Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  I dare say I never objected nor, I believe, ever will object to these arguments, [c] nor to many other eloquent ones like them, to the effect that virtue is teachable and that more care should be devoted to one’s self than to anything else. I consider them to be extremely beneficial and extremely effective in turning us in the right direction; they can really rouse us as if we’d been sleeping. I was therefore very interested in what would come next after such arguments; at first I asked not you, Socrates, but your companions and fellow enthusiasts, or friends, or whatever we should call their relationship to you. And I first questioned those who are thought by [d] you to be really something; I asked them what argument would come next and put my case to them in a style somewhat like your own:

  O you most distinguished gentlemen, what are we actually6 to make of Socrates’ exhorting of us to pursue virtue? Are we to believe that this is all there is, and that it is impossible to pursue the matter7 further and grasp it fully? Will this be our life-long work, [e] simply to convert to the pursuit of virtue those who have not yet been converted so that they in turn may convert others? Even if we agree that this is what a man should do, should we not also ask Socrates, and each other, what the next step is? How should we begin to learn what justice is? What do we say?

  It’s as if we were children with no awareness of the existence of such things as gymnastics and medicine, and somebody saw this and exhorted us to take care of our bodies and reproached us, saying that it’s shameful that we devote such care to cultivating wheat, barley, vines and all the other things which we work hard to acquire for the sake of the body, while we fail to discover any [409] skill or other means of making the body itself as good as possible, even though such skills exist. Now, if we were to ask the man who gave us this exhortation, “Which skills are you talking about?,” he would presumably reply, “Gymnastics and medicine.” Now what about us? What do we say is the skill which concerns the virtue of the soul? Let’s have an answer.

  The man who appeared the most formidable among your companions answered these questions by telling me that this skill is “the very skill [b] which you hear Socrates talking about, namely, justice itself.” Then I said, “Don’t just give me the name; try it this way. Medicine is surely a kind of skill. It has two results: it produces other doctors in addition to those who are already doctors, and it produces health. Of these, the second result is not itself a skill, but rather the product of a skill, the product we call ‘health’; the skill itself is what teaches and what’s taught. Likewise, carpentry has as its results a house and carpentry itself; the first is the product while the second is what’s taught. Let’s assume that one result of justice [c] is also to produce just men, just as in the case of each of the skills a goal is to produce men with that skill—but what, then, are we to call the other thing, the product which the just man produces for us? Tell me.”

  He, I think, replied, “the beneficial,” somebody else said, “the appropriate,” someone else, “the useful” and someone else, “the advantageous.” But8 I returned to the point and said, “All those words, such as ‘acting correctly’, ‘advantageously’, ‘usefully’ and the like, are to be found in each of the skills as well. When asked, however, what these all aim at, each skill will mention some product peculiar to itself. So, for example, when [d] carpentry uses the words ‘well’, ‘properly’ and ‘appropriately’, it is speaking of the production of wooden artifacts, which are products distinct from the skill itself. What, then, is the peculiar product of justice? Give me that sort of answer.”

  Finally, Socrates, one of your friends answered—and he really seemed quite clever in saying this—that the product peculiar to justice and not shared by any of the other skills is to produce friendship within cities. When questioned, he said that friendship is always good and never bad. When questioned further, he wouldn’t allow that what we call the “friendships” [e] of children and animals are really friendships, since he was led to the conclusion that such relationships are more often harmful than good. So in order to avoid saying that this is true of friendship, he claimed that these relationships are not friendships at all and that those who call them that are wrong; instead, real and true friendship is most precisely agreement. When asked whether he considered this agreement to be shared belief or knowledge, he rejected the former suggestion since he was forced to admit that many men’s shared beliefs are harmful, whereas he had agreed that friendship is entirely good and is the product of justice; so he said that agreement is the same, being knowledge, not belief.

  Now by the time we reached this point in the argument, having really [410] made no progress, the bystanders were able to take him to task and say that the argument had gone around in a circle back to where it began.

  “Medicine too,” they said, “is a sort of agreement, as is every skill, and they all can say what they’re about. But what you call ‘justice’ and ‘agreement’ has no idea what it’s aiming at, and so it’s not clear what its product could be.”

  So, Socrates, finally I asked you yourself these questions and you told [b] me that the aim of justice is to hurt one’s enemies and help one’s friends. But later it turned out that the just man never harms anyone, since everything he does is for the benefit of all.

  When I had endured this disappointment, not once or twice but a long time, I finally got tired of begging for an answer. I came to the conclusion that while you’re better than anyone at turning a man towards the pursuit of virtue, one of two things must be the case: either this is all you can do, nothing more—as might happen with any other skill, for example, when someone who’s not a pilot rehearses a speech in praise of the pilot’s skill [c] as being something of great worth to men; the same could also be done for any other skill. And someone might accuse you of being in the same position with justice, that your ability to praise it so well does not make you any more knowledgeable about it. Now that’s not my own view, but there are only two possibilities: either you don’t know it, or you don’t wish to share it with me.

