II
While the ancient Greek philosophers—unlike the
writers of the Hebrew Scriptures and of the Apocry-
pha—consciously sought to achieve intellectual clarity,
their moral conceptualizations are by no means clear-
cut. While a few concepts attain a high degree of
articulation, others, including loyalty, are left largely
to suggestion, implication, or myth.
The drama of the trial and death—martyrdom—of
Socrates, however, clearly spelled out what loyalty
meant to the greatest of Athenian teachers. “The truth
of the matter is this, gentlemen,” Socrates said to the
jury:
Where a man has once taken up his stand, either because
it seems best to him or in obedience to his orders, there
I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger, taking
no account of death or anything else before dishonor
(Apology 28D, Loeb trans.).
It would be difficult to find anywhere a clearer instance
of loyalty to a mission. Were the jury to acquit him
on condition that he give up his mission, Socrates said
that he would retort to the jury as follows:
Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant,
but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you....
You know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not
even if I have to die a hundred deaths
(ibid., 30B).
In the Crito Socrates makes it clear that he considered
himself the victim of a miscarriage of justice, for which
he blamed not the laws or the state, but his fellow
men (Crito 54C). Accordingly, he said that he must
gladly submit to the legal punishment, and in this way
avoid the great sin against the state: violence against
its laws.
Socrates is thus a classic paradigm of a man who,
even in the face of death, chose to remain loyal to
his country, to God, and, above all, to his mission, to
his soul.
What came to be accepted as the four cardinal
virtues—wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control or
temperance—appear in three of Plato's leading dia-
logues: Phaedo (69C), the Republic (IV. 427E-433B),
and the Laws (631C). Loyalty is not explicitly discussed
as a virtue, but surely it is an ingredient of each of
the cardinal virtues as they are treated by Plato. Cour-
age, the prerogative of the soldiers in the Republic,
would hardly be possible unless they felt loyalty to the
state and its order. Self-control, the dominant virtue
of the governed, would be impossible without loyalty
to one's neighbors, on whose rights one may not tres-
pass. Justice, the principle of a place for everyone and
everyone in his place, assumes loyalty to one's station
and its duties. Wisdom, the virtue that peculiarly char-
acterizes the philosopher-kings, who specialized in
governance according to their knowledge of good and
evil, surely implicates loyalty to Truth, to the Form
of the Good, to the city-state, and to the legitimate
interests of the other social classes. Indeed, the govern-
ing guardians are to have community of wives and
children so that they may not be distracted from the
public work by domestic loyalties.
Both the Republic and the Laws are consistent with
the Hellenic position that the chief outlet for unselfish
loyalty and devotion is the city (polis). In the Laws,
when Plato came to providing for a court for capital
offenses (855C), he took as his model the Areopagus,
which Solon had invested with the power to punish
sedition and treason (856-57). The greatest enemy of
the state is he who stirs up civil strife, and next to
him is one who, aware of an act of sedition, fails to
inform the officials or to prosecute the conspirators
(856B-C). Other serious public crimes include failure
to report for military duty, desertion from the army,
and disloyal conduct by an envoy to a foreign state
(941, 943). There is also the serious crime of traffic
with the enemy (857).
Certainly Plato's proposals for a strict censorship of
the arts is in part motivated by the objective to instill
in the masses of citizens, who will have “opinion” and
not “knowledge” as their motive power for action,
absolute loyalty to a tradition with which they have
been imbued by their “social environment” rather than
“loyalty to the claims of a summum bonum grasped
by personal insight” (A. E. Taylor, Plato, 2nd ed. [1956],
p. 280). Loyalty to tradition is a basic requirement for
the control of the polities projected by the Republic
and the Laws.
It is strange, however, that Plato, and the other
Greek thinkers as well, hardly discussed the problem
of conflicting loyalties—e.g., that the duty to inform
on criminal conspirators may conflict with loyalty to
one's relatives or friends. Perhaps they assumed, as
many do in modern times, that it is sufficient to resolve
all such questions to say that the duty to be loyal to
the state rises above all other duties. Yet there was
always the example of Socrates expressing his loyalty
to Athens by his determination to die rather than obey
what he considered to be an unlawful state order; also,
there was always the theme of Sophocles' Antigone:
the conflict between loyalty to God or Nature or the
Soul and to the state or its historically-conditioned law.
But the successors of Socrates refused to see a sharp
conflict here. They were more impressed by the insist-
ence of Socrates that while the state's laws and customs
are not exempt from critical examination, it is these
very laws and customs that make life and the search
for the good possible; therefore, one must willingly and
unconditionally obey the state. This seems to be the
lesson learned by Plato, as developed in the Republic
and especially in the Laws.
Aristotle even more clearly than his teacher, Plato,
articulated the belief that it is impossible for man
to fulfill his ends—to live as a rational being—outside
of a community, to live the moral life outside of the
state.
For the moral, virtuous life, man needs to exercise
his rational insight to discover the mean between two
extreme lines of conduct—e.g., courage is the mean
between an excess which is foolhardiness, and a defi-
ciency which is cowardice. Aristotle considers other
examples (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch. vii); he
does not, however, treat of loyalty as such; but he
admits that not every action or emotion admits of the
observance of a mean (II, vi, 18); some qualities do
not admit of excess or deficiency; it may be that
Aristotle would say that loyalty is the mean between
fanaticism and perfidy. Nor is the mean—and one
would assume that this would be true of every virtue,
including loyalty—the same for everyone under all
circumstances: “The agents themselves have to con-
sider what is suited to the circumstances on each occa-
sion” (II, ii, 4).
While loyalty is not expressly mentioned in Aris-
totle's discussion of friendship and 
love 
of country, it
is clearly implied, as in the following passage:
But it is also true that the virtuous man's conduct is often
guided by the interests of his friends and of his country,
and that he will if necessary lay down his life in their behalf.
For he will surrender wealth and power and all the goods
that men struggle to win, if he can secure nobility for
himself; since he would prefer an hour of rapture to a long
period of mild enjoyment.... And this is doubtless the case
with those who give their lives for others.... Also the
virtuous man is ready to forgo money if by that means his
friends may gain more money; for thus, though his friend
gets money, he himself achieves nobility...
(IX, viii, 9;
Loeb trans.).
Both Plato and Aristotle not only sketched ideal
states but also subjected the Greek states, which they
knew, to judgment according to ideals and principles.
Aristotle's Politics also devotes a long section (Book
V) to causes of revolution, sedition, and constitutional
change. Yet neither of them undertook a philosophic
analysis of loyalty and disloyalty, key conceptions in-
volved in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution
of societies, states, and governments.
