Plato: Republic Book 5

[449a]

Socrates

“To such a city, then, or constitution I apply the terms good1 and right—and to the corresponding kind of man; but the others I describe as bad and mistaken, if this one is right, in respect both to the administration of states and to the formation2 of the character of the individual soul, they falling under four forms of badness.” “What are these,” he said. And I was going on3 to enumerate them in what seemed to me the order of their evolution4 [449b] from one another, when Polemarchus—he sat at some little distance5 from Adeimantus—stretched forth his hand, and, taking hold of his garment6 from above by the shoulder, drew the other toward him and, leaning forward himself, spoke a few words in his ear, of which we overheard nothing7 else save only this, “Shall we let him off,8 then,” he said, “or what shall we do?” “By no means,” said Adeimantus, now raising his voice. “What, pray,”9 said I, “is it that you are not letting off?” “You,” [449c] said he. “And for what reason, pray?” said I. “We think you are a slacker,” he said, and are trying to cheat10 us out of a whole division,11 and that not the least, of the argument to avoid the trouble of expounding it, and expect to ‘get away with it’ by observing thus lightly that, of course, in respect to women and children it is obvious to everybody that the possessions of friends will be in common.12” “Well, isn't that right, Adeimantus?” I said. “Yes,” said he, “but this word ‘right,’13 like other things, requires defining14 as to the way15 and manner of such a community. There might be many ways. Don't, then, pass over the one [449d] that you16 have in mind. For we have long been lying in wait for you, expecting that you would say something both of the procreation of children and their bringing up,17 and would explain the whole matter of the community of women and children of which you speak. We think that the right or wrong management of this makes a great difference, all the difference in the world,18 in the constitution of a state; so now, since you are beginning on another constitution before sufficiently defining this, we are firmly resolved, [450a] as you overheard, not to let you go till you have expounded all this as fully as you did the rest.” “Set me down, too,” said Glaucon, “as voting this ticket.19” “Surely,” said Thrasymachus, “you may consider it a joint resolution of us all, Socrates.”

“What a thing you have done,” said I, “in thus challenging20 me! What a huge debate you have started afresh, as it were, about this polity, in the supposed completion of which I was rejoicing, being only too glad to have it accepted [450b] as I then set it forth! You don't realize what a swarm21 of arguments you are stirring up22 by this demand, which I foresaw and evaded to save us no end of trouble.” “Well,” said Thrasymachus,23“do you suppose this company has come here to prospect for gold24 and not to listen to discussions?” “Yes,” I said, “in measure.” “Nay, Socrates,” said Glaucon, “the measure25 of listening to such discussions is the whole of life for reasonable men. So don't consider us, and do not you yourself grow weary [450c] in explaining to us what we ask or, your views as to how this communion of wives and children among our guardians will be managed, and also about the rearing of the children while still young in the interval between26 birth and formal schooling which is thought to be the most difficult part of education. Try, then, to tell us what must be the manner of it.” “It is not an easy thing to expound, my dear fellow,” said I, “for even more than the provisions that precede it, it raises many doubts. For one might doubt whether what is proposed is possible27 and, even conceding the possibility,28 one might still be sceptical whether it is best. [450d] For which reason one as it were, shrinks from touching on the matter lest the theory be regarded as nothing but a ‘wish-thought,’29 my dear friend.” “Do not shrink,” he said, “for your hearers will not be inconsiderate30 nor distrustful nor hostile.” And I said, “My good fellow, is that remark intended to encourage me?” “It is,” he said. “Well, then,” said I, “it has just the contrary effect. For, if I were confident that I was speaking with knowledge, it would be an excellent encouragement. [450e] For there is both safety and security in speaking the truth with knowledge about our greatest and dearest concerns to those who are both wise and dear. But to speak when one doubts himself and is seeking while he talks is [451a] a fearful and slippery venture. The fear is not of being laughed at,31 for that is childish, but, lest, missing the truth, I fall down and drag my friends with me in matters where it most imports not to stumble. So I salute Nemesis,32 Glaucon, in what I am about to say. For, indeed,33 I believe that involuntary homicide is a lesser fault than to mislead opinion about the honorable, the good, and the just. This is a risk that it is better to run with enemies34 [451b] than with friends, so that your encouragement is none.” And Glaucon, with a laugh, said, “Nay, Socrates, if any false note in the argument does us any harm, we release you as35 in a homicide case, and warrant you pure of hand and no deceiver of us. So speak on with confidence.” “Well,” said I, “he who is released in that case is counted pure as the law bids, and, presumably, if there, here too.” “Speak on, then,” he said, “for all this objection.” “We must return then,” said I, “and say now what perhaps ought to have been said in due sequence there. [451c] But maybe this way is right, that after the completion of the male drama we should in turn go through with the female,36 especially since you are so urgent.”

“For men, then, born and bred as we described there is in my opinion no other right possession and use of children and women than that which accords with the start we gave them. Our endeavor, I believe, was to establish these men in our discourse as the guardians of a flock37?” “Yes.” [451d] “Let us preserve the analogy, then, and assign them a generation and breeding answering to it, and see if it suits us or not.” “In what way?” he said. “In this. Do we expect the females of watch-dogs to join in guarding what the males guard and to hunt with them and share all their pursuits or do we expect the females to stay indoors as being incapacitated by the bearing and the breeding of the whelps while the males toil and have all the care of the flock?” “They have all things in common,” [451e] he replied, “except that we treat the females as weaker and the males as stronger.” “Is it possible, then,” said I, “to employ any creature for the same ends as another if you do not assign it the same nurture and education?” “It is not possible.” “If, then, we are to use the women for the same things as the men, [452a] we must also teach them the same things.” “Yes.” “Now music together with gymnastic was the training we gave the men.” “Yes.” “Then we must assign these two arts to the women also and the offices of war and employ them in the same way.” “It would seem likely from what you say,” he replied. “Perhaps, then,” said I, “the contrast with present custom38 would make much in our proposals look ridiculous if our words39 are to be realized in fact.” “Yes, indeed,” he said. “What then,” said I, “is the funniest thing you note in them? Is it not obviously the women exercising unclad in the palestra [452b] together with the men, not only the young, but even the older, like old men in gymnasiums,40 when, though wrinkled and unpleasant to look at, they still persist in exercising?” “Yes, on my word,” he replied, “it would seem ridiculous under present conditions.” “Then,” said I, “since we have set out to speak our minds, we must not fear all the jibes41 with which the wits would greet so great a revolution, and the sort of things they would say about gymnastics [452c] and culture, and most of all about the bearing of arms and the bestriding of horses.” “You're right,” he said. “But since we have begun we must go forward to the rough part of our law,42 after begging these fellows not to mind their own business43 but to be serious, and reminding them that it is not long since the Greeks thought it disgraceful and ridiculous, as most of the barbarians44 do now, for men to be seen naked. And when the practice of athletics began, first with the Cretans [452d] and then with the Lacedaemonians, it was open to the wits of that time to make fun of these practices, don't you think so?” “I do.” “But when, I take it, experience showed that it is better to strip than to veil all things of this sort, then the laughter of the eyes45 faded away before that which reason revealed to be best, and this made it plain that he talks idly who deems anything else ridiculous but evil, and who tries to raise a laugh by looking to any other pattern of absurdity than [452e] that of folly and wrong or sets up any other standard of the beautiful as a mark for his seriousness than the good.” “Most assuredly,” said he.

“Then is not the first thing that we have to agree upon with regard to these proposals whether they are possible or not? And we must throw open the debate46 to anyone who wishes either in jest or earnest to raise the question [453a] whether female human nature is capable of sharing with the male all tasks or none at all, or some but not others,47 and under which of these heads this business of war falls. Would not this be that best beginning which would naturally and proverbially lead to the best end48?” “Far the best,” he said. “Shall we then conduct the debate with ourselves in behalf of those others49 so that the case of the other side may not be taken defenceless and go by default50?” [453b] “Nothing hinders,” he said. “Shall we say then in their behalf: ‘There is no need, Socrates and Glaucon, of others disputing against you, for you yourselves at the beginning of the foundation of your city agreed51 that each one ought to mind as his own business the one thing for which he was fitted by nature?’ ‘We did so agree, I think; certainly!' ‘Can it be denied then that there is by nature a great difference between men and women?’ ‘Surely there is.’ ‘Is it not fitting, then, that a different function should be appointed [453c] for each corresponding to this difference of nature?’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘How, then, can you deny that you are mistaken and in contradiction with yourselves when you turn around and affirm that the men and the women ought to do the same thing, though their natures are so far apart?’ Can you surprise me with an answer to that question?” “Not easily on this sudden challenge,” he replied: “but I will and do beg you to lend your voice to the plea in our behalf, whatever it may be.” “These and many similar difficulties, Glaucon,” said I, [453d] “I foresaw and feared, and so shrank from touching on the law concerning the getting and breeding of women and children.” “It does not seem an easy thing, by heaven,” he said, “no, by heaven.” “No, it is not,” said I; “but the fact is that whether one tumbles into a little diving-pool or plump into the great sea he swims all the same.” “By all means.” “Then we, too, must swim and try to escape out of the sea52 of argument in the hope that either some dolphin53 will take us on its back or some other desperate rescue.” [453e] “So it seems,” he said. “Come then, consider,” said I, “if we can find a way out. We did agree that different natures should have differing pursuits and that the nature of men and women differ. And yet now we affirm that these differing natures should have the same pursuits. That is the indictment.” “It is.” “What a grand54 thing, Glaucon,” said I, [454a] “is the power of the art of contradiction55!” “Why so?” “Because,” said I, “many appear to me to fall into it even against their wills, and to suppose that they are not wrangling but arguing, owing to their inability to apply the proper divisions and distinctions to the subject under consideration. They pursue purely verbal oppositions, practising eristic, not dialectic on one another.” “Yes, this does happen to many,” he said; “but does this observation apply to us too at present?” [454b] “Absolutely,” said I; “at any rate I am afraid that we are unawares56 slipping into contentiousness.” “In what way?” “The principle that natures not the same ought not to share in the same pursuits we are following up most manfully and eristically57 in the literal and verbal sense but we did not delay to consider at all what particular kind of diversity and identity58 of nature we had in mind and with reference to what we were trying to define it when we assigned different pursuits to different natures and the same to the same.” “No, we didn't consider that,” he said. [454c] “Wherefore, by the same token,” I said, “we might ask ourselves whether the natures of bald59 and long-haired men are the same and not, rather, contrary. And, after agreeing that they were opposed, we might, if the bald cobbled, forbid the long-haired to do so, or vice versa.” “That would be ridiculous,” he said. “Would it be so,” said I, “for any other reason than that we did not then posit likeness and difference of nature in any and every sense, but were paying heed solely to the kind of diversity [454d] and homogeneity that was pertinent60 to the pursuits themselves?” “We meant, for example, that a man and a woman who have a physician's61 mind have the same nature. Don't you think so?” “I do.” “But that a man physician and a man carpenter have different natures?” “Certainly, I suppose.”

“Similarly, then,” said I, “if it appears that the male and the female sex have distinct qualifications for any arts or pursuits, we shall affirm that they ought to be assigned respectively to each. But if it appears that they differ only in just this respect that the female bears [454e] and the male begets, we shall say that no proof has yet been produced that the woman differs from the man for our purposes, but we shall continue to think that our guardians and their wives ought to follow the same pursuits.” “And rightly,” said he. “Then, is it not the next thing to bid our opponent tell us [455a] precisely for what art or pursuit concerned with the conduct of a state the woman's nature differs from the man's?” “That would be at any rate fair.” “Perhaps, then, someone else, too, might say what you were saying a while ago, that it is not easy to find a satisfactory answer on a sudden,62 but that with time for reflection there is no difficulty.” “He might say that.” “Shall we, then, beg the raiser of such objections to follow us, [455b] if we may perhaps prove able to make it plain to him that there is no pursuit connected with the administration of a state that is peculiar to woman?” “By all means.” “Come then, we shall say to him, answer our question. Was this the basis of your distinction between the man naturally gifted for anything and the one not so gifted—that the one learned easily, the other with difficulty; that the one with slight instruction could discover63 much for himself in the matter studied, but the other, after much instruction and drill, could not even remember what he had learned; and that the bodily faculties of the one adequately served64 his mind, [455c] while, for the other, the body was a hindrance? Were there any other points than these by which you distinguish the well endowed man in every subject and the poorly endowed?” “No one,” said he, “will be able to name any others.” “Do you know, then, of anything practised by mankind in which the masculine sex does not surpass the female on all these points?65 Must we make a long story of it by alleging weaving and the watching of pancakes [455d] and the boiling pot, whereon the sex plumes itself and wherein its defeat will expose it to most laughter?” “You are right,” he said, “that the one sex66 is far surpassed by the other in everything, one may say. Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things, but broadly speaking, it is as you say.” “Then there is no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to a woman because she is a woman or to a man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all— [455e] yet for all the woman is weaker than the man.” “Assuredly.” “Shall we, then, assign them all to men and nothing to women?” “How could we?” “We shall rather, I take it, say that one woman has the nature of a physician and another not, and one is by nature musical, and another unmusical?” “Surely.” “Can we, then, deny that one woman is naturally athletic [456a] and warlike and another unwarlike and averse to gymnastics?” “I think not.” “And again, one a lover, another a hater, of wisdom? And one high-spirited, and the other lacking spirit?” “That also is true.” “Then it is likewise true that one woman has the qualities of a guardian and another not. Were not these the natural qualities of the men also whom we selected for guardians?” “They were.” “The women and the men, then, have the same nature in respect to the guardianship of the state, save in so far as the one is weaker, the other stronger.” “Apparently.” [456b]

