by Plato
17 (4.444c) they are like disease and health; being in the soul just what disease and health are in the body: The comparison of justice and injustice in the soul to bodily health and disease previews the arguments that Socrates will develop in books 8 and 9 about the psychological dysfunction brought about by “injustice” as it has just been defined in book 4.
Book 5
1 (5.449b) when Polemarchus, who was sitting just a little way off, just beyond Adeimantus, began to whisper to him: The personal interactions in this passage are noteworthy. Polemarchus, who was at the beginning of the dialogue an uncritical proponent of the commonplace view of justice, seems caught up in the spirit of the discussion among Socrates and the two brothers, and ventures to seek clarification (via Adeimantus) about two key proposals concerning the guardians’ way of life. Even Thrasymachus, who was openly hostile to Socrates in book 1, appears won over (5.450a-b); it is he who now emphasizes the importance of the conversation (compare Socrates at 1.344e) and urges Socrates to cooperate with the group’s request for more details about the “community” of wives and children.The lengthy digression that Polemarchus’ request initiates postpones further consideration of the dialogue’s main questions—that is, whether justice leads to “happiness” and is “profitable”—until book 8. At first Socrates and his interlocutors are concerned with considering the role to be undertaken by women of the guardian classes and the “community” of wives and children; Glaucon, however, insists that Socrates address the more general questions of whether the ideal city-state could ever be brought into being, and under what conditions it might be founded (5.471c—e; compare 5.466c). This prompts Socrates to make his famous claim that the ideal state will come into being only when “philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy” (5.473d—e). Socrates’ assertion leads in turn to efforts to (1) define “philosophy” and “philosophers” (5.474b-6.487a), (2) explain the unfavorable reputation of philosophers in contemporary Athens (6.487a—497a), (3) identify the ultimate goal of the philosopher’s education (6.502c-7.521b), and (4) elucidate how future philosophers might be prepared to achieve that goal (7.521c-540c).
Though technically parts of a digression, these topics are clearly of central importance to Republic. The philosopher-ruler is the key figure upon whom the ideal (that is, just) state depends for its (hypothetical) existence, and he (or she) is also implicitly the exemplar of justice in the individual, since he (or she) is “orderly and divine, as far as the nature of man allows” (6.500c-d). It should be noted that Plato strives to create strong impressions in his readers’ imaginations throughout this long section, in which he has Socrates convey some of his most vivid and memorable images—including the simile of the sun at 6.507a-509b and the allegory of the cave at 7.514a-518b; see also the metaphor of the ship of state at 6.488a-489a, and the image of philosophy as a bride abandoned by her true grooms and forced to “wed” unworthy suitors at 6.495b-496a.
2 (5.449d) the right or wrong management of [domestic] matters will have a great and paramount influence on the State for good or for evil: The notion that proper “household management” was intimately connected to the effective management of political affairs became widely accepted in Athens during the classical period; in Protagoras 318e-319a, for example, Plato has Protagoras claim to teach his students how they “might best arrange their household business and become most successful with respect to the affairs of the city.” Socrates’ outline in books 2 and 3 of the guardians’ early education argues for a yet more intense connection between “domestic affairs” (that is, the education and training of children) and the successful management of the polis.
3 (5.451a) the danger is not that I shall be laughed at ... but that I shall miss the truth ... and drag my friends after me in my fall: Socrates was formally accused and convicted in 399 B.C.E. on charges of impiety and “corrupting the youth.” It is in the light of the latter charge, perhaps, that Plato has Socrates express caution about speaking his mind and (potentially) misleading his young companions. Glaucon’s reassurance that Socrates “shall not be held to be a deceiver” may be equally pointed.
