victors as boys are hardly ever victors as men. Children should learn drawing, in order to
appreciate the beauty of the human form; and they should be taught to appreciate such painting
and sculpture as expresses moral ideas. They may learn to sing and to play musical instruments
enough to be able to enjoy music critically, but not enough to be skilled performers; for no
freeman would play or sing unless drunk. They must of course learn to read and write, in spite of
the usefulness of these arts. But the purpose of education is virtue," not usefulness. What Aristotle
means by "virtue" he has told us in the Ethics, to which this book frequently refers.
Aristotle's fundamental assumptions, in his Politics, are very different from those of any modern
writer. The aim of the State, in his view, is to produce cultured gentlemen-men who combine the
aristocratic mentality with love of learning and the arts. This combination existed, in its highest
perfection, in the Athens of Pericles, not in the population at large, but among the well-to-do. It
began to break down in the last years of Pericles. The populace, who had no culture, turned
against the friends of Pericles, who were driven to defend the privileges of the rich, by treachery,
assassination, illegal despotism, and other such not very gentlemanly methods. After the death of
Socrates, the bigotry of the Athenian democracy diminished, and Athens remained the centre of
ancient culture, but political power went elsewhere. Throughout later antiquity, power and culture
were usually separate: power was in the hands of rough soldiers, culture belonged to powerless
Greeks, often slaves. This is only partially true of Rome in its great days, but it is emphatically
true before Cicero and after Marcus Aurelius. After the barbarian invasion, the "gentlemen" were
northern barbarians, the men of culture subtle southern ecclesiastics. This state of affairs
continued, more or less, until the Renaissance, when the laity began to acquire culture. From the
Renaissance onwards, the Greek conception of government by cultured gentlemen gradually
prevailed more and more, reaching its acme in the eighteenth century.
Various forces have put an end to this state of affairs. First, democracy, as embodied in the French
Revolution and its aftermath. The cultured gentlemen, as after the age of Pericles, had to defend
their privileges against the populace, and in the process ceased to be either gentlemen or cultured.
A second cause was the rise of indus-