by Plato
31 (7.537e) Do you not remark, I said, how great is the evil which dialectic has introduced?: Socrates’ acknowledgment that dialectic is potently destabilizing, since it inevitably causes one to devalue that which one prized in the past (and which others may still prize) and to develop “a questioning spirit” that “asks what is fair and honorable” (7.538d), paves the way for his distinction between dialectic, as practiced for socially constructive ends by the true philosopher, and “antilogic” and “eristic,” as pursued by those who carelessly engage in arguments simply for the sake of winning (7.539b-d; see note 6 on 5.454a). It also reinforces his point that philosophy (that is, dialectic) is not suitable for young, restless people, no matter how gifted (7.539a-b; compare 6.498b-c).
Book 8
1 (8.544c) the four governments of which I spoke ... are first, those of Crete and Sparta, which are generally applauded: In contrast to Athens’ democracy, the governments of Crete and Sparta strictly limited political franchise. Critics of Athenian democracy praised the Spartan constitution in particular, and Plato is careful to have Socrates associate it with “timarchy,” which is characterized by “love of honor” (see 545b), and not with the more degenerate “oligarchy,” in which wealth alone determines qualification for political franchise and leadership.
2 (8.545d) Clearly, all political changes originate in divisions of the actual governing power; a government which is united, however small, cannot be moved: Compare the concern for stasis (factionalism and civil strife) at 4.444b.
3 (8.545e) Shall we imagine them in solemn mockery, to play and jest with us as if we were children, and to address us in a lofty tragic vein, making believe to be in earnest?: As above at 7.536b-c, Plato has Socrates call attention to the fundamentally “playful” nature of the discussion, and he seems to invite his readers not to take what is claimed in 8.546a-c too literally.
4 (8.546a) In plants that grow in the earth, as well as in animals that move on the earth’s surface, fertility and sterility of soul and body occur when the circumferences of the circles of each are completed, which in short-lived existences pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones over a long space: Socrates envisions the “cycle” of fertility for each species of living thing as represented by a circle; for a short-lived species, the representative circle is small and so is its circumference, whereas the circle is larger for the longer-lived. The notion advanced here—that the cycles of fertility and sterility in individual species are mathematically comprehensible—anticipates what is suggested in 8.546b—c about the existence of a rational, mathematically comprehensible order governing the cosmos as a whole.
5 (8.546b) but the period of human birth is comprehended in a number ... : Adopting the voice of the Muses, Socrates presents a calculation for the number that comprehends, or governs, human births. The number ( 12,960,000) is in fact a “master number” that comprehends the area of two great figures, one of which is a square with sides of 3600 units, and the other a rectangle with sides of 4800 and 2700 units.The “number of Plato” is a notoriously difficult passage that has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention. Critics have offered a number of interpretations of its significance. It is possible that the number and its calculation are indebted to Pythagorean mathematical theories, and it is also possible that the two figures comprehended in the master number 12,960,000 represent two periods in the “lifetime” of the cosmos with which human births, if they are to be “goodly and fortunate” (8.546c), must somehow be in accord. All such interpretations are speculative, however. As suggested in note 3 on 8.545e, the fact that Socrates ascribes the calculation of the number to the Muses (who, he imagines, “play and jest with us as if we were children”) should make us cautious about attempting to interpret the number and its calculation in an overly precise manner. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to suppose that the passage in 8.546a-c is intended to convey, in general and suggestive terms, two facts: (1) that there is a rational order governing the cosmos, which can be expressed in mathematical terms, and (2) that this order is extremely difficult to comprehend. However its philosophical significance is interpreted, the passage puts Plato’s mathematical sophistication on full display.
6 (8.546c) Now this number represents a geometrical figure which has control over the good and evil of births: More literally, “this entire geometric number has authority over this sort of thing, [that is] better and inferior births.” Jowett’s translation is somewhat misleading, since the entire “geometric number” comprehends the two geometric figures described in the immediately preceding passage. The apparent meaning of this sentence is that, to be appropriate and “good,” human births must somehow be in accordance with the cosmic order that the figures suggest; precisely how this accordance is to be accomplished is left unspecified.
7 (8.547b-c) There was a battle between them, and at last they agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual owners; and they enslaved their friends and maintainers ... and they themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch against them: Compare 3.416d-417b and 5.462b-464d, where Socrates links private property to the development of private interests that differ from those of the community as a whole and are thus detrimental, as is reasserted at 8.550d. Socrates’ assumption seems to be that the possession of private property goes hand in hand with the establishment of individual families and households; see, for example, the reference to “wives” at 8.548a-b.
8 (8.547d) In the honor given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior-class from agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution of common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military training—in all these respects this State will resemble the former: Plato surely intends Socrates’ description of the practices of the ruling class in the timarchic state to remind his readers of the Spartans. See note 1 on 8.544c.