“Women of this kind, then, must be selected to cohabit with men of this kind and to serve with them as guardians since they are capable of it and akin by nature.” “By all means.” “And to the same natures must we not assign the same pursuits?” “The same.” “We come round,67 then, to our previous statement, and agree that it does not run counter to nature to assign music and gymnastics to the wives of the guardians.” [456c] “By all means.” “Our legislation, then, was not impracticable or utopian,68 since the law we proposed accorded with nature. Rather, the other way of doing things, prevalent today, proves, as it seems, unnatural.” “Apparently.” “The object of our inquiry was the possibility and the desirability69 of what we were proposing.” “It was.” “That it is possible has been admitted.” “Yes.” “The next point to be agreed upon is that it is the best way.” “Obviously.” “For the production of a guardian, then, education will not be one thing for our men and another for our women, especially since [456d] the nature which we hand over to it is the same.” “There will be no difference.” “How are you minded, now, in this matter?” “In what?” “In the matter of supposing some men to be better and some worse,70 or do you think them all alike?” “By no means.” “In the city, then, that we are founding, which do you think will prove the better men, the guardians receiving the education which we have described or the cobblers educated by the art of cobbling71?” “An absurd question,” he said. [456e] “I understand,” said I; “and are not these the best of all the citizens?” “By far.” “And will not these women be the best of all the women?” “They, too, by far.” “Is there anything better for a state than the generation in it of the best possible women72 and men?” “There is not.” “And this, music and gymnastics [457a] applied as we described will effect.” “Surely.” “Then the institution we proposed is not only possible but the best for the state.” “That is so.” “The women of the guardians, then, must strip, since they will be clothed with virtue as a garment,73 and must take their part with the men in war and the other duties of civic guardianship and have no other occupation. But in these very duties lighter tasks must be assigned to the women than to the men [457b] because of their weakness as a class. But the man who ridicules unclad women, exercising because it is best that they should, ‘plucks the unripe74 fruit’ of laughter and does not know, it appears, the end of his laughter nor what he would be at. For the fairest thing that is said or ever will be said is this, that the helpful is fair75 and the harmful foul.” “Assuredly.”

“In this matter, then, of the regulation of women, we may say that we have surmounted one of the waves of our paradox [457c] and have not been quite swept76 away by it in ordaining that our guardians and female guardians must have all pursuits in common, but that in some sort the argument concurs with itself in the assurance that what it proposes is both possible and beneficial.” “It is no slight wave that you are thus escaping.” “You will not think it a great77 one,” I said, “when you have seen the one that follows.” “Say on then and show me,” said he. “This,” said I, “and all that precedes has for its sequel, in my opinion, the following law.” “What? “That these women shall all be common78 to all the men, [457d] and that none shall cohabit with any privately; and that the children shall be common, and that no parent shall know its own offspring nor any child its parent.” “This is a far bigger paradox than the other, and provokes more distrust as to its possibility and its utility.79” “I presume,” said I, “that there would be no debate about its utility, no denial that the community of women and children would be the greatest good, supposing it possible. But I take it that its possibility or the contrary [457e] would be the chief topic of contention.” “Both,” he said, “would be right sharply debated.” “You mean,” said I, “that I have to meet a coalition of arguments. But I expected to escape from one of them, and that if you agreed that the thing was beneficial, it would remain for me to speak only of its feasibility.” “You have not escaped detection,” he said, “in your attempted flight, but you must render an account of both.” “I must pay the penalty,” I said, “yet do me this much grace: [458a] Permit me to take a holiday, just as men of lazy minds are wont to feast themselves on their own thoughts when they walk alone.80 Such persons, without waiting to discover how their desires may be realized, dismiss that topic to save themselves the labor of deliberating about possibilities and impossibilities, assume their wish fulfilled, and proceed to work out the details in imagination, and take pleasure in portraying what they will do when it is realized, thus making still more idle a mind that is idle without that.81 I too now succumb to this weakness82 [458b] and desire to postpone83 and examine later the question of feasibility, but will at present assume that, and will, with your permission, inquire how the rulers will work out the details in practice, and try to show that nothing could be more beneficial to the state and its guardians than the effective operation of our plan. This is what I would try to consider first together with you, and thereafter the other topic, if you allow it.” “I do allow it,” he said: “proceed with the inquiry.” “I think, then,” said I, “that the rulers, [458c] if they are to deserve that name, and their helpers likewise, will, the one, be willing to accept orders,84 and the other, to give them, in some things obeying our laws, and imitating85 them in others which we leave to their discretion.” “Presumably.” “You, then, the lawgiver,” I said, “have picked these men and similarly will select to give over to them women as nearly as possible of the same nature.86 And they, having houses and meals in common, and no private possessions of that kind, [458d] will dwell together, and being commingled in gymnastics and in all their life and education, will be conducted by innate necessity to sexual union. Is not what I say a necessary consequence?” “Not by the necessities of geometry,” he said, “but by those of love,87 which are perhaps keener and more potent than the other to persuade and constrain the multitude.”

“They are, indeed,” I said; “but next, Glaucon, disorder and promiscuity in these unions or [458e] in anything else they do would be an unhallowed thing in a happy state and the rulers will not suffer it.” “It would not be right,” he said. “Obviously, then, we must arrange marriages, sacramental so far as may be. And the most sacred marriages would be those that were most beneficial.” [459a] “By all means.” “How, then, would the greatest benefit result? Tell me this, Glaucon. I see that you have in your house hunting-dogs and a number of pedigree cocks.88 Have you ever considered something about their unions and procreations?” “What?”89 he said. “In the first place,” I said, “among these themselves, although they are a select breed, do not some prove better than the rest?” “They do.” “Do you then breed from all indiscriminately, or are you careful to breed from the best90?” [459b] “From the best.” “And, again, do you breed from the youngest or the oldest, or, so far as may be, from those in their prime?” “From those in their prime.” “And if they are not thus bred, you expect, do you not, that your birds and hounds will greatly degenerate?” “I do,” he said. “And what of horses and other animals?” I said; “is it otherwise with them?” “It would be strange if it were,” said he. “Gracious,” said I, “dear friend, how imperative, then, is our need of the highest skill in our rulers, if the principle holds also for mankind.” [459c] “Well, it does,” he said, “but what of it?” “This,” said I, “that they will have to employ many of those drugs91 of which we were speaking. We thought that an inferior physician sufficed for bodies that do not need drugs but yield to diet and regimen. But when it is necessary to prescribe drugs we know that a more enterprising and venturesome physician is required.” “True; but what is the pertinency?” “This,” said I: “it seems likely that our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception [459d] for the benefit92 of their subjects. We said, I believe, that the use of that sort of thing was in the category of medicine.” “And that was right,” he said. “In our marriages, then, and the procreation of children, it seems there will be no slight need of this kind of ‘right.'” “How so?” “It follows from our former admissions,” I said, “that the best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and the worst with the worst in the fewest, [459e] and that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the flock93 is to be as perfect as possible. And the way in which all this is brought to pass must be unknown to any but the rulers, if, again, the herd of guardians is to be as free as possible from dissension.” “Most true,” he said. “We shall, then, have to ordain certain festivals and sacrifices, in which we shall bring together the brides and the bridegrooms, and our poets must compose hymns [460a] suitable to the marriages that then take place. But the number of the marriages we will leave to the discretion of the rulers, that they may keep the number of the citizens as nearly as may be the same,94 taking into account wars and diseases and all such considerations, and that, so far as possible, our city may not grow too great or too small.” “Right,” he said. “Certain ingenious lots, then, I suppose, must be devised so that the inferior man at each conjugation may blame chance and not the rulers.” “Yes, indeed,” he said. [460b]

“And on the young men, surely, who excel in war and other pursuits we must bestow honors and prizes, and, in particular, the opportunity of more frequent intercourse with the women, which will at the same time be a plausible pretext for having them beget as many of the children as possible.” “Right.” “And the children thus born will be taken over by the officials appointed for this, men or women or both, since, I take it, the official posts too are common to women and men. [460c] The offspring of the good, I suppose, they will take to the pen or créche, to certain nurses who live apart in a quarter of the city, but the offspring of the inferior, and any of those of the other sort who are born defective, they will properly dispose of in secret,95 so that no one will know what has become of them.” “That is the condition,” he said, “of preserving the purity of the guardians' breed.” “They will also supervise the nursing of the children, conducting the mothers to the pen when their breasts are full, but employing every device96 [460d] to prevent anyone from recognizing her own infant. And they will provide others who have milk if the mothers are insufficient. But they will take care that the mothers themselves shall not suckle too long, and the trouble of wakeful nights and similar burdens they will devolve upon the nurses, wet and dry.” “You are making maternity a soft job97 for the women of the guardians.” “It ought to be,” said I, “but let us pursue our design. We said that the offspring should come from parents in their prime.” [460e] “True.” “Do you agree that the period of the prime may be fairly estimated at twenty years for a woman and thirty for a man?” “How do you reckon it?”98 he said. “The women,” I said, “beginning at the age of twenty, shall bear for the state99 to the age of forty, and the man shall beget for the state from the time he passes his prime in swiftness in running to the age of fifty-five.” [461a] “That is,” he said, “the maturity and prime for both of body and mind.” “Then, if anyone older or younger than the prescribed age meddles with procreation for the state, we shall say that his error is an impiety and an injustice, since he is begetting for the city a child whose birth, if it escapes discovery, will not be attended by the sacrifices and the prayers which the priests and priestesses and the entire city prefer at the ceremonial marriages, that ever better offspring may spring from good sires100 and from fathers helpful to the state [461b] sons more helpful still. But this child will be born in darkness and conceived in foul incontinence.” “Right,” he said. “And the same rule will apply,” I said, “if any of those still within the age of procreation goes in to a woman of that age with whom the ruler has not paired him. We shall say that he is imposing on the state a base-born, uncertified, and unhallowed child.” “Most rightly,” he said. “But when, I take it, the men and the women have passed the age of lawful procreation, we shall leave the men free to form such relations [461c] with whomsoever they please, except101 daughter and mother and their direct descendants and ascendants, and likewise the women, save with son and father, and so on, first admonishing them preferably not even to bring to light102 anything whatever thus conceived, but if they are unable to prevent a birth to dispose of it on the understanding that we cannot rear such an offspring.” “All that sounds reasonable,” he said; “but how are they to distinguish one another's fathers and daughters, [461d] and the other degrees of kin that you have just mentioned?” “They won't,” said I, “except that a man will call all male offspring born in the tenth and in the seventh month after he became a bridegroom his sons, and all female, daughters, and they will call him father.103 And, similarly, he will call their offspring his grandchildren104 and they will call his group grandfathers and grandmothers. And all children born in the period in which their fathers and mothers were procreating will regard one another as brothers and sisters. [461e] This will suffice for the prohibitions of intercourse of which we just now spoke. But the law will allow brothers and sisters to cohabit if the lot so falls out and the Delphic oracle approves.” “Quite right,” said he.

“This, then, Glaucon, is the manner of the community of wives and children among the guardians. That it is consistent with the rest of our polity and by far the best way is the next point that we must get confirmed [462a] by the argument. Is not that so?” “It is, indeed,” he said. “Is not the logical first step towards such an agreement to ask ourselves what we could name as the greatest good for the constitution of a state and the proper aim of a lawgiver in his legislation, and what would be the greatest evil, and then to consider whether the proposals we have just set forth fit into the footprints105 of the good and do not suit those of the evil?” “By all means,” he said. “Do we know of any greater evil for a state than the thing that distracts it [462b] and makes it many instead of one, or a greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?” “We do not.” “Is not, then, the community of pleasure and pain the tie that binds, when, so far as may be, all the citizens rejoice and grieve alike at the same births and deaths?” “By all means,” he said. “But the individualization of these feelings is a dissolvent, when some grieve exceedingly and others rejoice at the same happenings [462c] to the city and its inhabitants?” “Of course.” “And the chief cause of this is when the citizens do not utter in unison such words as ‘mine’ and ‘not mine,’ and similarly with regard to the word ‘alien’?”106“Precisely so.” “That city, then, is best ordered in which the greatest number use the expression ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ of the same things in the same way.” “Much the best.” “And the city whose state is most like that of an individual man.107 For example, if the finger of one of us is wounded, the entire community of bodily connections stretching to the soul for ‘integration’108 [462d] with the dominant part is made aware, and all of it feels the pain as a whole, though it is a part that suffers, and that is how we come to say that the man has a pain in his finger. And for any other member of the man the same statement holds, alike for a part that labors in pain or is eased by pleasure.” “The same,” he said, “and, to return to your question, the best governed state most nearly resembles such an organism.” “That is the kind of a state, [462e] then, I presume, that, when anyone of the citizens suffers aught of good or evil, will be most likely to speak of the part that suffers as its own and will share the pleasure or the pain as a whole.” “Inevitably,” he said, “if it is well governed.”

