Republic (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Plato

  16 (3.402e) But let me ask you another question: Has excess of pleasure any affinity to temperance?: This question, which leads to a brief discussion of how intense homoerotic attachments must be banned in the ideal state, constitutes a striking transition between the discussions of the young guardians’ training in mousikê and gymnastikê. Later in Republic (5.474d) Glaucon graciously accepts being characterized, for the sake of the argument, as a “man of pleasure” (literally, an “erotic man”—that is, someone who falls in love with handsome youths), and the verses quoted by Socrates at 2.368a reveal that, until recently, Glaucon has also been the object of an older man’s attentions. Moreover, in Symposium, Phaedrus, and elsewhere, Plato has Socrates playfully confess his erotic attraction to handsome young men, such as Alcibiades and Agathon. It is always made plain, however, that Socratic eros is wholly spiritual. The point in this passage is that, although love of beauty is ennobling and worth cultivating, it does not legitimize intemperate lust for handsome young men or boys.

  17 (3.404b) My meaning may be learned from Homer: Socrates’ reliance upon “Homer” as an authority on diet, exercise, and medicine may come as a bit of a surprise after his extensive critical analysis of various elements in Iliad and Odyssey. It is perhaps best to take with some grains of salt Plato’s references to the expertise of Homer and other poets on various practical matters.

  18 (3.405b) pride himself on his litigiousness: Fifth- and fourth-century critics of democracy frequently alleged that the Athenians were overly fond of going to court, both as prosecutors and as jurors. The analogy developed in this passage between medicine, which cures the ailments of the body, and corrective justice, which seeks to “cure” the ills of the soul, is paralleled in some regards in Gorgias.

  19 (3.407e) Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a statesman: The parallels between rulers who care for their subjects and doctors who care for their patients have already been suggested in book 1 (for example, at 1.341c), and they figure prominently in other Platonic dialogues concerned with political leadership and management. Statesman 293c-d advances the notion that the good ruler, like a doctor, will be obliged to make difficult decisions (such as the life-and-death choices that Socrates attributes to Asclepius) and do painful, unpleasant things.

  20 (3.408c-d) Ought there not to be good physicians in a State, and are not the best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions, good and bad, and are not the best judges in like manner those who are acquainted with all sorts of moral natures?: Among Plato’s dialogues, Gorgias is noteworthy for its extensive comparison of corrective justice, which metes out (often painful) punishments in order to ameliorate defects of the soul, and the art of medicine, which implements (often painful) treatments in order to cure disease in the body. In this passage, however, Socrates (perhaps with some irony) adduces an important difference between the expertise of doctors and that of people who sit in judgment of crimes—doctors benefit from the experience of physical illness, but jurors/judges (dikastai in Greek) are not profited by exposure to crime and moral defect.

  21 (3.410e) And in our opinion the guardians ought to have both these qualities?: The cultivation of courage (3.386a-389d) and temperance (3.389d-391e) has been a preoccupation of Socrates’ description of the guardians‘early education and thus of his discussion of poetry’s content and its musical accompaniment. For more on the importance of fostering these two qualities in the citizenry, see Plato, Statesman 306a-311c and Laws 1.626d-636c.

  22 (3.412b) Very good, I said; then what is the next question?: In the short section that follows this question (through 3.417b), Socrates introduces several important provisions about the organization of the ideal city-state and, more particularly, about the guardians’ way of life. These provisions include: the testing of the guardians so that they may be divided into two groups, rulers (who are “guardians” in the limited sense of the word) and their helpers (“auxiliaries”); the devising of a “royal lie” designed to make citizens accept their division into “classes” of gold (rulers), silver (auxiliaries) and bronze and iron (craftsmen, farmers, et al.); the promotion and demotion of children born into each class according to their natural abilities (physis); and the requirement that the guardians (both rulers and auxiliaries) have no private property and “live together like soldiers in a camp” (3.416e). This last requirement, along with the provision that rulers and auxiliaries “possess” their women and children in common (4.423e), receives fuller treatment in book 5.

