman (yewpyov), or other person of 

 like status (TOIOVTOV), is to intrude unless the magistrates summon 

 him to attend. 



It is a pity that Aristotle has left us no estimate of the relative 

 numerical strength of the various classes of population in Utopia. He 

 neglects this important detail more completely even than Plato. Yet 

 I fancy that an attempt to frame such an estimate would very soon 



1 Pol vin 4 . 2 Pol II 5 19. 3 Pol n 10 16. 



4 Pol vi 2 3, cf 4 20, and Ethics x 10 13. 5 Pol vn 12 3-6. 



