Common Wives and Hanging Cities

But let us see what Plato learned from Socrates. Socrates had thrown out the study of nature altogether and turned to questions of virtue and duty, and so I have no doubt that he trained his hearers in the rules of justice. Under his teaching, then, it did not escape Plato that the force of justice lies in equality, since everyone is born into an equal condition. Therefore, he says, people must have nothing private, nothing of their own; if they are to be equal, as the rule of justice requires, they must hold everything in common. That can be borne with as long as it looks like a statement about money. I could show by many arguments how impossible and how unjust even that much is; but let it stand as possible. Grant that all men are wise and think nothing of money. Where, then, did that sharing lead him? Marriages too, he says, ought to be held in common — so that many men crowd around the same woman like dogs, and whoever is stronger carries her off; or, if they are as patient as philosophers, they wait their turn as men do in a brothel. What a marvelous equality, this equality of Plato’s! Where is the virtue of chastity now? Where is a husband’s and a wife’s faithfulness? Take those away and all justice is taken away with them. He also says that states would flourish if either philosophers were their kings or their kings were philosophers. But hand supreme power to this man of such justice and fairness — a man who has stripped some people of their own property and handed other people’s property to others — and he would prostitute the modesty of women. That is a thing no king ever did; no tyrant did it either. [a]

And what reason did he put forward for this utterly degrading advice? The state will be at one with itself, he says, and tied together by bonds of mutual love, if everyone is the husband and father and wife and child of everyone. What a jumbling together of the human race! How can affection survive where there is nothing definite to love? What man will love a woman, or what woman a man, unless they have lived together all along — unless devotion of mind, and faith kept on both sides, have made their love something that cannot be divided? And that virtue has no place in pleasure taken indiscriminately. Besides, if all children belong to all, who will be able to love children as his own when he does not know, or cannot be sure, whether they are his? Who will honor anyone as his father when he does not know who fathered him? The result is that a man not only takes a stranger for his father, but takes his father for a stranger. And why point out that a wife can be shared but a son cannot, since a son can be conceived from one man only? At this one point the sharing breaks down, with nature herself crying out against it. That leaves harmony as the only reason he wants wives held in common. But there is no more violent cause of discord than many men wanting one woman. Plato could have been warned of this — if not by reasoning, then certainly by example. The animals that cannot speak fight over nothing so fiercely, and men have always waged their bitterest wars with one another over exactly this.

The upshot is that the sharing we have described lets in nothing but adultery and lust — the very things virtue exists above all to put out. So he never found the harmony he was looking for, because he did not see where it comes from. Justice carries no weight in outward circumstances, or even in the body; it is entirely a matter of the human mind. Anyone who wants to put people on a level, then, should not take away marriage and money. He should take away arrogance, pride and disdain, so that men who are powerful and set up on high may know that they stand level even with the neediest. Once insolence and injustice have been taken from the rich, it will make no difference that some are rich and some poor, because they will be equal in spirit — and nothing but reverence toward God can bring that about. He thought, then, that he had found justice, when in fact he had removed it altogether; for what ought to be held in common is not perishable things but minds. [c]

For if justice is the mother of all the virtues, then when they are taken away one by one she is brought down along with them. And Plato took away, first of all, thrift, which cannot exist where there is no property of one’s own to own. He took away restraint, since there will be nothing belonging to anyone else to keep your hands off. He took away self-control and chastity, the greatest virtues in either sex. He took away self-respect, shame and modesty, once the things people are used to judging low and disgraceful begin to count as honorable and lawful. So in wanting to give virtue to everyone, he takes it from everyone. Owning property holds the material of both vices and virtues; holding goods in common holds nothing but vice let loose. Men who keep many mistresses can only be called self-indulgent and wasteful. And women who are had by many men are necessarily not adulteresses — they have no fixed marriage to break — but prostitutes and whores. So he brought human life down: I will not say to the level of the speechless animals, but to that of herds and beasts. For nearly all birds make marriages. They pair off; they defend the nest as though it were the marriage bed, with one mind between them; and they care for their own young, because they know which are theirs, and if you put others in front of them they drive them off. But this wise man went against the practice of human beings and against nature, and picked more foolish models to copy. Because he saw that among the other animals the duties of male and female are not divided, he decided that women too should go to war, take part in public deliberation, hold office and take command. So he handed them horses and weapons — and by the same logic he should have handed men the wool and the loom and the carrying of babies. He never saw the proof that what he said was impossible: that no people on earth has ever been foolish or empty-headed enough to live this way.