  23 (3.413c) we must inquire who are the best guardians of their own conviction that what they think the interest of the State is to be the rule of their lives: Described here is the battery of tests and trials (of memory, physical endurance, and mental stability) that young guardians must undergo; those who are to be rulers will need to undergo, beginning at age twenty, yet another series of tests that measure their intellectual sophistication (7.537a-540c).

  24 (3.413e) good guardians of themselves and of the music which they have learned: See note 8 on 2.367a.

  25 (3.414c) only an old Phoenician tale: Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes in Boeotia, came to Greece from Phoenicia (on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea). The tale is that Cadmus killed the dragon that dwelled at the site of his newly founded city and threw its teeth in the ground; from these teeth sprang fully armed men, called Spartoi (that is, “Sown Men”). This is one of several myths that describe how individuals, or an entire people, came to be born from the earth.

  26 (3.415a) Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold ... : As Socrates indicates at 8.546e, the conception of people characterized by gold, silver, bronze, and iron is borrowed from Hesiod, Works and Days 109-201, which describes how the earth was successively peopled by a golden “race” (genos), a silver race, a bronze race, a race of “heroes,” and the current race of “iron.”

  27 (3.415d) Not in the present generation: At 7.540e-541b Socrates acknowledges that it would be generally impossible to persuade adults to accept the beliefs and ideals necessary for the institution of the ideal state; compare 6.501a.

  28 (3.416e-417a) for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled: Socrates’ assertion concerning the (inevitably) corrupting influence of wealth counters the original assumption of Cephalus, who claimed at 1.331a-b that his wealth is what has enabled him to be “just” throughout his life. Property-holding in the guardian classes violates the ideal state’s foundational one-person-one-job rule, insofar as it would consequently lead rulers and auxiliaries to become “good housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians ...” (3.417a). Compare Socrates’ more general indication at 4.421d-422a that excessive wealth among the bronze/ iron class (who are allowed to possess private property) would be “the parent of luxury and indolence.”

  Book 4

  1 (4.423a-b) Hellenes or barbarians: Greeks (that is, Hellenes) saw themselves as ethnically and culturally distinct from other people, such as the local peoples of Asia Minor (for example, Lydians and Phrygians), as well as Egyptians, Persians, and Scythians. See also 4.435e-4.436a and 5.470c.

  2 (4.424a) the general principle that friends have all things in common: Socrates casually mentions here another strikingly unusual aspect of the guardians’ way of life: the absence of individual families and the common “possession” of women and children. Although Adeimantus does not question Socrates’ provision about the guardians’ wives and children at this point, it is examined in detail beginning at 5.449c.

  3 (4.424c) when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them: The word translated here as “modes” is not harmoniai (see note 6 on 3.398e), but the more general term tropoi (“styles,” “manners”). Damon’s theory concerning the relationship between musical innovation and change in fundamental political laws naturally follows on what Socrates has set forth in book 3 concerning the ethical influence of music (compare Laws 2.673a). The
underlying logic is that, if the character of people changes (because of their exposure to new types of music), this ethical transformation will inevitably lead to changes in basic customs and laws (compare Laws 3.700a-701d). Hence Socrates’ insistence that the guardians must, above all, guard against innovation in music and education; compare 8.546e.

  4 (4.424d) in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears harmless: On the importance of children’s games and play to the overall welfare and stability of the state, see also Laws 7.793d-794a and 7.797a-798e, which present more detailed arguments against permitting innovations in children’s games.

  5 (4.426b-c) do not these States resemble the persons whom I was describing?: The allusion is to 3.405a-410a. As in the earlier passage, this description of the “ill-ordered state” that forbids constitutional change but continually experiments with legislative tinkering plainly alludes to contemporary Athens. See note 18 on 3.405b.