“It is time,” I said, “to return to our city and observe whether it, rather than any other, embodies the qualities agreed upon in our argument.109” “We must,” he said. “Well, then, [463a] there are to be found in other cities rulers and the people as in it, are there not?” “There are.” “Will not all these address one another as fellow-citizens?” “Of course.” “But in addition to citizens, what does the people in other states call its rulers.” “In most cities, masters. In democratic cities, just this, rulers.” “But what of the people in our city. In addition to citizens, [463b] what do they call their rulers?” “Saviors and helpers,” he said. “And what term do these apply to the people?” “Payers of their wage and supporters.” “And how do the rulers in other states denominate the populace?” “Slaves,” he said. “And how do the rulers describe one another?” “Co-rulers,” he said. “And ours?” “Co-guardians.” “Can you tell me whether any of the rulers in other states would speak of some of their co-rulers as ‘belonging’ and others as outsiders?” “Yes, many would.” “And such a one thinks and speaks of the one that ‘belongs’ as his own, doesn't he, and of the outsider as not his own?” “That is so.” “But what of your guardians. Could any of them think or speak of [463c] his co-guardian as an outsider?” “By no means,” he said; “for no matter whom he meets, he will feel that he is meeting a brother, a sister, a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, or the offspring or forebears of these.” “Excellent,” said I; “but tell me this further, [463d] will it be merely the names110 of this kinship that you have prescribed for them or must all their actions conform to the names in all customary observance toward fathers and in awe and care and obedience for parents, if they look for the favor111 of either gods or men, since any other behaviour would be neither just nor pious? Shall these be the unanimous oracular voices that they hear from all the people, or shall some other kind of teaching beset112 the ears of your children from their birth, both concerning113 what is due to those who are pointed out as their fathers [463e] and to their other kin?” “These,” he said; “for it would be absurd for them merely to pronounce with their lips the names of kinship without the deeds.” “Then, in this city more than in any other, when one citizen fares well or ill, men will pronounce in unison the word of which we spoke: ‘It is mine that does well; it is mine that does ill.'” “That is most true,” he said. [464a] “And did we not say that this conviction and way of speech114 brings with it a community in pleasures and pains?” “And rightly, too.” “Then these citizens, above all others, will have one and the same thing in common which they will name mine, and by virtue of this communion they will have their pleasures and pains in common.” “Quite so.” “And is not the cause of this, besides the general constitution of the state, the community of wives and children among the guardians?” “It will certainly be the chief cause,” he said. [464b]

“But we further agreed that this unity is the greatest blessing for a state, and we compared a well governed state to the human body in its relation to the pleasure and pain of its parts.” “And we were right in so agreeing.” “Then it is the greatest blessing for a state of which the community of women and children among the helpers has been shown to be the cause.” “Quite so,” he said. “And this is consistent with what we said before. For we said,115 I believe, that these helpers must not possess houses of their own or [464c] land or any other property, but that they should receive from the other citizens for their support the wage of their guardianship and all spend it in common. That was the condition of their being true guardians.” “Right,” he said. “Is it not true, then, as I am trying to say, that those former and these present prescriptions tend to make them still more truly guardians and prevent them from distracting the city by referring ‘mine’ not to the same but to different things, one man dragging off to his own house anything he is able to acquire apart from the rest, [464d] and another doing the same to his own separate house, and having women and children apart, thus introducing into the state the pleasures and pains of individuals? They should all rather, we said, share one conviction about their own, tend to one goal, and so far as practicable have one experience of pleasure and pain.” “By all means,” he said. “Then will not law-suits and accusations against one another vanish,116 one may say,117 from among them, because they have nothing in private possession but their bodies, but all else in common? [464e] So that we can count on their being free from the dissensions that arise among men from the possession of property, children, and kin.” “They will necessarily be quit of these,” he said. “And again, there could not rightly arise among them any law-suit for assault or bodily injury. For as between age-fellows118 we shall say that self-defence is honorable and just, thereby compelling them to keep their bodies in condition.” “Right,” he said. [465a] “And there will be the further advantage in such a law that an angry man, satisfying his anger in such wise, would be less likely to carry the quarrel to further extremes.” “Assuredly.” “As for an older man, he will always have the charge of ruling and chastising the younger.” “Obviously.” “Again, it is plain that the young man, except by command of the rulers, will probably not do violence to an elder or strike him, or, I take it, dishonor him in any other way. Two guardians sufficient to prevent that [465b] there are, fear and awe, awe restraining him from laying hands on one who may be his parent, and fear in that the others will rush to the aid of the sufferer, some as sons, some as brothers, some as fathers.” “That is the way it works out,” he said. “Then in all cases the laws will leave these men to dwell in peace together.” “Great peace.” “And if these are free from dissensions among themselves, there is no fear that119 the rest of the city will ever start faction against them or with one another.” “No, there is not.” [465c] “But I hesitate, so unseemly120 are they, even to mention the pettiest troubles of which they would be rid, the flatterings121 of the rich, the embarrassments and pains of the poor in the bringing-up of their children and the procuring of money for the necessities of life for their households, the borrowings, the repudiations, all the devices with which they acquire what they deposit with wives and servitors to husband,122 and all the indignities that they endure in such matters, which are obvious and [465d] ignoble and not deserving of mention.” “Even a blind123 man can see these,” he said.

“From all these, then, they will be finally free, and they will live a happier life than that men count most happy, the life of the victors at Olympia.124” “How so?” “The things for which those are felicitated are a small part of what is secured for these. Their victory is fairer and their public support more complete. For the prize of victory that they win is the salvation of the entire state, the fillet that binds their brows is the public support of themselves and their children— [465e] they receive honor from the city while they live and when they die a worthy burial.” “A fair guerdon, indeed,” he said. “Do you recall,” said I, “that in the preceding125 argument the objection of somebody or other rebuked us for not making our guardians happy, [466a] since, though it was in their power to have everything of the citizens, they had nothing, and we, I believe, replied that this was a consideration to which we would return if occasion offered, but that at present we were making our guardians guardians and the city as a whole as happy as possible, and that we were not modelling126 our ideal of happiness with reference to any one class?” “I do remember,” he said. “Well then, since now the life of our helpers127 has been shown to be fairer and better than that of the victors at Olympia, [466b] need we compare128 it with the life of cobblers and other craftsmen and farmers?” “I think not,” he said. “But further, we may fairly repeat what I was saying then also, that if the guardian shall strive for a kind of happiness that will unmake129 him as a guardian and shall not be content with the way of life that is moderate and secure and, as we affirm, the best, but if some senseless and childish opinion about happiness shall beset him and impel him to use his power to appropriate [466c] everything in the city for himself, then he will find out that Hesiod130 was indeed wise, who said that “‘the half was in some sort more than the whole.’”Hes. WD 40 “If he accepts my counsel,” he said, “he will abide in this way of life.” “You accept, then, as we have described it, this partnership of the women with our men in the matter of education and children and the guardianship of the other citizens, and you admit that both within the city and when they go forth to war they ought to keep guard together and hunt together as it were like hounds, [466d] and have all things in every way, so far as possible, in common, and that so doing they will do what is for the best and nothing that is contrary to female human nature131 in comparison with male or to their natural fellowship with one another.” “I do admit it,” he said.

“Then,” I said, “is not the thing that it remains to determine this, whether, namely, it is possible for such a community to be brought about among men as it is in the other animals,132 and in what way it is possible?” “You have anticipated,” he said, “the point I was about to raise.” “For133 as for their wars,” I said, [466e] “the manner in which they will conduct them is too obvious for discussion.” “How so,” said he. “It is obvious that they will march out together,134 and, what is more, will conduct their children to war when they are sturdy, in order that, like the children of other craftsmen,135 they may observe the processes of which they must be masters in their maturity; and in addition to looking on [467a] they must assist and minister in all the business of war and serve their fathers and mothers. Or have you never noticed the practice in the arts, how for example the sons of potters look on as helpers a long time before they put their hands to the clay?” “They do, indeed.” “Should these then be more concerned than our guardians to train the children by observation and experience of what is to be their proper business?” “That would be ridiculous,” he said. “But, further, when it comes to fighting, [467b] every creature will do better in the presence of its offspring?” “That is so, but the risk, Socrates, is not slight, in the event of disasters such as may happen in war, that, losing their children as well as themselves, they make it impossible for the remnant of the state to recover.” “What you say is true,” I replied; “but, in the first place, is it your idea that the one thing for which we must provide is the avoidance of all danger?” “By no means.” “And, if they are to take chances, should it not be for something success in which will make them better?” [467c] “Clearly.” “Do you think it makes a slight difference and not worth some risk whether men who are to be warriors do or do not observe war as boys?” “No, it makes a great difference for the purpose of which you speak.” “Starting, then, from this assumption that we are to make the boys spectators of war, we must further contrive136 security for them and all will be well, will it not?” “Yes.” “To begin with, then,” said I, “will not the fathers be, humanly speaking, not ignorant of war [467d] and shrewd judges of which campaigns are hazardous and which not?” “Presumably,” he said. “They will take the boys with them to the one and avoid the others?” “Rightly.” “And for officers, I presume,” said I, “they will put in charge of them not those who are good for nothing else but men who by age and experience are qualified to serve at once as leaders and as caretakers of children.” “Yes, that would be the proper way.” “Still, we may object, it is the unexpected137 that happens to many in many cases.” “Yes, indeed.” “To provide against such chances, then, we must wing138 the children from the start so that if need arises they may fly away and escape.” [467e] “What do you mean?” he said. “We must mount them when very young,” said I, “and first have them taught to ride, and then conduct them to the scene of war, not on mettlesome war-steeds, but on the swiftest and gentlest horses possible; for thus they will have the best view of their own future business and also, if need arises, will most securely escape to safety in the train of elder guides.” “I think you are right,” he said. [468a] “But now what of the conduct of war? What should be the attitude of the soldiers to one another and the enemy? Am I right in my notions or not?” “Tell me what notions,” he said. “Anyone of them who deserts his post, or flings away his weapons,139 or is guilty of any similar act of cowardice, should be reduced to the artisan or farmer class, should he not?” “By all means.” “And anyone who is taken alive by the enemy140 we will make a present of to his captors, shall we not, to deal with their catch141 [468b] as they please?” “Quite so.” “And don't you agree that the one who wins the prize of valor and distinguishes himself shall first be crowned by his fellows in the campaign, by the lads and boys each in turn?” “I do.” “And be greeted with the right hand?” “That, too.” “But I presume you wouldn't go as far as this?” “What?” “That he should kiss and be kissed by everyone142?” “By all means,” he said, “and I add to the law the provision that during that [468c] campaign none whom he wishes to kiss be allowed to refuse, so that if one is in love with anyone, male or female, he may be the more eager to win the prize.” “Excellent,” said I, “and we have already said that the opportunity of marriage will be more readily provided for the good man, and that he will be more frequently selected than the others for participation in that sort of thing, in order that as many children as possible may be born from such stock.” “We have,” he replied.

“But, furthermore, we may cite Homer143 [468d] too for the justice of honoring in such ways the valiant among our youth. For Homer says that Ajax, who had distinguished himself in the war, was honored with the long chine,144 assuming that the most fitting meed for a brave man in the prime of his youth is that from which both honor and strength will accrue to him.” “Most rightly,” he said. “We will then,” said I, “take Homer as our guide in this at least. We, too, at sacrifices and on other like occasions, will reward the good so far as they have proved themselves good with hymns and the other privileges of which we have just spoken, [468e] and also with “‘seats of honor and meat and full cups’”Hom. Il. 8.162, so as to combine physical training with honor for the good, both men and women.” “Nothing could be better,” he said. “Very well; and of those who die on campaign, if anyone's death has been especially glorious, shall we not, to begin with, affirm that he belongs to the golden race?”145 “By all means.” “And shall we not believe Hesiod146 who tells us that when anyone of this race dies, so it is that they become [469a] “ Hallowed spirits dwelling on earth, averters of evil, Guardians watchful and good of articulate-speaking mortals?” ”Hes. WD 121“We certainly shall believe him.” “We will inquire of Apollo,147 then, how and with what distinction we are to bury men of more than human, of divine, qualities, and deal with them according to his response.148” “How can we do otherwise?” “And ever after149 we will bestow on their graves the tendance and [469b] worship paid to spirits divine. And we will practice the same observance when any who have been adjudged exceptionally good in the ordinary course of life die of old age or otherwise.” “That will surely be right,” he said. “But again, how will our soldiers conduct themselves toward enemies?” “In what respect?” “First, in the matter of making slaves of the defeated, do you think it right for Greeks to reduce Greek cities150 to slavery, or rather that so far as they are able, they should not suffer any other city to do so, but should accustom Greeks [469c] to spare Greeks, foreseeing the danger151 of enslavement by the barbarians?” “Sparing them is wholly and altogether the better,” said he. “They are not, then, themselves to own Greek slaves, either, and they should advise the other Greeks not to?” “By all means,” he said; “at any rate in that way they would be more likely to turn against the barbarians and keep their hands from one another.” “And how about stripping the dead after victory of anything except their weapons: is that well? Does it not furnish a pretext to cowards [469d] not to advance on the living foe, as if they were doing something needful when poking152 about the dead? Has not this snatching at the spoils ere new destroyed many an army?” “Yes, indeed.” “And don't you think it illiberal and greedy to plunder a corpse, and is it not the mark of a womanish and petty153 spirit to deem the body of the dead an enemy when the real foeman has flown away154 and left behind only the instrument155 with which he fought? [469e] Do you see any difference between such conduct and that of the dogs156 who snarl at the stones that hit them but don't touch the thrower?” “Not the slightest.” “We must abandon, then, the plundering of corpses and the refusal to permit their burial.157” “By heaven, we certainly must,” he said.