  [410d] And this is why, I suppose, I go9 to Thrasymachus and to anyone else I can: I’m at a loss. But if you’re finally ready to stop exhorting me with speeches—I mean, if it had been about gymnastics that you were exhorting me, saying that I must not neglect my body, you would have proceeded to give me what comes next after such an exhortation, namely, an explanation of the nature of my body and of the particular kind of treatment this [e] nature requires—that’s the kind of thing you should do now.

  Assume that Clitophon agrees with you that it’s ridiculous to neglect the soul itself while concerning ourselves solely with what we work hard to acquire for its sake. Suppose now that I have also said all the other things which come next and which I just went through. Then, please, do as I ask and I won’t praise you before Lysias and others for some things while criticizing you for others, as I do now. For I will say this, Socrates, that while you’re worth the world to someone who hasn’t yet been converted to the pursuit of virtue, to someone who’s already been converted you rather get in the way of his attaining happiness by reaching the goal of virtue.

  1. Lysias was a famous orator in Athens (Phaedrus 227a ff.); Thrasymachus, a teacher of rhetoric (Phaedrus 266c), appears in Republic (336b ff.) in a hostile light.

  2. Reading dē instead of de in a12.

  3. Accepting the conjecture humnois in a8.

  4. Placing a question mark after prattontes in b2.

  5. Accepting the supplement oute phrontizete after paradōsete in b4.

  6. Reading nun in d2 as enclitic.

  7. Accepting the emendation estin for eni in d4.

  8. Reading de instead of dē in c3.

  9. Reading poreuomai in c7.

  REPUBLIC

  Translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve.

  The Republic’s ancient subtitle— On Justice—much understates the scope of the work. It begins as a discussion of the nature of justice, much in the manner of ‘Socratic’ dialogues like L
aches or Charmides, with Socrates examining and refuting successive views of his interlocutors on this subject. But in book II he renews the inquiry, now agreeing to cease examining and refuting the opinions of others, and to present his own account. He will say what justice really is and show that people who are truly and fully just thereby lead a better, happier life than any unjust person could. The horizon lifts to reveal ever-expanding vistas of philosophy. Socrates presents his views on the original purposes for which political communities—cities—were founded, the basic principles of just social and political organization, and the education of young people that those principles demand (books II, III, and V). He decides that a truly just society requires philosophic rulers—both men and women—living in a communistic ‘guardhouse’ within the larger community. The need for such rulers leads him on to wider topics. He discusses the variety and nature (and proper regimentation) of human desires, and the precise nature of justice and the other virtues—and of the corresponding vices—both in the individual person’s psychology and in the organization of political society (IV, VIII, IX). He explains the nature of knowledge and its proper objects (V–VII): The world revealed by our senses—the world of everyday, traditional life—is, he argues, cognitively and metaphysically deficient. It depends upon a prior realm of separately existing Forms, organized beneath the Form of the Good and graspable not by our senses but only through rigorous dialectical thought and discussion, after preparation in extended mathematical studies. There is even a discussion of the basic principles of visual and literary art and art criticism (X). All this is necessary, Socrates says, finally to answer the basic question about justice—not what it is, but why it must make the just person live a good, happy life, and the unjust person a bad, miserable one.

  Speaking throughout to no identified person—that is, directly to the reader—Socrates relates a conversation he took part in one day in the Athenian port city of Piraeus. All the others present, a considerable company, represent historical personages: among them were the noted sophist and teacher of oratory, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato’s brothers. Glaucon is an ambitious, energetic, ‘manly’ young man, much interested in public affairs and drawn to the life of politics. An intelligent and argumentative person, he scorns ordinary pleasures and aspires to ‘higher’ things. Always especially attracted by such people, it was with him that Socrates had gone down to Piraeus in the first place. Adeimantus, equally a decent young man, is less driven, less demanding of himself, more easily satisfied and less gifted in philosophical argument. After book I Socrates carries on his discussion first with one, then with the other of these two men. The conversation as a whole aims at answering to their satisfaction the challenge they jointly raise against Socrates’ conviction that justice is a preeminent good for the just person, but Socrates addresses different parts of his reply to a different one of them. (To assist the reader, we have inserted the names of the speakers at the tops of the pages of the translation.)

  Though in books II–X Socrates no longer searches for the truth by criticizing his interlocutors’ ideas, he proceeds nonetheless in a spirit of exploration and discovery, proposing bold hypotheses and seeking their confirmation in the first instance through examining their consequences. He often emphasizes the tentativeness of his results, and the need for a more extensive treatment. Quite different is the main speaker in the late dialogues Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, and Laws—whether Socrates himself, or a visitor from Elea or Athens: there, we get confident, reasoned delivery of philosophical results assumed by the speaker to be well established.

  J.M.C.