9 (8.549b) having lost his best guardian: The language used in this passage, which identifies logos (“reason,” which Jowett translates as “philosophy”) mixed with mousikê (“music”) as the best guardian (aristos phylax) and savior of virtue, is pointed; compare 2.367a.
10 (8.549c) His origin is as follows.... : The vivid vignette describing the origin of the timarchic man, who is seduced into straying from the ways of his virtuous father by the nagging of his malcontent mother and household slaves, seems designed to reinforce the argument that individual families—and the private interests and loyalties they inevitably cause to develop—are detrimental to the development of “virtue” in both individuals and communities. Dysfunction in the family similarly accounts for the development of other “degenerate” personalities; compare 8.553a-d, 8.558c-560e, and 9.572d-575a.
11 (8.550e) And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance the one always rises as the other falls: This directly counters Cephalus’ assertion at 1.331b that wealth facilitates virtue; compare 3.416d-417b.
12 (8.551a-b) They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification for citizenship: The ownership of property (often land), as well as birth from citizen parents, were the typical qualifications for citizenship in Greek city-states.
13 (8.551d) The inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another: Compare 4.422e; see also 4.422a on the corrosive social effects of wealth and poverty, and 8.555c on the incompatibility of wealth and self-restraint.
14 (8.552a) nor horseman, nor hoplite: Hoplites were heavily armed infantrymen. Since Greek men typically supplied their own armor (and their own horses, if in the cavalry), and since the hoplite’s armor was expensive (as was the upkeep of horses), only men from wealthier classes served as hoplites and cavalrymen.
15 (8.552c) May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone in the honeycomb, an
d that the one is the plague of the city as the other is of the hive?: The images of the beehive and its drones (both “stingless” and “with stingers”) remain central throughout the rest of book 8 and in book 9’s discussion of the “tyrannical” personality. Within the individual soul, “drones” are desires and appetites that interfere with reason’s rule. In the state, “drones” are the criminals (who have “stings”) and paupers (who are “stingless”) created by extremes of wealth and poverty; it is the “drones with stingers” who, in Socrates’ account, exercise increasingly greater power in the increasingly degenerate constitutions.
16 (8.554d-e) The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not one: The oligarchic city is similarly described as being two cities “conspiring against one another” at 8.551d.
17 (8.556a) The evil blazes up like a fire; and they will not extinguish it either by restricting a man’s use of his own property, or by another remedy: This critique of what had become, by Plato’s day, common money-lending practices reflects the prejudices of upper-class Athenians against traders and bankers (many of whom were non-Athenian), as well as more general anxieties about the monetarized economy that had been rapidly developing from the mid-fifth century B.C.E. in Athens and other Greek city-states.
18 (8.557a) And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some: Socrates’ account of democracy’s development from oligarchy, while incorporating elements that reflect how democratic governments arose in some Greek city-states (including Athens) during the fifth century, is nonetheless not aimed first and foremost at historical accuracy. His subsequent account of democracy’s degeneration into tyranny (8.562a-569c) likewise incorporates reflections of actual events and phenomena into an essentially fictional framework. Nonetheless, many magistrates in classical Athens were elected by lot, and the following description of the democratic city, with its love of “freedom and frankness,” is plainly designed to evoke the political institutions and social arrangements of Athens.
19 (8.557b) In the first place, are they not free[?]: The emphasis on democracy’s love of freedom (compare 8.562b-c) recalls the popular identification of happiness with the freedom “to do what one wants,” which Socrates challenges at the beginning of the dialogue (1.345a).
20 (8.558a) And is not their humanity to the condemned in some cases quite charming?: The wording in Greek is ambiguous and variously interpreted. It may refer to the relaxed behavior of people who have been condemned for crimes, or conversely to the insouciant attitudes of those who have sat in judgment.
21 (8.558c) These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form, of government ... dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike: Socrates’ acknowledgment that democracy is “charming” (literally, hedeia, or “pleasant”), insofar as it affords the greatest number of people the greatest amount of freedom, should be interpreted in the light of Republic’s sustained interest in disassociating what is pleasant from what is good and beneficial. See 8.561c, as well as note 2 on 3.391a. The “equality” of Athens and democracy in general is opposed to the ideal state’s recognition of inequality; compare 2.370a.
22 (8.560a) and he goes to war with himself: That is, he falls into stasis (civil war) with himself; compare 4.444b.
23 (8.560c) the aforesaid vain conceits shut the gate of the King’s fastness: The language continues the image of the rational part of the soul (which is the soul’s king) as being seated—and besieged—in an acropolis, or citadel; compare 8.561b.
24 (8.560d) modesty, which they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nick-name unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and cast forth; ... they drive them beyond the border: Compare Thrasymachus’ attempt to redefine virtue (aretê) and baseness (kakia) at 1.348c-d. In his account of the stasis on Corcyra in 427 B.C.E. (History of the Peloponnesian War 3.82-84), Thucydides describes a convolution of basic moral terminology very much like the one outlined in these paragraphs.