“And again, we will not take weapons to the temples for dedicatory158 offerings, especially the weapons of Greeks, [470a] if we are at all concerned to preserve friendly relations with the other Greeks. Rather we shall fear that there is pollution in bringing such offerings to the temples from our kind unless in a case where the god bids otherwise159.” “Most rightly,” he said. “And in the matter of devastating the land of Greeks and burning their houses, how will your soldiers deal with their enemies.” “I would gladly hear your opinion of that.” “In my view,” [470b] said I, “they ought to do neither, but confine themselves to taking away the annual harvest. Shall I tell you why?” “Do.” “In my opinion, just as we have the two terms, war and faction, so there are also two things, distinguished by two differentiae.160 The two things I mean are the friendly and kindred on the one hand and the alien and foreign on the other. Now the term employed for the hostility of the friendly is faction, and for that of the alien is war.” “What you say is in nothing beside the mark,” he replied. “Consider, then, [470c] if this goes to the mark. I affirm that the Hellenic race is friendly to itself and akin, and foreign and alien to the barbarian.” “Rightly,” he said. “We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature,161 and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred. Greeks, however, we shall say, are still by nature the friends of Greeks when they act in this way, but that Greece is sick in that case and divided by faction, [470d] and faction is the name we must give to that enmity.” “I will allow you that habit of speech,” he said. “Then observe,” said I, “that when anything of this sort occurs in faction, as the word is now used, and a state is divided against itself, if either party devastates the land and burns the houses of the other such factional strife is thought to be an accursed thing and neither party to be true patriots. Otherwise, they would never have endured thus to outrage their nurse and mother.162 But the moderate and reasonable thing is thought to be that the victors [470e] shall take away the crops of the vanquished, but that their temper shall be that of men who expect to be reconciled and not always to wage war.” “That way of feeling,” he said, “is far less savage than the other.” “Well, then,” said I, “is not the city that you are founding to be a Greek city?” “It must be,” he said. “Will they then not be good and gentle?” “Indeed they will.” “And won't they be philhellenes,163 lovers of Greeks, and will they not regard all Greece as their own and not renounce their part in the holy places common to all Greeks ?” “Most certainly.” “Will they not then regard any difference with Greeks [471a] who are their own people as a form of faction and refuse even to speak of it as war?” “Most certainly.” “And they will conduct their quarrels always looking forward to a reconciliation?” “By all means.” “They will correct them, then, for their own good, not chastising them with a view to their enslavement164 or their destruction, but acting as correctors, not as enemies.” “They will,” he said. “They will not, being Greeks, ravage Greek territory nor burn habitations, and they will not admit that in any city all the population are their enemies, men, women and children, but will say that only a few at any time are their foes,165 [471b] those, namely, who are to blame for the quarrel. And on all these considerations they will not be willing to lay waste the soil, since the majority are their friends, nor to destroy the houses, but will carry the conflict only to the point of compelling the guilty to do justice by the pressure of the suffering of the innocent.” “I,” he said, “agree that our citizens ought to deal with their Greek opponents on this wise, while treating barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks.” “Shall we lay down this law also, then, [471c] for our guardians that they are not to lay waste the land or burn the houses?” “Let us so decree,” he said, “and assume that this and our preceding prescriptions are right.

“But166 I fear, Socrates,that if you are allowed to go on in this fashion, you will never get to speak of the matter you put aside in order to say all this, namely, the possibility of such a polity coming into existence, and the way in which it could be brought to pass. I too am ready to admit that if it could be realized everything would be lovely167 for the state that had it, and I will add what you passed by, that they would also be [471d] most successful in war because they would be least likely to desert one another, knowing and addressing each other by the names of brothers, fathers, sons. And if the females should also join in their campaigns, whether in the ranks or marshalled behind to intimidate the enemy,168 or as reserves in case of need, I recognize that all this too would make them irresistible. And at home, also, I observe all the benefits that you omit to mention. But, taking it for granted that I concede [471e] these and countless other advantages, consequent on the realization of this polity, don't labor that point further; but let us at once proceed to try to convince ourselves of just this, that it is possible and how it is possible, [472a] dismissing everything else.” “This is a sudden assault,169 indeed,” said I, “that you have made on my theory, without any regard for my natural hesitation. Perhaps you don't realize that when I have hardly escaped the first two waves, you are now rolling up against me the ‘great third wave170’ of paradox, the worst of all. When you have seen and heard that, you will be very ready to be lenient,171 recognizing that I had good reason after all for shrinking and fearing to enter upon the discussion of so paradoxical a notion.” “The more such excuses you offer,” he said, “the less [472b] you will be released by us from telling in what way the realization of this polity is possible. Speak on, then, and do not put us off.” “The first thing to recall, then,” I said, “is that it was the inquiry into the nature of justice and injustice that brought us to this pass.172” “Yes; but what of it?” he said. “Oh, nothing,173” I replied, “only this: if we do discover what justice is, are we to demand that the just man shall differ from it in no respect, [472c] but shall conform in every way to the ideal? Or will it suffice us if he approximate to it as nearly as possible and partake of it more than others?” “That will content us,” he said. “A pattern, then,” said I, “was what we wanted when we were inquiring into the nature of ideal justice and asking what would be the character of the perfectly just man, supposing him to exist, and, likewise, in regard to injustice and the completely unjust man. We wished to fix our eyes upon them as types and models, so that whatever we discerned in them of happiness or the reverse would necessarily apply to ourselves [472d] in the sense that whosoever is likest them will have the allotment most like to theirs. Our purpose was not to demonstrate the possibility of the realization of these ideals.” “In that,” he said, “you speak truly.” “Do you think, then, that he would be any the less a good painter,174 who, after portraying a pattern of the ideally beautiful man and omitting no touch required for the perfection of the picture, should not be able to prove that it is actually possible for such a man to exist?” “Not I, by Zeus,” he said. “Then were not we, [472e] as we say, trying to create in words the pattern of a good state?” “Certainly.” “Do you think, then, that our words are any the less well spoken if we find ourselves unable to prove that it is possible for a state to be governed in accordance with our words?” “Of course not,” he said. “That, then,” said I, “is the truth175 of the matter. But if, to please you, we must do our best to show how most probably and in what respect these things would be most nearly realized, again, with a view to such a demonstration, grant me the same point.176” “What?” [473a] “Is it possible for anything to be realized in deed as it is spoken in word, or is it the nature of things that action should partake of exact truth less than speech, even if some deny it177? Do you admit it or not?” “I do,” he said. “Then don't insist,” said I, “that I must exhibit as realized in action precisely what we expounded in words. But if we can discover how a state might be constituted most nearly answering to our description, you must say that we have discovered that possibility of realization which you demanded. [473b] Will you not be content if you get this?” “I for my part would.” “And I too,” he said.

“Next, it seems, we must try to discover and point out what it is that is now badly managed in our cities, and that prevents them from being so governed, and what is the smallest change that would bring a state to this manner of government, preferably a change in one thing, if not, then in two, and, failing that, the fewest possible in number and the slightest in potency.” [473c] “By all means,” he said. “There is one change, then,” said I, “which I think that we can show would bring about the desired transformation. It is not a slight or an easy thing but it is possible.” “What is that?” said he. “I am on the very verge,” said I, “of what we likened to the greatest wave of paradox. But say it178 I will, even if, to keep the figure, it is likely to wash179 us away on billows of laughter and scorn. Listen.” “I am all attention,” he said. “Unless,” said I, “either philosophers become kings180 [473d] in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory [473e] ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun. But this is the thing that has made me so long shrink from speaking out, because I saw that it would be a very paradoxical saying. For it is not easy181 to see that there is no other way of happiness either for private or public life.” Whereupon he, “Socrates,” said he, “after hurling at us such an utterance and statement as that, you must expect to be attacked by a great multitude of our men of light and leading,182 who forthwith will, so to speak, cast off their garments183 [474a] and strip and, snatching the first weapon that comes to hand, rush at you with might and main, prepared to do184 dreadful deeds. And if you don't find words to defend yourself against them, and escape their assault, then to be scorned and flouted will in very truth185 be the penalty you will have to pay.” “And isn't it you,” said I, “that have brought this upon me and are to blame?” “And a good thing, too,” said he; “but I won't let you down, and will defend you with what I can. I can do so with my good will and my encouragement, and perhaps I might answer your questions more suitably186 than another. [474b] So, with such an aid to back you, try to make it plain to the doubters that the truth is as you say.” “I must try,” I replied, “since you proffer so strong an alliance. I think it requisite, then, if we are to escape the assailants you speak of, that we should define for them whom we mean by the philosophers, who we dare to say ought to be our rulers. When these are clearly discriminated it will be possible to defend ourselves by showing that to them by their very nature belong the study of philosophy [474c] and political leadership, while it befits the other sort to let philosophy alone and to follow their leader.” “It is high time,” he said, “to produce your definition.” “Come, then, follow me on this line, if we may in some fashion or other explain our meaning.” “Proceed,” he said. “Must I remind you, then,” said I, “or do you remember, that when we affirm that a man is a lover of something, it must be apparent that he is fond of all of it? It will not do to say that some of it he likes and some187 does not.”

“I think you will have to remind me,” he said, [474d] “for I don't apprehend at all.” “That reply, Glaucon,” said I, “befits another rather than you. It does not become a lover to forget that all adolescents in some sort sting and stir the amorous lover of youth and appear to him deserving of his attention and desirable. Is not that your ‘reaction’ to the fair? One, because his nose is tip-tilted,188 you will praise as piquant, the beak of another you pronounce right-royal, the intermediate type you say strikes the harmonious mean, [474e] the swarthy are of manly aspect, the white are children of the gods divinely fair, and as for honey-hued, do you suppose the very word is anything but the euphemistic invention of some lover who can feel no distaste for sallowness when it accompanies the blooming time of youth? And, in short, there is no pretext [475a] you do not allege and there is nothing you shrink from saying to justify you in not rejecting any who are in the bloom of their prime.” “If it is your pleasure,” he said, “to take me as your example of this trait in lovers, I admit it for the sake of the argument.” “Again,” said I, “do you not observe the same thing in the lovers of wine?189 They welcome every wine on any pretext.” “They do, indeed.” And so I take it you have observed that men who are covetous of honor,190 if they can't get themselves elected generals, are captains of a company.191 And if they can't be honored [475b] by great men and dignitaries, are satisfied with honor from little men and nobodies. But honor they desire and must have.” “Yes, indeed.” “Admit, then, or reject my proposition. When we say a man is keen about something, shall we say that he has an appetite for the whole class or that he desires only a part and a part not?” “The whole,” he said. “Then the lover of wisdom, too, we shall affirm, desires all wisdom, not a part and a part not.” [475c] “Certainly.” “The student, then, who is finical192 about his studies, especially when he is young and cannot yet know by reason what is useful and what is not, we shall say is not a lover of learning or a lover of wisdom, just as we say that one who is dainty about his food is not really hungry, has not an appetite for food, and is not a lover of food, but a poor feeder.” “We shall rightly say so.” “But the one who feels no distaste in sampling every study, and who attacks his task of learning gladly and cannot get enough of it, him we shall justly pronounce the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, shall we not?” To which Glaucon replied,193 [475d] “You will then be giving the name to a numerous and strange band, for all the lovers of spectacles194 are what they are, I fancy, by virtue of their delight in learning something. And those who always want to hear some new thing195 are a very queer lot to be reckoned among philosophers. You couldn't induce them to attend a serious debate or any such entertainment,196 but as if they had farmed out their ears to listen to every chorus in the land, they run about to all the Dionysiac festivals,197 never missing one, either in the towns or in the country-villages. Are we to designate all these, then, and similar folk [475e] and all the practitioners of the minor arts as philosophers?” “Not at all,” I said; “but they do bear a certain likeness198 to philosophers.”