4 (5.452a) several of our proposals ... being unusual, may appear ridiculous: Socrates repeatedly draws attention to the possibility that his proposals concerning guardian women may strike many as “ridiculous”; compare 5.452c and 5.457a-b, and also 5.473d-e, where he introduces the concept of the philosopher-ruler. Utopian social models that empowered women (and also featured “communism” in wives and children) were satirized by comic playwrights, such as Aristophanes in The Women at the Assembly (Ecclesiazusae), which was produced in 392 B.C.E. Socrates’ comments seem aimed at acknowledging—and discrediting—this kind of comic satire.
5 (5.452c-d) when first the Cretans, and then the Lacedaemonians, introduced the custom: “Lacedaemonian” and “Laconian” refer to the territory around the polis of Sparta and its inhabitants. Greek men in the classical period regularly stripped when they exercised and competed in athletic contests; in his History of the Peloponnesian War 1.6, Thucydides concurs that this practice was an innovation that the Spartans (that is, Lacedaemonians) introduced to Greece at some point in the distant past.
6 (5.454a) glorious is the power of the art of contradiction!: The “art of contradiction” is antilogike technê (literally, the “skill of antilogic”), a technique of argumentation whereby speakers cause their listeners to think of an object (or person or action) as first possessing one quality (or predicate) and then its opposite. “Antilogic” represents one of several techniques that someone seeking success in verbal debates could deploy and is therefore associated with the practice of “eristic.” Socrates opposes eristic argumentation (aiming at persuasion and victory, no matter what the cost) to dialectic (aiming at the truth, no matter what the cost) just below at 5.454a, where he contrasts the “spirit of contention” with that “of fair discussion,” and again at 7.539c. See also Meno 75c and Philebus 17a.
7 (5.454d) a physician and one who is in mind a physician may be said to have the same nature: The Greek text is difficult. Some editors prefer a reading that translates as “a male physician and a female physician may be said to have the same nature”; others prefer the reading “one physician and another may be said....”
8 (5.454d—e) but if the difference consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to a proof that a woman differs from a man in respect of the sort of education she should receive: Socrates’ assertion of the potential equality between men and women (which is perhaps at odds with the remark at 5.455d about “the general inferiority of the female sex”), and his judgment that the current practice of not training women for war is “in reality a violation of nature” (5.456c) are striking. Women in Athens during the classical period had no political franchise and were generally not educated outside the home. Although several dramas dating to the fifth century (for example, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy [458 B.C.E.] and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata [411 B.C.E.]) feature characters who debate the fairness and propriety of this kind of marginalization, there seems to have been little doubt in the minds of Athenian men that their wives, daughters, and sisters were meant to stay in the home. Mythical women warriors, such as Amazons, were universally represented as dangerous aberrations.Modem scholars differ in their assessments of Plato’s “feminism.” On the one hand, he has Socrates assert that women as well as men are capable of becoming philosopher-rulers (7.540c); on the other, perhaps reflecting the cultural realities of his day, he never represents respectable Athenian women (that is, the relatives of citizen men) participating in philosophical conversations, and female figures in his dialogues (the probably fictional Diotima in Symposium, Pericles’ mistress Aspasia in Menexenus) are few and far between.
9 (5.457c) Yes, that was a mighty wave which you have escaped: Waves were thought to come in groups of three, with the third as the largest (and potentially most dangerous). See below
at 5.472a. The three “waves” are the challenges Socrates faces in (1) explaining how female guardians are to be trained and educated (5.451c-457c), (2) justifying the “community” of wives and children among the guardians (5.457c-471c), and (3) explaining how the ideal city-state might come into being. Socrates’ effort to respond to this final challenge occupies the rest of book 5 and all of books 6 and 7.
10 (5.458d) necessity, not geometrical, but another sort of necessity which lovers know, and which is far more convincing and constraining to the mass of mankind: Socrates refers here to the “necessity” of sexual passion, which most people cannot resist, and which differs completely from the logical necessity of mathematical reasoning.
11 (5.458e) the next thing will be to make matrimony sacred in the highest degree: To Athenian ears, the phrase hieros gamos (“sacred marriage”) would have signified, first and foremost, the marriage of Zeus and Hera, which was regularly celebrated at a special festival. The phrase underscores the solemnity of the “marriages” among guardians.