  6 (4.428a) And is not a similar method to be pursued about the virtues, which are also four in number?: Traditional conceptions of the virtues (aretai) admitted some variation. Here, the virtues are wisdom (sophia), courage (andreia ), temperance or moderation (sophrosynê), and justice (dikaiosynê); in Protagoras, Plato has Socrates and Protagoras add piety (hosiotês) to these four. The process of elimination by which Socrates proposes to discover “justice” in the ideal state may, with good reason, strike some readers as simplistic and unconvincing, and it is perhaps wisest to assume that his argument in the following passage is meant to be merely suggestive. See 4.435c-d for the first of several passages in which Socrates and his interlocutors acknowledge the provisional and inadequate nature of their discussion.

  7 (4.432d) Why, my good sir, at the beginning of our inquiry, ages ago, there was Justice tumbling out at our feet, and we never saw her; nothing could be more ridiculous: See 2.372a and also 2.370b. The definition of justice that emerges in this passage—that is, of doing one’s own business—looks back to the formulation of justice introduced by Polemarchus at 1.332b as “giving what is due or proper,” insofar as the role of leadership is “due” and “proper” to the guardians in the ideal state, as it also is to the “rational principle” in the individual human being (4.441e).

  8 (4.433a) Justice was doing one’s own business, and not being a busybody: The verb “to be a busybody” (polypragmonein) and the related noun (polypragmosynê, “meddlesomeness”) and adjective (polypragmon) were ideo logically charged terms in fifth- and fourth-century Athens. They were typically used by critics of Athenian democracy to disparage its empower ment of average citizens who, as members of the Assembly and as jurors in courts, could “meddle” in affairs of state as well as in the lives of important men. The same terms were also used to critique the “meddling” of Athens in the affairs of the city-states that were its nominal allies in the Delian League. The association of injustice in the state with polypragmosynê, which is described at 4.434a-c as the “meddling” of the bronze/iron class in the business of rulers and auxiliaries, is an obvious criticism of the current institutions and practices of Athenian democracy. The earlier comparison at 3.389c of average individuals to the patients of a doctor or the crew on a ship anticipates this passage’s emphasis on the dysfunction that occurs when such people attempt to give orders instead of taking them.It is worth noting how Socrates and his interlocutors, here in book 4 and in the more detailed analysis of the four “degenerate” political constitutions in books 8 and 9, assume that the division of the ideal city-state’s citizens into three groups (rulers, auxiliaries, all others) reflects the actual and natural categorization of people in all types of political communities. This assumption follows upon their agreement that in the ideal state people are grouped according to their natural abilities, and it furnishes them the grounds for assessing the defects of any political arrangement that fails to observe the ideal state’s distinctions and prohibitions against “meddling.”

  9 (4.435b-c) we may assume that he has the same three principles in his own soul which are found in the State; and he may be rightly described in the same terms, because he is affected in the same manner?: This assumption, which Socrates strives to justify in the following pages, is a corollary of the major assumption that “justice” in the state is qualitatively identical to “justice” in the individual (2.368c-e; compare below at 4.442d). The understanding of human psychology that Socrates advances in this passage capitalizes on commonplace conceptions (for example, the opposition between “reason” and “appetites”) but is nonetheless distinctive. In particular, his conception of the third and intermediate part of the soul (“spirit” or “passion” [thumos ]), which he posits as reason’s “ally” (4.440a-441c), requires special explanation. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates develop a similar (though not identical) image of the soul, which is likened to a chariot with a team of two horses. The charioteer (that is, “reason”) drives; of the two horses, the one on the right side is fair and disciplined, corresponding to the “spirited” part (thumos) of the soul in Republic, whereas his dark and unruly counterpart on the left corresponds to Republic’s appetitive part.