“Whom do you mean, then, by the true philosophers?” “Those for whom the truth is the spectacle of which they are enamored,199” said I. “Right again,200” said he; “but in what sense do you mean it?” “It would be by no means easy to explain it to another,” I said, “but I think that you will grant me this.” “What?” “That since the fair and honorable is the opposite of the base and ugly, they are two.” [476a] “Of course.” “And since they are two, each is one.201” “That also.” “And in respect of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the ideas or forms, the same statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of their communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves everywhere, each as a multiplicity of aspects.” “Right,” he said. “This, then,” said I, “is my division. I set apart and distinguish those of whom you were just speaking, the lovers of spectacles and the arts, [476b] and men of action, and separate from them again those with whom our argument is concerned and who alone deserve the appellation of philosophers or lovers of wisdom.” “What do you mean?” he said. “The lovers of sounds and sights,” I said, “delight in beautiful tones and colors and shapes and in everything that art fashions out of these, but their thought is incapable of apprehending and taking delight in the nature of the beautiful in itself.” “Why, yes,” he said, “that is so.” “And on the other hand, will not those be few202 who would be able to approach beauty itself and contemplate it in and by itself?” [476c] “They would, indeed.” “He, then, who believes in beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it—do you think that his life is a dream or a waking203? Just consider. Is not the dream state, whether the man is asleep or awake, just this: the mistaking of resemblance for identity?” “I should certainly call that dreaming,” he said. “Well, then, take the opposite case: the man whose thought recognizes a beauty in itself, [476d] and is able to distinguish that self-beautiful and the things that participate in it, and neither supposes the participants to be it nor it the participants—is his life, in your opinion, a waking or a dream state?” “He is very much awake,” he replied. “Could we not rightly, then, call the mental state of the one as knowing, knowledge, and that of the other as opining, opinion?” “Assuredly.” “Suppose, now, he who we say opines but does not know should be angry and challenge our statement as not true. [476e] Can we find any way of soothing him and gently204 winning him over, without telling him too plainly that he is not in his right mind?” “We must try,” he said. “Come, then, consider what we are to say to him, or would you have us question him in this fashion—premising that if he knows anything, nobody grudges it him, but we should be very glad to see him knowing something—but tell205 us this: Does he who knows know something or nothing? Do you reply in his behalf.” “I will reply,” he said, “that he knows something.” “Is it something that is or is not206?” “That is. How could [477a] that which is not be known?” “We are sufficiently assured of this, then, even if we should examine it from every point of view, that that which entirely207‘is’ is entirely knowable, and that which in no way 'is' is in every way unknowable.” “Most sufficiently.” “Good. If a thing, then, is so conditioned as both to be and not to be, would it not lie between that which absolutely and unqualifiedly is and that which in no way is?” “Between.” “Then if knowledge pertains to that which is and ignorance of necessity to that which is not, [477b] for that which lies between we must seek for something between nescience and science, if such a thing there be.” “By all means.” “Is there a thing which we call opinion?” “Surely.” “Is it a different faculty from science or the same?” “A different.” “Then opinion is set over one thing and science over another, each by virtue of its own distinctive power or faculty.” “That is so.” “May we say, then, that science is naturally related to that which is,208 to know that and how that which is is? But rather, before we proceed, I think we must draw the following distinctions.” “What ones?” [477c]

“Shall we say that faculties,209 powers, abilities are a class of entities by virtue of which we and all other things are able to do what we or they are able to do? I mean that sight and hearing, for example, are faculties, if so be that you understand the class or type that I am trying to describe.” “I understand,” he said. “Hear, then, my notion about them. In a faculty I cannot see any color or shape or similar mark such as those on which in many other cases I fix my eyes in discriminating in my thought one thing [477d] from another. But in the case of a faculty I look to one thing only—that to which it is related and what it effects,210 and it is in this way that I come to call211 each one of them a faculty, and that which is related to212 the same thing and accomplishes the same thing I call the same faculty, and that to another I call other. How about you, what is your practice?” “The same,” he said. “To return, then, my friend,” said I, “to science or true knowledge, do you say that it is a faculty and a power, [477e] or in what class do you put it?” “Into this,” he said, “the most potent of all213 faculties.” “And opinion—shall we assign it to some other class than faculty.” “By no means,” he said, “for that by which we are able to opine is nothing else than the faculty of opinion.214” “But not long ago you agreed that science and opinion are not identical.” “How could any rational man affirm the identity of the infallible with the fallible?” “Excellent,” said I, “and we are plainly agreed [478a] that opinion is a different215 thing from scientific knowledge.” “Yes, different.” “Each of them, then, since it has a different power, is related to a different object.” “Of necessity.” “Science, I presume, to that which is, to know the condition of that which is. But opinion, we say, opines.” “Yes.” “Does it opine the same thing that science knows, and will the knowable and the opinable be identical, or is that impossible?” “Impossible by our admissions,216” he said. “If different faculties are naturally related to different objects [478b] and both opinion and science are faculties, but each different from the other, as we say—these admissions do not leave place for the identity of the knowable and the opinable.” “Then, if that which is is knowable, something other than that which is would be the opinable.217” “Something else.” “Does it opine that which is not,218 or is it impossible even to opine that which is not? Reflect: Does not he who opines bring his opinion to bear upon something or shall we reverse ourselves and say that it is possible to opine, yet opine nothing?” “That is impossible.” “Then he who opines opines some one thing.” “Yes.” “But surely that which is not could not be designated as some one thing, but [478c] most rightly as nothing at all. To that which is not we of necessity assigned nescience, and to that which is, knowledge.” “Rightly,” he said. “Then neither that which is nor that which is not is the object of opinion.” “It seems not.” “Then opinion would be neither nescience nor knowledge.” “So it seems.” “Is it then a faculty outside of these, exceeding either knowledge in lucidity or ignorance in obscurity?” “It is neither.” “But do you deem opinion something darker than knowledge but brighter than ignorance?” “Much so,” he said. “And does it lie within the boundaries [478d] of the two?” “Yes.” “Then opinion would be between the two.” “Most assuredly.” “Were we not saying a little while ago219 that if anything should turn up220 such that it both is and is not, that sort of thing would lie between that which purely and absolutely is and that which wholly is not, and that the faculty correlated with it would be neither science or nescience, but that which should appear to hold a place correspondingly between nescience and science.” “Right.” “And now there has turned up between these two the thing that we call opinion.” “There has.” [478e]

“It would remain, then, as it seems, for us to discover that which partakes of both, of to be and not to be, and that could not be rightly designated either in its exclusive purity; so that, if it shall be discovered, we may justly pronounce it to be the opinable, thus assigning extremes to extremes and the intermediate to the intermediate. Is not that so?” “It is.” “This much premised, let him tell me, [479a] I will say, let him answer me, that good221 fellow who does not think there is a beautiful in itself or any222 idea of beauty in itself always remaining the same and unchanged, but who does believe in many beautiful things—the lover of spectacles, I mean, who cannot endure to hear anybody say that the beautiful is one and the just one, and so of other things—and this will be our question: My good fellow, is there any one of these many fair-and-honorable things that will not sometimes appear ugly and base223? And of the just things, that will not seem unjust? And of the pious things, that will not seem impious?” “No, it is inevitable,” he said, “that they would appear [479b] to be both beautiful in a way and ugly, and so with all the other things you asked about.” “And again, do the many double things224 appear any the less halves than doubles?” “None the less.” “And likewise of the great and the small things, the light and the heavy things—will they admit these predicates any more than their opposites?” “No,” he said, “each of them will always hold of, partake of, both.” “Then is each of these multiples rather than it is not that which one affirms it to be?” “They are like those jesters who palter with us in a double sense at banquets,” he replied, “and resemble the children's riddle225 [479c] about the eunuch and his hitting of the bat—with what and as it sat on what they signify that he struck it. For these things too equivocate, and it is impossible to conceive firmly226 any one of them to be or not to be or both or neither.” “Do you know what to do with them, then?” said I, “and can you find a better place to put them than that midway between existence or essence and the not-to-be? For we shall surely not discover a darker region than not-being227 that they should still more not be, [479d] nor brighter than being that they should still more be.” “Most true,” he said. “We would seem to have found, then, that the many conventions228 of the many about the fair and honorable and other things are tumbled about in229 the mid-region between that which is not and that which is in the true and absolute sense.” “We have so found it.” “But we agreed in advance that, if anything of that sort should be discovered, it must be denominated opinable, not knowable, the wanderer between being caught by the faculty that is betwixt and between.” “We did.” “We shall affirm, then, that those who view many beautiful things [479e] but do not see the beautiful itself and are unable to follow another's guidance230 to it, and many just things, but not justice itself, and so in all cases—we shall say that such men have opinions about all things, but know nothing of the things they opine.” “Of necessity.” “And, on the other hand, what of those who contemplate the very things themselves in each case, ever remaining the same and unchanged—shall we not say that they know and do not merely opine?” “That, too, necessarily follows.” “Shall we not also say that the one welcomes to his thought and loves the things [480a] subject to knowledge and the other those to opinion? Do we not remember that we said that those loved and regarded tones and beautiful colours and the like, but they could not endure the notion of the reality of the beautiful itself?” “We do remember.” “Shall we then offend their ears if we call them doxophilists231 rather than philosophers and will they be very angry if we so speak?” “Not if they heed my counsel,” he said, “for to be angry with truth is not lawful.” “Then to those who in each and every kind welcome the true being, lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion232 is the name we must give.” “By all means.”

1 Cf. on 427 E, and Newman, Introduction to Aristotle Polotics p. 14; for ὀρθή, “normal,” see p.423.

2 κατασκευήν: a highly general word not to be pressed in this periphrasis. Cf. Gorgias 455 E, 477 B.

3 Cf. 562 C, Theaetetus 180 C, Stein on Herodotus i. 5. For the transition here to the digression of books V., VI., and VII. cf. Introduction p. xvii, Phaedo 84 C. “Digression” need not imply that these books were not a part of the original design.

4 μεταβαίνειν: the word is half technical. Cf. 547 C, 550 D, Laws 676 A, 736 D-E, 894 A.

5 ἀπωτέρω absolutely. Cf. Cratinus 229 Kock ὄνοι κάθηνται τῆς λύρας ἀπωτέρω.

6 Cf. 327 B.

7 Cf. 359 E.

8 Cf. on 327 C.

9 Cf. 337 D, 343 B, 421 C, 612 C, Laches 188 E, Meno 80 B. There is a play on the double meaning, “What, pray?” and “Why, pray?”

10 Cf. Sophocles Trach. 437.

11 So Isocrates xv. 74ὅλοις εἴδεσι.

12 Cf. 424 A, Laws 739 C. Aristotle says that the possessions of friends should be separate in ownership but common in use, as at Sparta. Cf. Newman, Introduction to Aristotle Politics p. 201, Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius x. 11, Aristotle Politics 1263 a 30 ff., Euripides Andromache 270.

13 Cf. 459 D, Laws 668 D, Aristotle Politics 1269 b 13, Shakespeare Tro. and Cre. I. i. 23 “But here's yet in the word hereafter the kneading, the making of the cake,” etc.

14 Cf. Laws 665 B 7.

15 Cf. Aristotle Politics 1264 a 12.

16 Emphatic. Cf. 427 E.

17 γενομένους: a noun is supplied from the preceding verb. Cf. on 598 C, and on 341 D.

18 μέγα . . . καὶ ὅλον: cf. 469 C, 527 C, Phaedo 79 E, Laws 779 B, 944 C, Symposium 188 D, Demosthenes ii. 22, Aeschylus Prom. 961.

19 Cf. Protagoras 330 C.

20 Cf. Theaetetus 184 C, Gorgias 469 C.

21 For the metaphor cf. Euripides Bacchae 710 and σμῆνος, Republic 574 D, Cratylus 401 C, Meno 72 A.

22 Cf. Philebus 36 D, Theaetetus 184 A, Cratylus 411 A.

23 Thrasymachus speaks here for the last time. He is mentioned in 357 A, 358 B-C, 498 C, 545 B, 590 D.

24 Lit. “to smelt ore.” The expression was proverbial and was explained by an obscure anecdote. Cf. Leutsch, Paroemiographi, ii. pp. 91, 727, and i. p. 464, and commentators on Herodotus iii. 102.

25 Plato often anticipates and repels the charge of tedious length (see Politicus 286 C, Philebus 28 D, 36 D). Here the thought takes a different turn (as 504 C). The δέ γε implies a slight rebuke (Cf. Class. Phil. xiv. pp. 165-174).

26 So 498 A. Cf. on Aristophanes Acharnians 434, and Laws 792 A.

27 Cf. 456 C, Thucydides vi. 98, Introduction xvii.

28 εἰ ὅ τι μάλιστα: a common formula for what a disputant can afford to concede. Cf. Lysias xiii. 52, xxii. 1, xxii. 10. It occurs six times in the Charmides.

29 Cf. Introduction xxxi-xxxii, 456 C, 499 C, 540 D, Laws 736 D, Aristotle Politics 1260 b 29, 1265 a 17δεῖ μὲν οὖν ὑποτίθεσθαι κατ᾽ εὐχην, μηδὲν μέντοι ἀδύνατον.

30 ἀγνώμονες=inconsiderate, unreasonable, as Andocides ii. 6 shows.

31 Cf. on 452 C-D, Euthydemus 3 C “To be laughed at is no matter,”Laws 830 Bτὸν τῶν ἀνοήτων γέλωτα, Euripides fr. 495.

32 Ἀδράστειαν: practically equivalent to Nemesis. Cf. our “knock on wood.” Cf. Posnansky in Breslauer Phil. Abhandl. v. 2, “Nemesis und Adrasteia”: Herodotus i. 35, Aeschylus Prom. 936, Euripides Rhesus 342, Demosthenes xxv. 37καὶ Ἀδράστειαν μὲν ἄνθρωπος ὢν ἐγὼ προσκυνῶ. For the moral earnestness of what follows cf. 336 E, Gorgias 458 A, and Joubert apudArnold, Essays in Crit. p. 29 “Ignorance . . . is in itself in intellectual matters a crime of the first order.”

33 γὰρ οὖν, “for in fact,” but often with the suggestion that the fact has to be faced, as e.g. in Timaeus 47 E, where the point is often missed.

34 Almost proverbial. Cf. my note on Horace, Odes iii. 27. 21. Plato is speaking here from the point of view of the ordinary man, and not from that of his “Sermon on the Mount ethics.” Cf. Philebus 49 D and Gorgias 480 E, where Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, ii. pp. 332 and 350, goes astray. Cf. Class. Phil. vol. i. p. 297.

35 ὥσπερ marks the legal metaphor to which ἐκεῖ below refers. Cf. Laws 869 E, and Euripides Hippolytus 1433 and 1448-1450, with Hirzel,Δίκη etc. p. 191, n. 1, Demosthenes xxxvii. 58-59. Plato transfers the idea to the other world in Phaedo 114 A-B, where the pardon of their victims is required for the release of sinners. The passage is used by the older critics in the comparison of Plato with Christianity.