25 (8.561b) any true word of advice: That is, logos. Socrates describes logos (that is, “reason,” “rational accounting”) as the guardian (phylax) and “saviour” of virtue at 8.549b.
26 (8.562a) And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy from oligarchy—I mean, after a sort?: That is, each degenerate constitution is destroyed by what it erroneously values in the place of true virtue (aretê). Just as democracy, in Socrates’ logic, is destroyed by its desire for freedom (8.562b-d), so timocracy and oligarchy are brought to ruin because of the premiums they place, either covertly or overtly, on wealth.
27 (8.562e) By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them: A similar point is made in a treatise dating to approximately 430 B.C.E., titled “The Constitution of the Athenians” (alternatively, “The Old Oligarch”), which was erroneously attributed in antiquity to Plato’s contemporary (and fellow Socratic) Xenophon.
28 (8.565b-c) And the end is that when they see the people ... seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the drones torments them and breeds revolution in them: Socrates’ representation of how wealthy men are forced against their will to oppose democratic governments involves some special pleading and seems tailored to support the political biases of Republic.
29 (8.566a) After a while he is driven out, but comes back, in spite of his enemies, a tyrant full grown: Plato probably intends his readers to think of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus (mid-sixth century B.C.E.), whose rise to power is described in Herodotus, Histories 1.59-64.
30 (8.566b) Then comes the famous request for a body-guard: A corps of armed bodyguards was the hallmark of tyrants in ancient Greek city-states. Readers are probably meant to think of figures like Dionysius I of Syracuse and others, as well as Peisistratus. Some of the details Socrates gives concerning the tyrant’s brutal techniques for maintaining power also recall the strategies of the so-called Thirty Tyrants who seized control of Athens in 404 at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Plato’s original readers would have surely appreciated the irony in the fact that the word for “bodyguards” is phylakes, the very term that Socrates and his companions have used throughout Republic to designate the guardians of the ideal state.
31 (8.566c) “By pebbly Hermus’s shore he flees and rests not, and is not ashamed to be a coward”: This is a quotation from Herodotus, Histories 1.55. The Lydian king Croesus was a descendant of Gyges, who is mentioned in Republic at 2.359c-360a; he was counseled by the oracle at Delphi to flee when a “mule” (that is, Cyrus, who had ethnically mixed parentage) sat on the throne of Persia.
32 (8.567c) happy man, he is the enemy of them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no, until he has made a purgation of the State: The emphasis on the ways in which the budding tyrant is compelled against his will (in this case, to kill all worthy rivals and allies) marks an important point in Socrates’ effort to discredit Thrasymachus’ assertion that the tyrant enjoys the maximum amount of “freedom.” Compare 1.344c and 9.578c-579c.
33 (8.568b) “Tyrants are wise by living with the wise”: The verse, which is also attributed to Euripides in Theages 125b, is in fact from Sophocles’ lost Ajax of Locris. Socrates’ ironic praise of tragedy’s “wisdom” resonates with the Iconcerns raised earlier about the problematic moral messages conveyed by poetic texts.
34 (8.568c) But they will continue to go to other cities and attract mobs, and hire voices fair and loud and persuasive, and draw the cities over to tyrannies and democracies: The insinuation that democracy is one step away from tyranny would have surely affronted most Athenians, who considered democracy, with its respect for law and guarantee of freedom, the opposite of tyranny.
35 (8.568e) Why, clearly, he said, then he and his boon companions, whether male or female, will
be maintained out of his father’s estate: Athenians viewed the abuse and neglect of elderly parents with abhorrence, and the image of the tyrant as an ungrateful “son” who brutally abuses his aged parent (that is, the people, or demos) is viscerally jolting. See also 7.537e-538c, where the immature dialectician is compared to an ungrateful adopted son. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates is represented as indirectly responsible for a son’s beating of his aged and indulgent father. The strong aversion to such violence that is attributed to Socrates in this passage is perhaps another step in Plato’s effort to counter Aristophanes’ unflattering portrayal. See note 22 on 2.378b.
Book 9
1 (9.572b) even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep: Compare 9.588b-e, where Socrates suggests that the soul is like a hybrid creature that is part human, part lion, and part chimerical beast. These vivid formulations pave the way for Socrates’ conclusion concerning the value of justice in the individual—that is, that it is what strengthens the truly human element of the soul and is thus what “humanizes” human beings (9.588e-589c). As the agent of “humanization,” justice is thus the “excellence” (aretê) that enables human beings to fulfill their unique function (ergon) and so attain happiness (eudaimonia); compare 1.352e-354b. It is doubtless no accident that Thrasymachus, the proponent of injustice and self-aggrandizement, is initially represented as beast-like (1.336b).
2 (9.573b) And is not this the reason why, of old, love has been called a tyrant?: The overwhelming, “tyrannical” power of eros (“lust,” “sexual passion”) is a familiar poetic topic. Compare the description at 9.575a of the domination of the tyrant’s soul by sexual desire.