Now if the leading men among the philosophers turn out to be this empty, what are we to think of the lesser ones, who never seem so wise to themselves as when they are boasting of how little they think of money? A fine, brave spirit! But I am waiting to see what they do, and what comes of that contempt. They shun the property their parents left them as though it were an evil, and abandon it. Rather than risk shipwreck in a storm, they throw themselves overboard in a flat calm — resolute not out of virtue but out of a twisted fear, like men who kill themselves for fear of being killed by the enemy, and escape death by dying. So these men, with no standing and no influence, throw away the one thing that could have won them a name for generosity. Democritus is praised for giving up his fields and letting them become public pasture. I would approve if he had given them to someone. But nothing is done wisely that would be useless and harmful if everyone did it. Still, that sort of carelessness can be put up with. What am I to say about the man who turned his property into cash and threw the cash into the sea? I cannot tell whether he was in his right mind or out of it. “Away with you into the deep, you wicked cravings! I will drown you before you drown me.” If you think that little of money, spend it on kindness and human decency; give it to the poor. What you are about to throw away could keep alive many people who will otherwise die of hunger or thirst or exposure. At the very least, copy the madness and frenzy of Tuditanus and scatter your property for the people to snatch up. You can get free of owning money and still lay it out to advantage — for whatever has done good to many people is money safely invested. [e]

And who approves Zeno’s doctrine that all faults are equal? Let that pass; everyone always laughs at it. This one thing is enough to prove the man a madman: he puts pity among the vices and diseases. He robs us of a feeling that runs through nearly the whole of human life. Human nature is weaker than that of the other animals, which the providence of God has armed with natural defenses, either to endure hard weather or to keep attacks off their bodies. None of that was given to a human being. In place of all of it he received the feeling of pity, which is rightly called humanity, and by which we protect one another. If the sight of another human being turned a man savage — as we see happen with the animals that live alone — there would be no society among human beings, no thought or plan for the building of cities; and life itself would not even be safe, since human weakness would lie open to attack from the other animals, and men would rage against one another like wild beasts. And the madness is no less on other subjects.

For what can be said about the man who claimed that snow is black? How consistent of him, then, to claim that pitch is white! This is the one who said he was born for a single purpose, to look at the sky and the sun — and who saw nothing at all on the earth while the sun was shining. Xenophanes was foolish enough to believe the mathematicians who said that the disc of the moon is eighteen times bigger than the earth; and, keeping consistent with that folly, he said that inside the moon’s hollow there is another earth, and that another race of people lives there in the same way we live on this one. So these moon-dwellers must have a moon of their own to hold out a light for them at night, as ours does for us. And perhaps this globe of ours is a moon to some other earth below it. Seneca says there was a man among the Stoics who used to debate with himself whether he should assign the sun its own inhabitants as well. He was foolish to hesitate. What harm would he have done by assigning them? I suppose the heat put him off — he did not want to endanger so large a population, in case they all perished of the excessive heat and so great a disaster was said to have happened through his fault.

And what about the people who imagine there are antipodes, whose feet are set opposite ours? Is there anything in what they say? Is anyone so far gone as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads? That what lies flat here hangs upside down there? That crops and trees grow downward? That rain and snow and hail fall upward onto the ground? And is anyone still impressed that the hanging gardens are counted among the seven wonders of the world, when the philosophers give us hanging fields and seas and cities and mountains? We ought to set out where this error came from as well, because they are always taken in the same way. When they have assumed something false at the beginning of an inquiry, misled by its likeness to the truth, they necessarily fall into whatever follows from it. That is how they land in so many ridiculous positions: whatever agrees with what is false must itself be false. And because they trusted the first step, they never look at the character of what comes after, but defend it in every way — when they ought to be judging from what follows whether the first step was true or false. [p]

So what course of argument brought them to the antipodes? They saw the stars running their courses toward the west; they saw the sun and the moon always setting in the same quarter of the sky and rising from the same one. But they could not make out what machinery governed those courses, or how the sun and moon got back from west to east. They supposed instead that the sky itself slopes downward on every side — which is how it has to look, given its immense breadth — and so they concluded that the world is round like a ball. They imagined that the sky turns in step with the motion of the heavenly bodies, and that the stars and the sun, once they have set, are carried back around to the east by the sheer speed of the world’s spin. That is why they built bronze globes, modeled on the shape of the world, and engraved on them certain monstrous figures which they said were the constellations. It followed from this roundness of the sky that the earth was shut inside the middle of its curve. And if that were so, the earth itself would have to be like a ball, since a thing held enclosed by something round could not possibly be anything but round. And if the earth were round, it would necessarily present the same appearance toward every part of the sky: raising mountains, spreading out plains, holding level seas. And if that were so, one last consequence followed — that there would be no part of the earth without people and the other animals living on it. So the roundness of the earth throws in, on top of everything else, the invention of those dangling antipodes.

If you ask the men who defend these marvelous fictions why everything does not fall off into that lower part of the sky, they answer that this is simply the nature of things: heavy bodies are carried toward the middle and are all joined together toward the middle, as we see the spokes in a wheel, while light bodies — mist, smoke, fire — are carried away from the middle and make for the sky. I do not know what to say about men who, having once gone wrong, keep steadily on in their folly and prop up one empty thing with another; except that I sometimes suspect they either take up philosophy for a joke, or deliberately and knowingly set out to defend falsehoods, as an exercise or a display of their talents on subjects they know to be untrue. I could prove by many arguments that it is impossible for the sky to be lower than the earth, if it were not that this book must now be brought to a close, and that some things still remain which are more necessary for the work in hand. And since it is not the business of a single book to run through everyone’s errors one by one, let it be enough to have listed a few, from which the character of the rest can be understood.