36 Sophron's Mimes are said to have been so classified. For δρᾶμα cf. also Theaetetus 150 A.

37 For the use of analogies drawn from animals cf. 375-376, 422 D, 466 D, 467 B, 491 D-E, 537 A, 546 A-B, 564 A. Plato is only pretending to deduce his conclusions from his imagery. Aristotle's literal-minded criticism objects that animals have no “economy,”Politics 1264 b 4-6.

38 Reformers always denounce this source of wit while conservative satirists maintain that ridicule is a test of truth. Cf. e.g. Renan, Avenir de la Science, p. 439 “Le premier pas dans la carrière philosophique est de se cuirasser contre le ridicule,” and Lucian, Piscator 14 “No harm can be done by a joke; that on the contrary, whatever is beautiful shines brighter . . . like gold cleansed,” Harmon in Loeb translation, iii. 22. There was a literature for and against custom (sometimes called συνήθεια) of which there are echoes in Cicero's use of consuetudo, Acad. ii. 75, De off. i. 148, De nat. deor. i. 83.

39 ᾖ λέγεται: cf. on 389 D.

40 Cf. Theaetetus 162 B, and the ὀψιμαθής or late learner in Theophrastus'Characters xxvii. 14 Loeb. Euripides Andromache 596 ff. denounces the light attire of Spartan women when exercising.

41 Cf. Propert. iv. 13 Muller.

42 For a variation of this image cf. 568 D.

43 Plato plays on his own favorite phrase. The proper business of the wit is to raise a laugh. Cf. Symposium 189 B.

44 Cf. Thucydides i. 6, Herodotus i. 10. Sikes in Anthropolgy and the Classics says this was borrowed from Thucydides, whom Wilamowitz says Plato never read. Cf. Dio Chrys. xiii. 226 M. For ἐξ οὗ cf. Demosthenes iv. 3, Isocrates v. 47.

45 Lit. “what (seemed) laughable to (in) the eyes.”

46 Cf. 607 Dδοῖμεν . . . λόγον.

47 Plato as elsewhere asks whether it is true of all, some, or none. So of the commingling of ideas in Sophist 251 D. Aristotle (Politics 1260 b 38) employs the same would-be exhaustive method.

48 ἀρχόμενος . . . τελευτήσειν: an overlooked reference to a proverb also overlooked by commentators on Pindar, Pyth. i. 35. Cf. Pindar, fr. 108 A Loeb, Laws 775 E, Sophocles, fr. 831 (Pearson), Antiphon the Sophist, fr. 60 (Diels).

49 This pleading the opponent's case for him is common in Plato. Cf. especially the plea for Protagoras in Theaetetus 166-167.

50 Apparently a mixture of military and legal phraseology. Cf.ἐκπέρσῃ in Protagoras 340 A, Iliad v. 140τὰ δ᾽ ἐρῆμα φοβεῖται, and the legal phrase ἐρήμην καταδιαιτᾶν or οφλεῖν.

51 ὡμολογεῖτε: cf. 369 E f. For κατὰ φύσιν cf. 370 C and 456 C. The apparent emphasis of φύσις in this book is of little significance. Cf. Laws, passsim.

52 Cf. the πέλαγος τῶν λόγωνProtagoras 338 A. Similarly Sidney Smith: “cut his cable, and spread his enormous canvas, and launch into the wide sea of reasoning eloquence.”

53 An allusion to the story of Arion and the dolphin in Herodotus i. 24, as ὑπολαβεῖν perhaps proves. For ἄπορον cf. 378 A.

54 γενναία: often as here ironical in Plato. Cf. Sophist 231 B, where interpreters misunderstand it. But the new L. and S. is correct.

55 ἀντιλογικῆς: one of several designations for the eristic which Isocrates maliciously confounds with dialectic while Plato is careful to distinguish them. Cf. E. S. Thompson, The Meno of Plato, Excursus V., pp. 272 ff. and the introduction to E.H. Gifford's Euthydemus, p. 42. Among the marks of eristic are the pusuit of merely verbal oppositions as here and Euthydemus 278 A, 301 B, Theaetetus 164 C; the neglect to distinguish and divide, Philebus 17 A, Phaedrus 265 E, 266 A, B; the failure to distinguish the hypothesis from its consequences, Phaedo 101 E, Parmenides 135-136.

56 ἄκοντες is almost “unconscious.” Cf. Philebus 14 C.

57 Greek style often couples thus two adverbs, the second defining more specifically the first, and, as here and often in Plato and Aristophanes, with humorous or paradoxical effect. Cf. Aristophanes Knights 800εὖ καὶ μιαρῶς. So Shakespeare “well and chirurgeonly.”

58 Cf. Sophist 256 A-B for the relativity of “same” and “other.”Politicus 292 C describes in different language the correct method.

59 For this humorously trivial illustration cf. Mill, Rep. Gov. chap. viii. p. 190: “I have taken no account of difference of sex. I consider it to be as entirely irrelevant to political rights as difference in height, or in the color of the hair;” and Mill's disciple Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, i. 291: “We may at least grant that the burden of proof should be upon those who would disfranchise all red-haired men.”

60 Cf. Laches 190 Dεἰς ὃ τείνειν δοκεῖ, Protagoras 345 B.

61 Adam makes difficulties, but Cf. Laws 963 Aνοῦν . . . κυβερνητικὸν μὲν καὶ ἰατρικὸν καὶ στρατηγικόν. The translation follows Hermann despite the objection that this reading forestalls the next sentence. Cf. Campbell ad loc. and Apelt, Woch. für klass. Phil., 1903, p. 344.

62 Plato anticipates the objection that the Socratic dialectic surprises assent. Cf. more fully 487 B, and for a comic version Hippias Major 295 A “if I could go off for a little by myself in solitude I would tell you the answer more precisely than precision itself.”

63 Cf. Politicus 286 E, where this is said to be the object of teaching.

64 Cf. Protagoras 326 B, Republic 498 B, 410 C, Isocrates xv. 180, Xenophon Memorabilia ii. 1. 28.

65 On the alleged superiority of men even in women's occupations cf. the amusing diatribe of the old bachelor in George Eliot's Adam Bede, chap. xxi.: “I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all but what a man can do better than women, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way,” and the remarks on women as cooks of the bachelor Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 234. But Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 9. 11 takes the ordinary view. On the character of women generally Cf. Laws 781 and Aristotle in Zeller trans. ii. 215.

66 Cf. Cratylus 392 Cὡς τὸ ὅλον εἰπεῖν γένος.

67 Cf. Gorgias 517 C.

68 Cf. on 450 D.

69 Cf. Introduction p. xvii.

70 This is only a more complicated case of the point of style noted on 349 D. Cf. Cratylus 386 A, Sophist 247 A.

71 Cf. on 421 A. We should not press this incidental phrase to prove that Plato would not educate all the citizens, as he in fact does in the Laws and by implication in the Politicus.

72 Cf. Morley, Voltaire, p. 103: “It has been rather the fashion to laugh at the Marquise de Châtelet, for no better reason than that she, being a woman, studied Newton. . . . There is probably nothing which would lead to so rapid and marked an improvement in the world as a large increase of the number of women in it with the will and the capacity to master Newton as thoroughly as she did.”

73 Cf. Rousseau, Lettre à d'Alembert, “Couvertes de l'honnêteté publique.”

74 Cf. Pindar, fr. 209 Schroeder,ἀτελῆ σοφίας καρπὸν δρέπ（ειν). Plato varies the quotation to suit his purpose.

75 This is one of the chief texts for the alleged utilitarianism of Plato, a question too complicated to be settled by anything less than a comparative study of the Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedo, Philebus, Republic(IX) and Laws.ὠφέλιμον suggests “benefit” rather than “utility.” Cf. Introduction to second volume of this translation, and on 339 A-B.

76 Cf. Aeschylus Septem, in fine.

77 For this form of exaggeration Cf. on 414 C, 339 B.

78 On the whole topic cf. Introduction p. xxxiv, Lucian, Fugitivi 18οὐκ εἰδότες ὅπως ὁ ἱερὸς ἐκεῖνος ἠξίου κοινὰς ἡγεῖσθαι τὰς γυναῖκας, Epictetus fr. 53, p. 21, Rousseau, Emile, v: “je ne parle point de cette prétendue communauté de femmes dont le reproche tant répété prouve que ceux qui le lui font ne l'ont jamais lu.” But Rousseau dissents violently from what he calls “cette promiscuité civile qui confond partout les deux sexes dans les mêmes emplois.” Cf. further the denunciations of the Christian fathers passim, who are outdone by De Quincey's “Otaheitian carnival of licentious appetite, connected with a contempt of human life which is excessive even for paganism.” Most of the obvious parallels between Plato and Aristophanes'Ecclesiazusae follow as a matter of course from the very notion of communal marriage and supply no evidfence for the dating of a supposed earlier edition of the whole or a part of the Republic. In any case the ideas of the Republic might have come to Aristophanes in conversation before publication; and the Greeks knew enough of the facts collected in such books as Westermarck's Marriage, not to be taken altogether by surprise by Plato's speculations. Cf. Herodotus iv. 104, and Aristotle Politics 1262 a 20. Cf. further Adam's exhaustive discussion in the appendix to this book, Grube, “The Marriage Laws in Plato's Republic,”Classical Quarterly, 1927, pp. 95 ff., Teichmüller, Literarische Fehden, i. p. 19 n., and the more recent literature collected in Praechter-Ueberweg, 12th ed. i. p. 207, Pöhlmann, Geschichte der Sozialenfrage und des Sozialsmus in der antiken Welt, ii. p. 578, Pohlenz, Aus Platon's Werdezeit, pp. 225-228, C. Robert, Hermes lvii. pp. 351 ff.

79 A distinct suggestion of the topics of the “useful” and the “possible” in Aristotle's Rhetoric.

80 Cf. Isocrates ii. 47, on “those who in solitude do not deliberate but imagine what they wish,” and Chesterton's saying, “All feeble spirits live in the future, because it is a soft job”; cf. further on day-dreams, Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen, ii. p. 71, and Lucian's Πλοῖον ἢ εὐχαί. Plato's description anticipates the most recent psychology in everything except the term “autistic thinking.”

81 ἄλλως: Cf. 495 B.

82 Cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Clouds 727.

83 Cf. Herodotus ix. 8. He returns to the postponed topic in 466 D, but again digresses and does not take it up definitely till 471 C or rather 473 C-D. The reason is that the third wave of paradox is also the condition of the possibility of realization. Cf. Introduction p. xvii.

84 Cf. on 340 A-B.

85 That is to say, they are to imitate or conform to our principles in the details which we leave to them. So in the Laws, 770 B, 846 C, 876 E, and the secondary divinities in the Timaeus, 69 C. Cf. Politicus 301 A, and Aristotle Politics 1261 b 2μιμεῖται.

86 Cf. 456 B. Plato has already explained that he means “of like nature in respect to capacity for government.” There is no contradiction of the doctrine of the Politicus, 310 A (Cf. Laws 773 A-B) that the mating should blend opposite temperaments. Those elements are already mixed in the selection of the guardians. Cf. 375 B-C, 410 D-E and Unity of Plato's Thought, p. 62, n. 481.

87 The phrase is imitated by Plutarch, Adv. Col. 1122 Dφυσικαῖς, οὐ γεωμετρικαῖς ἑλκόμενος ἀνάγκαις.

88 Cf. Laws 789 B-C.

89 The riddling question to which the response is “what?” is a mannerism derived from tragedy, which becomes very frequent in the later style of the Sophist, Politicus and Philebus.

90 This commonplace of stirpiculture or eugenics, as it is now called, begins with Theognis 184, and has thus far got no further.

91 A recurrence to the metaphor of 389 B, as we are reminded below in D.

92 Cf. 389 B, 414 C, and Laws 663 Dἐπ᾽ ἀγαθῷ ψεύδεσθαι

93 Cf. on 343 A-B and Politicus 267 B-C, 268 B.αὖ below merely marks the second consideration, harmony, the first being eugenics.

94 Plato apparently forgets that this legislation applies only to the guardians. The statement that ancient civilization was free from the shadow of Malthusianism requires qualification by this and many other passages. Cf. 372 C and Laws 740 D-E. The ancients in fact took it for granted.

95 Opinions differ whether this is euphemism for exposure. On the frequency or infrequency of this practice cf. Professor La Rue Van Hook's article in T.A.P.A. vol. li, and that of H. Bolkestein, Class. Phil. vol. xvii. (1922) pp. 222-239.

96 Cf. on 414 B and Aristotle Politics 1262 a 14 ff.

97 Another favorite idea and expression. Cf. Gorgias 459 C, Laws 648 C, 713 D, 720 C, 779 A, 903 E, Isocrates iv. 36, Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 13. 5.

98 Cf. on 458 C.

99 Half humorous legal language. Cf. Aristotle Politics 1335 b 28λειτουργεῖν . . . πρὸς τεκνοποιίαν, and Lucan's “urbi pater est, urbique maritus” (Phars. ii. 388). The dates for marriage are given a little differently in the Laws, 785 B, 833 C-D, men 30-35, women 16-20. On the whole question and Aristotle's opinion cf. Newman, Introduction to Aristotle Politics p. 183; cf. also Grube, Class. Quarterly 1927, pp. 95 ff., “The Marriage Laws in Plato's Republic.”

100 Cf. Horace, Odes iv. 4. 29.

101 Cf. Laws 838 A and 924 E.

102 Cf. Newman, op. cit. p. 187.

103 Cf. Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology, p. 89: “A native of Hawaii, for example, calls by the name of father . . . every man of an age such that he could be his father.” Cf. Aristophanes Eccles . 636-637.