  10 (4.435d) I do not think that the method which we are employing is at all adequate to the accurate solution of this question: This is the first of several important passages in Republic in which Socrates, Glaucon, and/or Adeimantus acknowledge the methodological inadequacies of their discussion and call attention to the fact that, in the current circumstances, they are not able to explore their concerns properly. Compare 5.450e-451a and 5.472b-c; 6.484a, 6.504b, 6.506c-d, and 6.509c; 7.517b, 7.532d-e, 7.536b-c; and 10.595c. The cumulative effect of these passages is to highlight the provisional and suggestive nature of the conversation dramatized in Republic.

  11 (4.435e) the Thracians, Scythians, and in general the Northern nations: Thrace was located on the northern edge of the Aegean Sea; the Scythians were a nomadic people based, during the classical period, in the area north of the Black Sea. Phoenicia, mentioned below, was located on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Socrates’ statement reflects the standard cultural and ethnic prejudices that Greeks of his time entertained, and also the thinking of medical theorists such as Hippocrates, who argued that climate influenced the character of individuals and whole peoples. On Phoenician and Egyptian “character” and the importance of climate, compare Laws 5.747c-e.

  12 (4.437d) is not thirst the desire which the soul has of drink, and of drink only; not of drink qualified by anything else.. ?: That is, if one is thirsty for a cold drink, one is actually subject to two separate conditions: thirst (which makes one desire a drink) and heat (which makes one desire coldness). Appetite for good food is accordingly an appetite for food that is modified by some other force or factor.

  13 (4.439e) And what of passion, or spirit? Is it a third, or akin to one of the preceding?: The Greek word translated here as “passion” and “spirit” is thumos, which the ensuing discussion identifies as the source of anger and indignation. This understanding basically accords with traditional conceptions of thumos as the wellspring of courage and daring, and also competitiveness (compare Euripides, Medea 1079-1080 and Aristophanes, Acharnians 480). Given the pains Socrates takes in the ensuing exchange to distinguish “spirit” from the appetitive part of the soul, it seems that Plato could not assume that his readers would automatically see thumos as something other than (an) appetite.

  14 (4.442a) the concupiscent, which in each of us is the largest part of the soul and by nature most insatiable of gain: So, too, the bronze/iron group is the largest in the state—far larger than the classes of (gold) rulers and (silver) auxiliaries. In statements such as this, we can see the complete interdependence of the psychological theory that Socrates develops in Republic and the political philosophy that arises from his conception of the ideal state.

  15 (4.443c-d) But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned, however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernme
nt of man: Socrates’ striking conclusion, that the “justice” of an individual is not the product of his or her deeds and dealings with others but is rather the well-ordered “psychological” state that naturally gives rise to “just” actions, departs radically from traditional conceptions of “justice” and has far-reaching implications. Most notably, Socrates’ formulation deemphasizes the political and social interactions that are the focal points of most considerations of “justice,” since these are merely the results of the rule of reason in the soul over spirit and appetites. On the logic advanced in Republic, an individual can be “just” even if he or she has no social contact with other human beings.

  16 (4.444b) Must not injustice be a strife which arises among the three principles-a meddlesomeness, and interference ... ?: Stasis (“strife”) typically refers to civil strife and factionalism within a polis. Many Greek city-states, including Athens, had considerable experience with stasis in the classical period; during the Peloponnesian War, factional strife within Athens brought about two oligarchic coups (411-410 and 404-403 B.C.E.). “Meddlesomeness” is Jowett’s translation for the noun polypragmosynê, which is derived from the verb polypragmonein, translated above as “to be a busybody” (4.433a). “Interference” is his translation for allotriopragmosynê, a variation of polypragmosynê. For the political and ideological thrust of these last two terms, see note 8 on 4.433a.Socrates’ leading question strikes yet another blow at Athenian democracy. By linking polypragmosynê (“meddlesomeness”) to civil strife and factionalism (stasis), Socrates insinuates that there is inherent dysfunction in a political system (such as Athens‘) that encourages its citizens to become politically active. This formulation harks back to Socrates’ identification of injustice as the source of “divisions and hatreds and fighting” at 1.351d.