12 (5.459c-d) our rulers will find a considerable dose of falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects: ... the use of all these things regarded as medicines might be of advantage: See note 27 on 2.382c, and also 3.414b-415d for “needful falsehoods” in the ideal city-state.
13 (5.460c) but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be: Sickly, deformed, or unwanted infants were regularly exposed and left to die outside the city limits in Athens and elsewhere in Greece; the decision to expose an infant typically was made by the father or male head of household. Socrates’ provision for the “putting away” of sickly and deformed children is wholly in keeping with this practice; the only difference is that the decision in the ideal city-state would be made by the polis’ officials, not the father.
14 (5.460e) A woman ... at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the State, and continue to bear them until forty: In Athens, girls were generally married at puberty and began bearing children immediately; men did not marry until much later in life (that is, at approximately age thirty). Socrates’ provision for the female guardians’ late start in childbearing is noteworthy.
15 (5.462c) And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms “mine” and “not mine” in the same way to the same thing?: Like the prohibition against private property (3.416e-417b), the creation of what is in essence a common family among the guardians is aimed at keeping them from developing private interests at odds with those of the community as a whole (5.463c-464b).
16 (5.465d) The Olympic victor ... is deemed happy in receiving a part only of the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public cost: Victors in the games at Olympia and other pan-Hellenic sites were rewarded in Athens with public honors and privileges, including meals (paid for out of the polis’ treasury) in the Prytaneum. (Compare Apology 36d.) Socrates’ pronouncement concerning the “victory” of the guardians and the rewards they receive answers the complaint Adeimantus lodges on behalf of the guardians at 4.419a.
17 (5.466d) The inquiry ... has yet to be made, whether such a community will be found possible ... and if possible, in what way possible: See note 9 on 5.457c and note 21 on 5.471c.
18 (5.469b) Do you think it right that Hellenes should enslave Hellenic States, or allow others to enslave them, if they can help?: See note 1 on 4.423a, and also 5.470c. Although Greeks rarely served as slaves in other Greek city-states, Greek armies could sell their Hellenic captives to non-Greek foreigners. What is said in these paragraphs raises the question: Do Socrates and his interlocutors assume that there will be slaves in the ideal city-state, although their role in the community is never discussed? Scholars disagree about the implications of this sentence and the following remarks. Slaves were universally present in all Greek communities, and although the ideal state differs radically in several regards from existing states (see, for example, 6.497a-c), it is perhaps reasonable to infer from this passage that it was not meant to differ as far as the practice of slavery was concerned.
19 (5.469d) And is there not illiberality and avarice in robbing a corpse ... ?: Victorious armies regularly stripped weapons from corpses of the enemy dead; the armor subsequently would be dedicated to the gods and displayed in temples. Destroying crops and livestock and burning buildings (5.470a) were also standard practices in war.
20 (5.470c) we shall say that Hellas is then in a state of disorder and discord: Socrates’ distinction between stasis (“civil strife”) and polemos (“war”) reflects standard usage; his redefinition of the term stasis to cover conflicts between city-states is, however, unusual.
21 (5.471c) Is such an order of things possible, and how, if at all?: See note 9 on 5.457c and note 17 on 5.466d. Socrates’ reference to “the first and second waves” in the following paragraphs looks back to 5.457b-c.
22 (5.472e) And is our theory a worse theory because we are unable to prove the possibility of a city being ordered in the manner described?: Although Socrates eventually argues that the ideal state is in fact possible and is not “a mere dream” (7.540d), his assertion concerning the utility and importance of ideal models, even when they are unrealizable, is noteworthy.
