We are all familiar with the face that this “free” city, like all the states of the ancient world, was only free in name, for it rested upon the forced labor of a population of slaves. But, even apart from this radical defect, the ideal is one which the very speeches which set it forth acknowledge to have been but imperfectly and spasmodically realized at Athens. We have only to read the contemporary writings of Plato to see how deeply the best men of that age felt that Athens and the Athenians fell short of the pattern of the civic life. For Plato’s Republic, if on the one hand it is an exhibition in an ideal world of the philosophical principles which he conceives to lie at the root of conduct and character, a solution from the social side of the vexed problem of human education in its widest sense, is on the other hand a criticism of the Greek state as it existed in his day, and a proposal reform. Briefly, his reform lies in putting all government upon a basis of trained capacity.