104 Cf. 363 D and Laws 899 E, 927 B.

105 We may perhaps infer from the more explicit reference in Theaetetus 193 C that Plato is thinking of the “recognition” by footprints in Aeschylus Choeph.205-210.

106 Cf. 423 B, Aristotle Politics 1261 b 16 ff., “Plato's Laws and the Unity of Plato's Thought,”Class. Phil. ix. (1914) p. 358, Laws 664 A, 739 C-E, Julian (Teubner) ii. 459, Teichmüller, Lit. Fehden, vol. i. p. 19, Mill, Utilitarianism, iii. 345: “In an improving state of the human mind the influences are constantly on the increase which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest, which, if perfect, would make him never think of or desire any beneficial condition for himself in the benefits of which they are not included;” Spinoza, paraphrased by Hoffding, Hist. of Mod. Phil. i. p. 325: “It would be best, since they seek a common good, if all could be like one mind and one body.” Rabelais I. lvii. parodies Plato: “Si quelqu'un ou quelqu'une disoit 'beuvons,' tous beuvoient” etc. Aristotle's criticism, though using some of Plato's phrases, does not mention his name at this point but speaks of τίνες, Politics 1261 b 7.

107 Cf. Laws 829 A.

108 I so translate to bring out the analogy between Plato and e.g. Sherrington. For “to the soul” Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, n. 328, Laws 673 A, Timaeus 45 D, 584 C, Philebus 33, 34, 43 B-C. Poschenrieder, Die Platonischen Dialoge in ihrem Verhältnisse zu den Hippocratischen Schriften, p. 67, compares the De locis in homine, vi. p. 278 Littré.

109 For these further confirmations of an established thesis cf. on 442-443.

110 τὰ ὀνόματα μόνον may be thought to anticipate Aristotle's objections.

111 Cf. 554 Dὅτι οὐκ ἄμεινον.

112 Cf. the reliance on a unanimous public opinion in the Laws, 838 C-D.

113 περὶ . . . περί: for the preposition repeated in a different sense cf. Isocrates iv. 34, ix, 3, and Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III. i. “As here by Caesar and by you cut off.”

114 δόγματός τε καὶ ῥήματος: Cf. Sophist 265 C, Laws 797 C.

115 Cf. 416-417.

116 For a similar list Cf. Laws 842 D. Aristotle, Politics 1263 b 20 f., objects that it is not lack of unity but wickedness that causes these evils.

117 Softens the strong word οἰχήσεται.

118 Cf. A.J.P. vol. xiii. p. 364, Aeschines iii. 255, Xenophon Rep. Lac. 4. 5, Laws 880 A.

119 One of the profoundest of Plato's political aphorisms. Cf. on 545 D, Laws 683 E, and Aristotle Politics 1305 a 39.

120 Alma sdegnosa. Cf. 371 E, 396 B, 397 D, 525 D.

121 Cf. Aristotle Politics 1263 b 22.

122 Cf. 416 D, 548 A, 550 D.

123 Proverbial. Cf. Sophist 241 D.

124 Cf. 540B-C, 621D, Laws 715C, 807C, 840A, 946-947, 964C, Cicero Pro Flacco 31 “Olympionicen esse apud Graecos prope maius et gloriosius est quam Romae trimphasse.” The motive is anticipated or parodied by Dracontion, Athenaeus 237 D, where the parasite boasts—γέρα γὰρ αὐτοῖς ταῦτα τοῖς τἀλύμπιανικῶσι δέδοται χρηστότητος οὕνεκα.

125 Cf. 419 E-20.

126 Cf. 420 C. Omitting τό, translate “that we were not fixing our eyes on any one class, and portraying that as happy.”

127 ἐπικούρων: the word here includes the rulers.

128 κατά, “comparable to, on a level with.” Cf. Apology 17 B, Gorgias 512 B.

129 μηδέ: cf. 420 D.

130 Hes. WD 40. So Plat. Laws 690 E.

131 τήν: this order is frequent and sometimes significant in the Laws. Cf. 690 C, 720 E, 814 E, 853 A, 857 D, 923 B.

132 Cf. on 451 D. The community in this case, of course, refers only to occupations.

133 μὲν γάρ: forced transition to a delaying digression.

134 So with modifications Laws 785 B, 794 C-D, 804 D-E, 806 A-B, 813-814, 829 E.

135 For this practice of Greek artists see Klein, Praxiteles, Newman, Introduction to Aristotle Politics p. 352, Pater, The Renaissance 104, Protagoras 328 A, Laws 643 B-C, Protagoras frag. 3 (Diels), Aristotle Politics 1336 b 36, Iambl.Protrept. xx., Polyb. vi. 2. 16, iii. 71. 6καὶ παιδομαθῆ περὶ τὰ πολεμικά, Aristides x. 72 who quoted Plato; Antidotus, Athenaeus, 240 B, where the parasite boasts that he was a παιδομαθής in his art, and Sosipater, Athenaeus 377 F, where the cook makes the same boast, Phocyl. frag. 13, (Edmonds, Elegy and IambusI., L.C.L.), Henry Arthur Jones, Patriotism and popular Education, Kipling, From Sea to Sea, p. 361. Greek language and satire contrasted such παιδομαθεῖς with the ὀψιμαθεῖς or late learners.

136 προσμηχανᾶσθαι: Cf. on 414 B.

137 παρὰ δόξαν: cf. Thucydides i. 122ἥκιστα ὁ πόλεμος ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς χωρεῖ, ii. 11, iii. 30, iv. 102, vii. 61.

138 πτεροῦν: metaphorical. In Aristophanes Birds 1436-1438 literal.

139 The terms are technical. Cf. Laws 943 D ff., Lipsius, Das attische Recht（1908), ii. pp. 452 ff.

140 εἰς τοὺς πολεμίους: technical. Cf. inscription in Bulletin de corr. hellénique, xii. p. 224, n. 1τῶν ἁλόντων εἰς τοὺς πολεμίους.

141 ἄγρᾳ: the word is chosen to give a touch of Spartan, or, as we should say, Roman severity. Cf. Sophist 235 C, Aeschylus Eumenides 148, Horace, Odes, iii. 5. 33 ff. Plutarch, De aud. poet. 30, says that in Homer no Greeks are taken prisoners, only Trojans.

142 The deplorable facetiousness of the following recalls the vulgarity of Xenophon's guard-house conversations. It is almost the only passage in Plato that one would wish to blot. Helvetius, otherwise anything but a Platonist, characteristically adopts it, Lange, History of Materialism, ii. p. 86.

143 Hom. Il. 7.321-322. Cf. also viii. 162, xii. 311.

144 I.e, the back. Hom. Il. 7.321-322.

145 Cf. 415 A.

146 Cf. Stewart, Myths of Plato, p. 437.

147 Cf. 427 B-C.

148 ἐξηγῆται: cf. 427 C.

149 τὸν λοιπὸν δὴ χρόνον: cf. Pindar in Meno 81 C, Phaedo 81 A.

150 For this Pan-Hellenic feeling cf. Xenophon Ages. 7. 6, Hellen . i. 6. 14, Aeschines ii. 115, Isocrates Panegyricus.

151 For the following Cf. Laws 693 A, and Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iii. p. 275.

152 κυπτάζωσι: cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Nubes 509.

153 Cf. Juvenal, Satire xiii. 189-191.

154 ἀποπταμένου: both Homer and Sappho so speak of the soul as flitting away.

155 The body is only the instrument of the soul. Cf. Socrates' answer to the question,“How shall we bury you?”Phaedo 115 C ff. and the elaboration of the idea in Alc. I. 129 E, whence it passed in to European literature.

156 Quoted by Aristotle, Rhet. 1406 b. Epictetus iii. 19. 4 complains that nurses encourage children to strike the stone on which they stumble. Cf. also Lucan vi. 220-223. Otto, Sprichwörter der Römer, p. 70, cites Pliny, N.H. xxix. 102, and Pacuv. v. 38, Ribb.Trag. Cf. Montaigne i. 4, “Ainsin emporte les bestes leur rage à s'attaquer à la pierre et au fer qui les a blecées.”

157 Plato as a boy may have heard of the Thebans' refusal to allow the Athenians to bury their dead after Delium. Cf. Thucydides iv. 97-101, and Euripides Supplices.

158 For the practice cf. Aeschylus Septem 275-279 and Agamemnon 577-579. Italian cities and American states have restored to one another the flags so dedicated from old wars. Cf. Cicero De inventione ii. 70 “at tamen aeternum inimicitiarum monumentum Graios de Graiis statuere non oportet.”

159 For similar caution cf. on 427 B-C.

160 I have so translated in order to imply that the Plato of the Republic is already acquainted with the terminology of the Sophist. Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, notes 375 and 377, followed by Wilamowitz, Platon, i. p. 504. But most editors take διαφορά here as dissension, and construe “applied to the disagreements of two things,” which may be right. Cf. Sophist 228 Aστάσιν . . . τὴν τοῦ φύσει συγγενοῦς ἔκ τινος διαφθορᾶς διαφοράν.

161 Plato shared the natural feeling of Isocrates, Demosthenes, and all patriotic Greeks. Cf. Isocrates Panegyricus 157, 184, Panath. 163;Menexenus 237 ff., Laws 692 C and 693 A. It is uncritical then with Newman (op. cit. p. 430) and many others to take as a recantation of this passage the purely logical observation in Politicus 262 D that Greek and barbarinan is an unscientific dichotomy of mankind. Cf. on the whole question the dissertation of Friedrich Weber, Platons Stellung zu den Barbaren.

162 Cf. 414 E, Menexenus 237 E, Timaeus 40 B, Laws 740 A, Aeschylus Septem 16.

163 Cf. Epistles 354 A, Herodotus ii. 178, Isocrates Phil. 122, Panegyricus 96, Evagoras 40, Panath. 241. The word is still significant for international politics, and must be retained in the translation.

164 Cf. Newman, op. cit. p. 143.

165 The same language was frequently used in the recent World War, but the practice was sometimes less civilized than that which Plato recommends. Hobhouse (Mind in Evolution, p. 384), writing earlier, said, “Plato's conclusions (Republic 469-471) show how narrow was the conception of humanitarian duties in the fourth century.” It is, I think, only modern fancy that sees irony in the conclusion: “treating barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks.”

166 It is a mistaken ingenuity that finds a juncture between two distinct versions here.

167 πάντ᾽ . . . ἀγαθά: idiomatically colloquial. Cf. Politicus 284 B, Laws 711 D, 757 D, 780 D, Aristophanes Acharnians 978, 982, Frogs 302.

168 Cf. Laws 806 B.

169 ὥσπερ marks the figurative use as τινα in Aeschines, Tim. 135 τινα καταδρομήν.

170 Cf. Introduction p. xvii. The third wave, sometimes the ninth, was proverbially the greatest. Cf. Euthydemus 293 A, Lucan v. 672 “decimus dictu mirabile fluctus,” and Swineburne: “Who swims in sight of the third wave/ That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.”

171 συγγνώμην: L. and S. wrongly with ὅτι, “to acknowledge that . . .”

172 Cf. Introduction p. xii. and note d. Plato seems to overlook the fact that the search was virtually completed in the fourth book.

173 οὐδέν: idiomatic, like the English of the translation. Cf. Charmides 164 A, Gorgias 498 A, 515 E. The emphatic statement that follows of the value of ideals as ideals is Plato's warning hint that he does not expect the literal realization of his Utopia, though it would be disillusionizing to say so too explicitly. Cf. introduction p. xxxi-xxxii, and my paper on Plato's Laws, Class. Phil. ix. (1914) pp. 351 and 353. This is one of the chief ideas that Cicero derived from Plato. He applies it to his picture of the ideal orator, and the mistaken ingenuity of modern scholarship has deduced from this and attributed to the maleficent influence of Plato the post-Renaissancee and eighteenth-century doctrine of fixed literary kinds. Cf. my note in the New York Nation, vol. ciii. p. 238, Sept. 7, 1916.

174 An ideal in the plastic arts is used to illustrate the thought. Cf. Aristotle Poetics 1461 b 14, Politics 1281 b 10, Cicero, Orator ii. 3, Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 10, Finsler, Platon u. d. aristotelische Poetik, p. 56. Polyb. vi. 47. 7 gives a different turn to the comaprison of the Republic to a statue. Plato is speaking from the point of view of ordinary opinion, and it is uncritical to find here and in 501 an admission that the artist copies the idea, which is denied in Book X. 597 E ff. Apelt, Platonische Aufsätze, p. 67.

175 Cf. 372 E.

176 The point is so important that Plato repeats it more specifically.

177 Plato is contradicting the Greek commonplace which contrasts the word with the deed. Cf. Apology 32 A, Sophist 234 E, Euripides frag.Alcmeneλόγος γὰρ τοὔργον οὐ νικᾷ ποτε, and perhaps Democritus's λόγος ἔργου σκιή. Cf. A.J.P. xiii. p. 64. The word is the expression of the thought. It is more plastic (588 D, Laws 736 B) and, as Goethe says, “von einem Wort lässt sich kein Iota rauben.”

178 εἰρήσεται: so used by the orators to introduce a bold statement. Cf. Aeschines ii. 22, Demosthenes xix. 224, xi. 17, xiv. 24, xxi. 198, etc.