23 (5.473c-d) “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy ... cities will never have rest from their evils ... and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day”: This striking statement, which (as Glaucon imagines just below) most people would strenuously reject, dominates the discussion in books 5-7 and sets the stage for Republic’s analysis of justice’s “profitability” in books 8-10, as well as its reconsideration of poetic mimesis in book 10. The immediate problem it raises is how the “philosopher” (literally, “lover of wisdom”) is to be distinguished from other people who seem to be curious about the world around them and lovers of learning (5.474b-476c).
24 (5.476d) But take the case of the other, who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea ... is he a dreamer, or is he awake?: Socrates’ effort to separate philosophers, who are keen to perceive absolute beauty (as well as absolute justice, absolute good, and so forth), from mere lovers of sights (philotheamones), who perceive beautiful things but “have no sense of absolute beauty” (5.476c), introduces concepts, terminology, and analogies that are central to the theory of knowledge developed in Republic as well as its metaphysics (that is, the theory of the “ideas”).The notion that there is, for example, a single “idea” (idea, or eidos) of beauty, which is perfect, unalterable, and eternal and is also the source of the beauty in all “beautiful” phenomenal objects (including people, ideas, institutions, etc.) is familiar from other Platonic dialogues, notably Symposium, Phaedo, and Phaedrus. Phenomenal objects that are “beautiful” are said to “participate” temporarily and partially in the idea of beauty (also termed “absolute beauty,” “beauty-in-itself”); the temporary and partial nature of their participation accounts for the facts (1) that phenomenal objects do not seem equally beautiful to all observers (5.479a-e), and (2) that the beauty—of a rose, for instance—is impermanent. Phenomenal objects capable of being apprehended by the senses are themselves impermanent; in the language of Republic, they belong to the class of objects that are “becoming” (that is, between absolute “being” and absolute “nonbeing”). The only objects in the realm of absolute being (and thus the only objects that are truly “real”) are the ideas and mathematical objects, such as the circle, triangle, etc., that are wholly independent of anything that is physically and phenomenally manifest.
This theory of “ideas” is in part indebted to the formulations concerning “being” or “that which is” (to on) of Parmenides of Elea (late sixth-early
fifth century B.C.E.), who similarly asserts that “being” can be apprehended only through reason (logos) and not via the senses, which are misleading. Complementing his conception of the metaphysical “ideas” and their relationship to phenomenal objects, Socrates begins to elaborate in this passage a theory of knowledge, to be refined at 6.509d-511e, that is in fact a theory about the different faculties of cognition (dynameis) that people exercise as they contemplate different types of objects (5.476d-480a). The ideas, which are not apprehensible by means of the senses, are perceived through the exercise of what Socrates in this passage alternatively calls gnosis or epistemê (translated as “knowledge” by Jowett); in contrast, everything in the realm of “becoming” is apprehensible by the separate faculty of doxa (“opinion”), which is intermediate between true knowledge and pure ignorance. Only the ideas, then, can be “known” in the absolute sense; about any phenomenal object, one can only “opine” (5.477a-b; compare 5.479e).
People who have “a sense of beautiful things” but “no sense of absolute beauty” are likened to dreamers who mistake their dreams for waking reality (5.476c); they will later be compared to the blind (6.484c-d; compare 6.506c) and, in the allegory of the cave, to prisoners in a cavern who erroneously believe that a parade of shadow-images is real (7.514a-518b). Only those few who are able and willing to contemplate “the very truth of each thing” (literally, “each thing that is”; 6.484d) are “awake” and truly sighted and “free”; these people are the genuine “philosophers” who ought to be entrusted with political governance (see 6.504d-506e). Through these potent images, Plato has Socrates stake out a rather limited definition of what, properly speaking, constitutes “philosophy,” as well as a bold claim for philosophy’s supreme relevance to the proper conduct of human affairs (for example, at 6.500c-501b and 6.506b). One particularly important assertion is that the philosopher’s awareness of the relative meanness and insignificance of all things in the phenomenal realm will ineluctably lead him or her to despise wealth, honor, and other “material” goods (for example, 7.540d-e).