  Book I

  [327] I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the son of Ariston. I wanted to say a prayer to the goddess,1 and I was also curious to see how they would manage the festival, since they were holding it for the first time. I thought the procession of the local residents was a fine one and that the one conducted by the Thracians was no less outstanding. After we had said our prayer and seen the procession, we started back towards [b] Athens. Polemarchus saw us from a distance as we were setting off for home and told his slave to run and ask us to wait for him. The slave caught hold of my cloak from behind: Polemarchus wants you to wait, he said. I turned around and asked where Polemarchus was. He’s coming up behind you, he said, please wait for him. And Glaucon replied: All right, we will.

  [c] Just then Polemarchus caught up with us. Adeimantus, Glaucon’s brother, was with him and so were Niceratus, the son of Nicias, and some others, all of whom were apparently on their way from the procession.

  Polemarchus said: It looks to me, Socrates, as if you two are starting off for Athens.

  It looks the way it is, then, I said.

  Do you see how many we are? he said.

  I do.

  Well, you must either prove stronger than we are, or you will have to stay here.

  Isn’t there another alternative, namely, that we persuade you to let us go?

  But could you persuade us, if we won’t listen?

  Certainly not, Glaucon said.

  Well, we won’t listen; you’d better make up your mind to that.

  Don’t you know, Adeimantus said, that there is to be a torch race on [328] horseback for the goddess tonight?

  On horseback? I said. That’s something new. Are they going to race on horseback and hand the torches on in relays, or what?

  In relays, Polemarchus said, and there will be an all-night festival that will be well worth seeing. After dinner, we’ll go out to look at it. We’ll be joined there by many of the young men, and we’ll talk. So don’t go; stay.

  It seems, Glaucon said, that we’ll have to stay. [b]

  If you think so, I said, then we must.

  So we went to Polemarchus’ house, and there we found Lysias and Euthydemus, the brothers of Polemarchus, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Charmantides of Paeania, and Clitophon the son of Aristonymus. Polemarchus’ father, Cephalus, was also there, and I thought he looked quite old, as I hadn’t seen him for some time. He was sitting on a sort of [c] cushioned chair with a wreath on his head, as he had been offering a sacrifice in the courtyard. There was a circle of chairs, and we sat down by him.

  As soon as he saw me, Cephalus welcomed me and said: Socrates, you don’t come down to the Piraeus to see us as often as you should. If it were still easy for me to walk to town, you wouldn’t have to come here; we’d come to you. But, as it is, you ought to come here more often, for you [d] should know that as the physical pleasures wither away, my desire for conversation and its pleasures grows. So do as I say: Stay with these young men now, but come regularly to see us, just as you would to friends or relatives.

  Indeed, Cephalus, I replied, I enjoy talking with the very old, for we should ask them, as we might ask those who have travelled a road that we too will probably have to follow, what kind of road it is, whether rough [e] and difficult or smooth and easy. And I’d gladly find out from you what you think about this, as you have reached the point in life the poets call “the threshold of old age.”2 Is it a difficult time? What is your report about it?

  By god, Socrates, I’ll tell you exactly what I think. A number of us, who [329] are more or less the same age, often get together in accordance with the old saying.3 When we meet, the majority complain about the lost pleasures they remember from their youth, those of sex, drinking parties, feasts, and the other things that go along with them, and they get angry as if they had been deprived of important things and had lived well then but are now hardly living at all. Some others moan about the abuse heaped on [b] old people by their relatives, and because of this they repeat over and over that old age is the cause of many evils. But I don’t think they blame the real cause, Socrates, for if old age were really the cause, I should have suffered in the same way and so should everyone else of my age. But as it is, I’ve met some who don’t feel like that in the least. Indeed, I was once present when someone asked the poet Sophocles: “How are you as far as [c] sex go
es, Sophocles? Can you still make love with a woman?” “Quiet, man,” the poet replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.” I thought at the time that he was right, and I still do, for old age brings peace and freedom from all such things. When the appetites relax and cease to importune us, everything Sophocles said comes to pass, and we escape [d] from many mad masters. In these matters and in those concerning relatives, the real cause isn’t old age, Socrates, but the way people live. If they are moderate and contented, old age, too, is only moderately onerous; if they aren’t, both old age and youth are hard to bear.

  I admired him for saying that and I wanted him to tell me more, so I [e] urged him on: When you say things like that, Cephalus, I suppose that the majority of people don’t agree, they think that you bear old age more easily not because of the way you live but because you’re wealthy, for the wealthy, they say, have many consolations.

  That’s true; they don’t agree. And there is something in what they say, though not as much as they think. Themistocles’ retort is relevant here. When someone from Seriphus insulted him by saying that his high reputation [330] was due to his city and not to himself, he replied that, had he been a Seriphian, he wouldn’t be famous, but neither would the other even if he had been an Athenian. The same applies to those who aren’t rich and find old age hard to bear: A good person wouldn’t easily bear old age if he were poor, but a bad one wouldn’t be at peace with himself even if he were wealthy.