179 More literally “deluge or overwhelm with ridicule.”

180 This is perhaps the most famous sentence in Plato. Cf. for the idea 499 B, 540 D, Laws 711 D, 712 A, 713 E ff. It is paraphrased by the author of the seventh Epistle(324 B, 326 A-B, 328 A-B) who perhaps quotes Plato too frequently to be Plato himself.Epistle ii. 310 E, though sometimes quoted in this connection, is not quite the same thought. It is implied in the Phaedrus 252 Eφιλόσοφος καὶ ἡγεμονικός, and Politicus 293 C, and only seems to be contradicted in Euthydemus 306 B. Aristotle is said to have contradicted it in a lost work (fr. 79, 1489 b 8 ff.). It is paraphrased or parodied by a score of writers from Polybius xii. 28 to Bacon, Hobbes, More, Erasmus, and Bernard Shaw. Boethius transmitted it to the Middle Ages (Cons. Phil. i. 4. 11). It was always on the lips of Marcus Aurelius. Cf. Capitol, Aurelius i. 1 and iv. 27. It was a standardized topic of compliment to princes in Themistius, Julian, the Panegyrici Latini, and many modern imitators. Among the rulers who have been thus compared with Plato's philosophic king are Marcus Aurelius, Constantine, Arcadius, James I., Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. There is a partial history of the commonplace in T. Sinko's Program, Sententiae Platonicae de philophis regnantibus fata quae fuerint, Krakow, 1904, in the supplementary article of Karl Praechter, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, xiv. (1905) pp. 4579-491, and in the dissertation of Emil Wolff, Francis Bacons Verhaltnis zu Platon, Berlin, 1908, pp. 60 ff.

181 Plato's condescension to the ordinary mind that cannot be expected to understand often finds expression in this form. Cf. 366 C, 489 C, Theaetetus 176 C, and Republic 495 Eἀνάγκη.

182 Lit. “many and not slight men.”

183 Cf. Hipponax, fr. 74 (58), Theophrast.Char. 27, Aristophanes Wasps 408.

184 Cf. Apology 35 A, Theaetetus 151 A.

185 τῷ ὄντι verifies the strong word τωθαζόμενος.

186 Cf. Theaetetus 162 A 7. The dialectician prefers a docile respondent. Cf. Sophist 217 C, Parmenides 137 B.

187 τὸ δὲ μή: for the idiom Cf. Philebus 22 A, Laws 797 E, 923 C, Demodocus's epigram on the Chians, Aeschylus Persae 802, Sophocles O.C. 1671.

188 Another of the famous sentences that would be worth a monograph. Cf. Lucretius iv. 1160, Molière, Misanthrope, ii. 5, Horace, Satire i. 338. F. Brunetière, Les Epoques du théâtre francÿais, p. 76, thinks that Molière took it from Scarron, not from Lucretius. Shakespeare Much Ado, III. i. reverses the conceit, Santayana, Reason in Society, p. 25, writes prettily about it.

189 Cf. Aristotle Eth. i. 8. 10ἑκάστῳ δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡδὺ πρὸς ὃ λέγεται φιλοτοιοῦτος. Cf. the old Latin hexameters—“si bene quid memini causae suant quinque bibendi:/ Hospitis adventus, praesens sitis atque futura,/ Aut vini bonitas, aut quaelibet altera causa.”

190 Cf. Theophrastus, Char. 21 (Loeb)μικροφιλοτιμίας, petty pride.

191 τριττυαρχοῦσι, “command the soldiers of a trittys” or third of one of the ten tribes.

192 δυσχεραίνοντα, squeamish, particular, “choicy.” Cf. 391 E, 426 D, and Pope, Essay on Criticism, 288—“Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best,/ Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest.”

193 Plato as usual anticipates objections and misunderstandings. Cf. e.g. on 487 B.

194 Cf. the argument in the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics that men's pleasure in sense-perception is a form of their love of knowledge.

195 φιλήκοοι: the word, like curiosity in Ruskin's interpretation, may have a higher and lower meaning. It is used half technically of intellectual interests generally. Cf. Euthydemus 304 B. The abstract φιληκοΐα became a virtual synonym of culture and reading.

196 Cf. on 498 A, and in Parmenides 126 E, Antiphon, who studied Eleatic dialectic in his youth, but now gives his time to horses. The word διατριβή has a long history in philosophy and literature, starting from such passages as Charmides 153 A and Lysis 204 A.

197 In addition to the presentation of new plays at the city Dionysia, there were performances at the Peiraeus and in the demes.

198 Cf. Theaetetus 201 B 3, Sophist 240 Bοὐδαμῶς ἀληθινόν γε, ἀλλ᾽ ἐοικὸς μέν.

199 Cf. Aristotle Eth. 1098 a 32θεατὴς γὰρ τἀληθοῦς.

200 Cf. 449 C.

201 Plato is merely restating the theory of Ideas to prepare for his practical distinction between minds that can and minds that cannot apprehend abstractions. He does not here enter into the metaphysics of the subject. But he does distinctly show that he is “already” aware of the difficulties raised in the Parmenides, 131 B ff., and of the misapprehension disposed of in the Sophist 252 ff. that the metaphysical isolation of the Ideas precludes their combination and intermingling in human thought and speech. For the many attempts to evade ἀλλήλων κοινωνία Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, n. 244, and add now Wilamowitz, Platon, i. p. 567, who, completely missing the point, refers to 505 A, which is also misunderstood. He adds “mit den Problemen des Sophistes hat das gar nichts zu tun; sie waren ihm noch nicht aufgestossen,” which begs the question.

202 “Le petit nombre des élus” is a common topic in Plato. Cf. on 494 A.

203 The dream state is a very different thing for Plato from what it is for some modern sentimental Platonists. Cf. 520 C-D, Phaedrus 277 D, Timaeus 52 B, and 71 E, if rightly interpreted.

204 ἠρέμα: Cf. Symposium 221 B. Plato's humorous use of this word is the source of Emerson's humorous use of “gently.”

205 For the humor of the sudden shift to the second person cf. Juvenal, Satire i. “profer, Galla, caput.”

206 To understand what follows it is necessary (1) to assume that Plato is not talking nonsense; (2) to make allowance for the necessity that he is under of combating contemporary fallacies and sophisms which may seem trivial to us (Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, pp. 50 ff.); (3) to remember the greater richness of the Greek language in forms of the verb “to be”; and the misunderstandings introduced by the indiscriminate use of the abstract verbal noun “being” in English—a difficulty which I have tried to meet by varying the terms of the translation; (4) to recognize that apart from metaphysics Plato's main purpose is to insist on the ability to think abstractly as a prerequisite of the higher education; (5) to observe the qualifications and turns of phrase which indicate that Plato himself was not confused by the double meaning of “is not,” but was already aware of the distinctions explicitly explained in the Sophist. (Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, pp. 53 ff. nn. 389 ff.)

207 παντελῶς: cf.μηδαμῇ and 478 Dπάντως. Not foreseeing modern philology Plato did not think it necessary to repeat these qualifying adverbs in 478 Bἢ ἀδύνατον καὶ δοξάσαι τὸ μὴ ὄν, which is still sometimes quoted to prove that Plato was “yet” naively unaware of the distinction between is-not-at-all (does not exist) and is-not-this-or-that.

208 Apart from the metaphysical question of the relativity of all knowledge, the word ἐπιστήμη in Greek usage connotes certainty, and so Plato and Aristotle always take it. But more specifically that which (always) is, for Plato, is the “idea” which is not subject to change and therefore always is what it is, while a particular material thing subject to change and relativity both is and is not any and every predicate that can be applied to it. And since knowledge in the highest sense is for Plato knowledge of abstract and general ideas, both in his and in our sense of the word idea, knowledge is said to be of that which is. It is uncritical to ignore Plato's terminology and purpose and to talk condescendingly of his confusing subjective with objective certainty in what follows.

209 The history of the word δύναμις has been studied in recent monographs and its various meanings, from potentiality to active power, discriminated. Cf. J. Souilhé, Etude sur le terme δύναμις dans les Dialogues de Platon, Paris, 1919, pp. 96, 163 ff. But Plato makes his simple meaning here quite plain, and it would be irrelevant to bring in modern denunciations of the “old faculty psychology.”

210 Cf. my note on Simplic.De An. 146. 21, Class. Phil. xvii. p. 143.

211 Cf. Ion 537 Dοὕτω καλῶ τὴν μὲν ἄλλην, τὴν δὲ ἄλλην τέχνην.

212 ἐπί: Cf. Parmenides 147 D-Eἕκαστον τῶν ὀνομάτων οὐκ ἐπί τινι καλεῖς;

213 Cf. Protagoras 352 B, Aristotle Eth. 1145 b 24.

214 For the various meanings of δόξα Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, p. 47 “ the word δόξα may be used in this neutral, psychological sense; it may be taken unfavorably to denote mere opinion as opposed to knowledge, or favorably when true opinions and beliefs are set in antithesis to the appetites and instincts.”

215 Plato reaffirms this strongly Timaeus 51 E, where, however,νοῦς is used, not ἐπιστήμη. Of course where distinctions are irrelevant Plato may use many of the terms that denote mental processes as virtual synonyms. Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought pp. 47-49.

216 Cf. Symposium 200 B, 201 D.

217 Cf. on 447 C.

218 Plato is, of course, aware that this is true only if μὴ ὄν be taken in the absolute sense. We cannot suppose that he himself is puzzled by a fallacy which he ironically attributes to the Sophists and to Protagoras (Theaetetus 167 A), and ridicules in the Cratylus 188 D and Euthydemus 286 C. Cf. Unity of Platos' Thought, pp. 53, 54. As Aristotle explicitly puts it, De interpr. 11. 11τὸ δὲ μὴ ὂν ὅτι δοξαστὸν οὐκ ἀληθὲς εἰπεῖν ὄν τι: δόξα γὰρ αὐτοῦ ἐστιν, οὐχ ὅτι ἔστιν ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι οὐκ ἔστι.

219 Cf. 477 A.

220 Cf. 477 A-B. This is almost a standardized method with Plato. Cf. 609 B, Charmides 168 B, Gorgias 496 C, 346 B, Philebus 11 D, 66 E, Laws 896 C.

221 Ironical. Cf. Phaedrus 266 E.

222 τινὰ does not mean that the theory of Ideas is a novelty here or that the terminology is new and strange. It merely says that the type of mind that is absorbed in the concrete cannot apprehend any general aspect of things.αὐτό and κατὰ ταὐτά are the technical designation of the Idea here. Cf. my note on Philebus 64 A, Class. Phil. xx. (1925) p. 347.

223 Plato consciously uses mere logic to lend the emphasis and dignity of absolute metaphysics to his distinction between the two types of mind, which is for all practical purposes his main point here. If you cannot correctly define the beautiful, all your imperfect definitions will be refuted by showing that they sometimes describe what is ugly. Cf. Hippias Major 289 C and note on Republic i. 333 E. The many concrete objects are this and are not that, and so with conscious use of the ambiguity of the copula may be said to tumble about between being and not-being. That this is the consciously intended meaning may be inferred from the fact that in Timaeus 37 E, where Plato must have had in mind the conclusions of the Sophist, he still avails himself of this ambiguity to suggest an absolute being behind phenomena. Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, pp. 55, 56, 60, De Platonis Idearum Doctrina pp. 48, 49.

224 Cf. on 524 A, B.

225 The scholiast (Hermann vi. 34) quotes the riddle in two forms. It might run in English—“A tale there is, a man not yet a man,/ Seeing, saw not, a bird and not a bird,/ Perching upon a bough and not a bough,/ And hit it—not, with a stone and not a stone.” The key words of the answer are eunuch, bat, reed, pumice-stone. Cf. also Athenaeus 448 E, 452 E, Gifford on Euthydemus 300 D. It was used in the Stoic schools of logic, and Epicurus is said to have used it to disprove Plato's statement that either the negative or the affirmative of a proposition must be true or false. Cf. Usener, Epicurea, p. 348.

226 Cf. Theaetetus 157 A.

227 Cf. Sophist 254 Aεἰς τὴν τοῦ μὴ ὄντος σκοτεινότητα.

228 A further thought is developed here, suggested in 479 A, B. Just as the many particular horses, trees, or tables shift and change, and are and are not in comparision with the unchanging multitude of each, so the many opinions of the multitude about justice and the good and the beautiful and other moral conceptions change, and both are and are not in comparison with the unalterable ideas of justice and beauty, which the philosopher more nearly apprehends. Thus, for the purposes of this contrast, notions, opinions, and what English usage would call ideas, fall into the same class as material objects. Cf. Euthyphro 6 D, Phaedo 78 D, Parmenides 131 D, Gorgias 488 Dτὰ τῶν πολλῶν ἄρα νόμιμα, Laws 715 Bτὰ τούτων δίκαια, 860 Cτοῖς μὲν τοίνυν πολλοῖς etc., 962 Dτὰ τῶν πόλεων(of states)νόμιμα. The practical truth of this distinction is unaffected by our metaphysics. Plato is speaking of what he elsewhere calls the εἴδωλα of justice, beauty and the like. Cf. 517 D, 532 D, Theaetetus 150 B, and “The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic,”University of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology, i. p. 238.

229 Cf. Phaedrus 275 E, Phaedo 81 C, 82 E. Isocrates uses καλινδέομαι in similar contemptuous connotation, v. 82, xiii. 20, xv. 30.

230 Cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 989 a 33τοῖς ἐπάγουσιν αὐτόν.

231 Plato coins a word which means “lovers of opinion.”

232 Isocrates xv. 271 is conceivably an answer to this.